Peony

Peony had arthritis and was very old, so she could barely move. She would try to climb into a climbing frame where a bunch of chimps were sitting and grooming each other. She wanted to join them, but she could barely get in there. The younger females would walk up to her, put their hands on her behind, and start pushing until she was up there with the rest. We’ve also seen cases where she started walking towards a water faucet, but, since it’s a very large enclosure and she walked with so much difficulty, a younger female would run ahead of her, take water in her own mouth, walk back to Peony, and then spit the water into her mouth so she wouldn’t need to walk all the way to the faucet. 

-- Frans de Waal

"Growing up in the Anthropocene"

Growing Up in the Anthropocene - my recommendations for Five Books

Ken Caldeira, who is mentioned in the piece, has this: How far can climate change go?

Subsidies: a paper from ODI says  that for 42 developing countries where data are available...the scale of fossil-fuel subsidies to consumers, at $396 billion in 2011, is 75 times higher than the average annual approved climate finance of $5 billion from 2010-2012

In this piece Christopher Shaw argues that the 2 degree "dangerous climate change" threshold I mention in the interview is a distraction.

Photo: Igor F. Petkovic

(P.S. As it happens, The Guardian has just published an interview with Jeremy Grantham, who stood beside Hansen and others at the Keystone XL protest. )

Wise monkey

When does a monkey turn down a free treat? When it is offered by a selfish person, apparently.

Given the choice between accepting goodies from helpful, neutral or unhelpful people, capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) tend to avoid individuals who refuse aid to others.

-- Capuchin monkeys show biases against humans who deny help to others

"The real littleness of ourselves"

It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. It is from him only that we learn the real littleness of ourselves, and of whatever relates to ourselves, and the natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator. It is he who shows us the propriety of generosity and the deformity of injustice; the propriety of resigning the greatest interests of our own, for the yet greater interests of others, and the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another, in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.

-- from The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith (1759) quoted by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Man's fate

I'm about a third of the way into The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright (2010), one of several books I wish I had read before writing Japanese macaque. Here's a summary of Seabright's argument from his introduction:

• the unplanned but sophisticated coordination of modern industrial societies is a remarkable fact that needs an explanation. Nothing in our species' biological evolution has show us to have any talent or taste for dealing with strangers.
• the explanation is to be found in the presence of institutions that make human beings willing to treat strangers as honorary friends.
• when human beings come together in the mass, the unintended consequences are sometimes startlingly impressive, sometimes very troubling
• the very talents for cooperation and rational reflection that could provide solutions to our most urgent problems are also the source of our species terrifying capacity for organized violence between groups. Trust between groups needs as much human ingenuity as trust between individuals.

And from page 78:

reducing levels of violence has required us not to sideline the emotions but to harness them.

Dog days

During the year or so that [the lives of my old dogs Nina and Tess] overlapped with that of my [new young] son, I was alternately touched, shocked, amazed, and dumbfounded by the kindness and patience they exhibited towards him. They would follow him from room to room, everywhere he went in the house, and lie down next to him while he slept. Crawled on, dribbled on, kicked, elbowed and kneed: these occurrences were all treated with a resigned fatalism. The fingers in the eye they received on a daily basis would be shrugged off with an almost Zen-like calm. In many respects, they were better parents than me. If my son so much as squeaked during the night, I would instantly feel two cold noses pressed in my face: get up, you negligent father — your son needs you.

-- from The Kindness of Beasts by Mark Rowlands

Moral Malthusianism

Not sure I agree with the framing or the assumptions of this, which is from the preface to Religion in Human Evolution by Robert Bellah, but it is worth considering:

We have proven to be enormously successful at adapting. We are now adapting so fast that we can hardly adapt to our own adaptations. Our technological progress is geometric. It would be hard to argue that our moral progress is even arithmetic. As one who has lived through one horrifying decade after another for eighty years, I confess that I cannot see much in the way of moral advance. There is an irony here, as moral sensitivity has grown steadily in the last hundred years. We are far more sensitive to the needs of whole categories of people that were previously despised or repressed. Yet our growing moral sensitivity seems to have occurred in a world of widespread and undiminished moral horror.

Moral enhancement

Julian Savalescu and Ingmar Persson write:

Modern technology provides us with many means to cause our downfall, and our natural moral psychology does not provide us with the means to prevent it. The moral enhancement of humankind is necessary for there to be a way out of this predicament. If we are to avoid catastrophe by misguided employment of our power, we need to be morally motivated to a higher degree (as well as adequately informed about relevant facts). A stronger focus on moral education could go some way to achieving this, but as already remarked, this method has had only modest success during the last couple of millennia. Our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology, could deliver additional moral enhancement, such as drugs or genetic modifications, or devices to augment moral education.

It's good to see this argument spelled out.  But even if (and I think it may be a big if) "our growing knowledge of biology, especially genetics and neurobiology" can deliver "additional moral enhancement" can they really do so faster than foreseeable breakthroughs in energy technology can (just perhaps) solve the energy/carbon challenge?
So, for example, Benjamin Strauss of Climate Central argues that "Our best hope is some kind of disruptive technology that takes off on its own, the way the Internet and the fax took off."

Note: two recent useful pieces relating relating to the psychology of climate change are Beth's We are all climate change idiots, which notes Robert Gifford analysis of habits of mind he calls the "dragons of inaction", and Atul Gawande's Something wicked this way comes, which is actually about health insurance in the US but notes Albert O. Hirschman's anatomy of reactionary argument in three basic forms: perversity, futility, and jeopardy.

(Image: melting ice on Greenland coast)

'The pillars of morality...

...are reciprocity (fairness) and empathy (compassion).'

There is little new in this presentation if you're already familiar with Frans de Waal's work but it's a nice introduction if you're not:

Men, in spite of all their morality, would never have been better than monsters, if nature had not given them pity to assist reason. Indeed, what is generosity, what clemency, what humanity, but pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general?...It is this pity which hurries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see in distress; it is this pity which, in a state of nature, stands for laws, for manners, for virtue, with this advantage, that no one is tempted to disobey her sweet and gentle voice.

-- from On the Inequality of Man by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and quoted by Timoth Pachirat in Every Twelve Seconds)

The living world

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan argue that the possession of emotions or consciousness should be a key concern when thinking about how to handle animals and increasingly sentient robots. [1]

But how far should the circle of concern extend? Should, for example, ecosystems -- the results of interactions between living and non-living systems -- have rights and not just instrumental value? In the epic of Gilgamesh the whole forest is sacred.

Footnote

[1] But, as noted in many places including here, robots still have a very long way to go.

(Related posts include Ghost and shadows, The age of criminal and compassionate machines, and A new kind of mind.)

The image, added on 15 Dec, is from here.

Take, eat; this is my body

Foer relates how, one night, he sneaked onto a California turkey farm with an animal-rights activist he calls C. Most of the buildings were locked, but the two managed to slip into a shed that housed tens of thousands of turkey chicks. At first, the conditions seemed not so bad. Some of the chicks were sleeping. Others were struggling to get closer to the heat lamps that substitute for their mothers. Then Foer started noticing how many of the chicks were dead. They were covered with sores, or matted with blood, or withered like dry leaves. C spotted one chick splayed out on the floor, trembling. Its eyes were crusted over and its head was shaking back and forth. C slit its throat.

-- from Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. Kolbert makes no mention of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. [1] Does Foer?

The story goes that Franz Kafka visited the Berlin aquarium and, gazing into the illuminated tanks, addressed the fish directly. “Now at last I can look at you in peace,” he told them. “I don’t eat you anymore.”

But should we cut out meat (and fish) altogether? And, as Kolbert points out, what about all other animal products? Can one imagine a world where many fewer animals are kept in excellent conditions and only consumed on special occasions? If not, how about 'Meat 2.0?' (or its dark side 'secret burgers')?

Would a world in which humans eat no animals be palid, etiolated? A more sustainable (more plausible) alternative, perhaps, would be one with a smaller human population which both reveres and eats a limited number of animals, rather as some nomadic peoples still do today. [2], [3]

And then there is Kafka's hunger artist (with whom I have some sympathy).

Image: a lake of blood and excrement near Granjas Caroll, Mexico

Footnote

[1] An overview from more than a year ago but still useful is Andy Revkin's Can people have meat and a planet too?

[2] A non-dreadful scenario for reduction in the total size of the human population would most likely be an accelerated and peaceful demographic transition: billions of freely made choices by more and more people to have just one or two children. Global population would peak at about 9 billion mid century and start to decline thereafter. Quality of life would continue to improve: 'Malthus' well and truly vanquished.

[3] (added 7 Nov) Or, as John Berger sees it (Why look at animals? 1977), as peasants in agricultural societies have long done:

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away the pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.

The riddle of kindness

In On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor write:

If the religious question is: how can it be that people created by a good God can do cruel things? then the secular question...is: why should the human animal, created by no deity, driven by sex and survival, be kind?

Adherents to various religions will have their own answers. As for the secular question, the answer is not such a mystery: compassion and altruism are 'wired' into the behaviour of highly social animals such as humans (see Hrdy, de Waal etc). [1]

No, the real question is how to manage the kindness 'instinct' with reason and imagination. Adam Smith (a deist, perhaps) argued the limits were clear:

The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country.

This may have seemed adequate in 1759 but it will not do today. Our comprehension may still be narrow but our responsibilities -- as a species profoundly impacting the biogeochemical cycle, extinguishing vast numbers of life forms and ready at a moment's notice to let slip the dogs of nuclear war -- are much increased. Our biggest challenge, perhaps, is to imagine more fully things we cannot directly see. [2]

Photo: Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst

Footnotes

[1] Marcus Aurelius got straight to the point: "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one!"

[2] This includes longer-term trends underlying short term blips.

Space cadets

Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart.

Lawrence Krauss proposes sending astronauts to Mars on a one way ticket. [1] It's good to hear an argument that pushes on some boundaries, but a flaw in this one emerges through a comparison that Krauss makes to the European colonists and pilgrims to North America who "seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip, usually because the places they were leaving were pretty intolerable anyway."

It's obviously true that many early settlers sought greater economic opportunity, but it's less clear that what they created was better than what they left behind. Quakers were not lynched in England just for being a Quakers, as they were in colonial Massachusetts. Slavery was illegal in England while it remained a keystone in large parts of the colonial and then early U.S. economy. We might also recall, among other things, the attitude of the founding fathers to the people who happened to have been there before the Europeans arrived. [2] And U.S. culture and economic practice today, undergirded by world wide military deployment, is still shot through with hateful magical thinking and debased bronze age mythology.

In sum, we cannot just walk away from the past, and unless we can sort things out on Earth we're unlikely to do any better in a 'New World', whether it be across the seas or interplanetary space.




Footnotes

[1] (added 16 Sep) See also Paul Davies: Fly me to Mars. One way.

[2] As George Washington put it, "the immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more." Quoted by Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee, along with a series of other incitements to genocide issued by presidents and powerful figures through much of U.S. history.

The second question

...assuming that the answer to the first one is "to be", is:

What do we want to be when we grow up?

-- or so suggests Andy Revkin.



P.S. 22 Aug: Robert Wright believes growing up is possible

Save the gorillas *and* the carbon

Here, slightly edited, is a comment I just posted in response to Stephen Fry's article Why turtles make me cry:

Stephen Fry says "if people don't go to Uganda then the gorillas will die....the only way of paying for the mountain rangers to keep them alive is for people to go to Bwindi Impenetrable Forest...and see them."

I disagree. It is possible to get people to support projects and initiatives they have not seen and will not see first hand, especially in the age of the Internet.

One example of the way to go is Oxfam's 'Unwrapped' in which you 'give' a present to a friend such as 100 school meals in a poor African country. The friend does not receive and does not sees the meals (except, perhaps in a photograph) but has the satisfaction of knowing that some children who may otherwise go hungry are getting a square meal. Another example are the thousands who support global political campaigns by the organisation Avaaz to support the rights and dignity of people they may never meet (such as the Burmese people).

I hold no brief for Oxfam, Avaaz or other organisations which use 'virtual' strategies such as these. I just suggest they are examples of the kind of things that demonstrably work.

I think the efforts of Richard Leakey and colleagues can be supported in a similar way.

All we need (!) are imagination, organization and energy. Stephen Fry can help.

Call me an idealist, but we have to try to save gorillas (and other charismatic species) without making an unnecessary additional contribution to the already high risk of dangerous anthropogenic climate change.

A gift

What [the] drive to mastery misses is an appreciation of the gifted character of human powers and achievements.

-- Michael Sandel in his third Reith Lecture, expressing caution about genetic manipulation and other biotechnology. Matt Ridley seemed unconvinced:

My main issue is how we take the decision as to whether something is an enhancement or a cure.

Can there be common ground?

Perhaps the idea of 'gift' can be accommodated both by those who believe a (supernatural) giver is at work and those (including me) who do not. [1] The latter can apply it figuratively (a little like the term 'natural selection', in which 'selection' does not imply the literal existence of a selector). A naturalistic outlook need not be incompatible with a sense of "openness to the unbidden" [2] which requires (among other things) a strong sense that existence is astonishing, that knowledge, while powerful, has limits, and that wisdom is elusive.

"Nature is more various than observation though observers be innumerable."

Footnotes

[1] Examine how people construct the idea of 'gift'. See, for example, Lewis Hyde.

[2] Sandel quotes this phrase from William F. May, a theologian. But surely, like "negative capability", it can be grounded in non-theological, lived experience.

Image: Hyalinobatrachium pellucidum, an endangered 'glass' frog (Luis Coloma). The quote underneath it is from Christopher Smart

Between ourselves

Yes, the differences between Man and other animals are less than philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Nagel supposed, says Mark Vernon [1]; but that does not mean we should suppose there are no differences.

Rather, Vernon argues, it is a question of how we should recalibrate our understanding of the gap between ourselves and them; and moral and rational intelligence -- properties unique to humans -- are inextricable from linguistic ability:

a deeper understanding of what it is to be human can emerge from "somewhere between" the wolf and the philosopher.

Nick Lane sees it like this:

Language without feeling is bereft of meaning, but feelings exist, meaning exists, without any verbal language, as a core consciousness of mute emotions and wordless perceptions.

Some evidence indicates that forms of morality do too. As Deborah Blum writes in her review of Wild Justice:

[Mark Berkoff and Jessica Pierce] see moral actions as dictated by the behavioural code of social species, the communal operating instructions that bond a group safely together, the "social glue" of survival. They believe such codes are necessarily species-specific and warn against, for instance, judging wolf morals by the standards of monkeys, dolphins or humans.

Still, a "moral" decision can seem remarkably similar across many species.

Alasdair Macintyre argues that:

the virtues we need, if we are to develop from our initial animal condition into that of independent rational agents, and the virtues that we need, if we are to confront and respond to vulnerability and disability both in ourselves and in others, belong to one and the same set of virtues, the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals, whose dependence, rationality and animality have to be understood in relationship to each other.

Footnote

[1] An article in a series titled Should we care about animals?

Loss and freedom

James Lovelock has an unsentimental view of nature. [1] "Gaia", as Lynn Margulis put it, "is one tough bitch". Yet he too mourns what is being lost (see previous post). Another view comes from N J Collar [2]:

The diminishment of nature is the diminishment of man. Extinction is the negation of the possible; it creates poverty in the mind. Our capacity to experience, to imagine, to contemplate, erodes with the erosion of nature, and with it we forfeit piecemeal — landscape by landscape, site by site, species by species — the freedom of mind which yet we cherish as ultimately the greatest feature of our human identity. This is not to say that we should never seek to provide justifications for conservation based on precise, measurable benefits to mankind at whatever scale. It is, however, to say that we should also and primarily have the courage and honesty to assert that the reason biodiversity matters is because it confers on us an imprecise, unmeasurable and immeasurable well-being that is located in the spirit rather than in the wallet.

One of the ways to think about the significance of human impacts on the biosphere, then, may be in terms of the blowback on human capabilities.

Footnotes

[1] In his most recent book Lovelock repeats that, in his view, 'nature' will be fine in the long run. We should, rather, worry about saving ourselves.

[2] Beyond value: biodiversity and the freedom of the mind (2003). Thanks to Tom Bailey for reminding me of this.

In slime we trust

I spent a little time last week at the final meeting of HERMES, a Europe-wide research project on the deep seas, where participants delight in such wonders as 'holothurian heaven': 'meadows' more than 3,000 metres down near canyons of Martian proportions off the Portuguese coast.

One for the nerds, you might think. But I'll push a connection to global ethics and the future of life.

The columnist Thomas Friedman sometimes approaches Jade Goody in lack of self-awareness, but he also channels sensible if not very original thoughts every now and then. This from a column titled The Inflection is Near?:

We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

And in today's FT Amartya Sen reminds 'Anglo-Saxon' financiers, and others, that Adam Smith believed that "humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others", and warned against "prodigals and projectors" (on whom see John Stewart):

[Smith] wanted institutional diversity and motivational variety, not monolithic markets and singular dominance of the profit motive. [1]

Smith's Theory, written 100 years before Darwin's Origin was published, is worth attention in re-thinking the global economic system as if people and planet mattered. [2]

Diverse communities may be both a 'good thing' and have survival advantage. As work included within HERMES found, "ecosystem functioning and efficiency on continental margins increases exponentially in deep sea ecosystems characterised by higher biodiversity." [3]  So let's hear it for slime. [4]


Footnotes

[1] Adam Smith’s market never stood alone

[2] Acting as if re-foundation is really possible, and melt-down is avoidable.

[3] Exponential Decline of Deep-Sea Ecosystem Functioning Linked to Benthic Biodiversity Loss R. Danovaro et al.

[4] One could be almost serious: "Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to the human future than any of our hopes or plans" (Gray, 2002)

Future minds

Some day, perhaps, my biological colleagues will be using [computers] to simulate many processes including the chemical complexities within living cells, how combinations of genes encode the intricate chemistry of a cell, and the morphology of limbs and eyes. Perhaps they will be able to simulate the conditions that led to the first life, and even other forms of life that could, in principle, exist.

So wrote Martin Rees in a recent article [1].  But Rees, who is giving a talk on 23 February about the world in 2050, thinks that there is a long way to go before "real machine intelligence" is achieved. [2] I know of at least two grounds on which people question this. The first asks you to consider a continuum which extends far lower and higher than the upper and lower bounds of human intelligence, which for convenience are 'village idiot' and 'Einstein'. Machine intelligence (according to this argument) may at present be far below 'village idiot' and inferior, even, to an earthworm in important respects; but it is, or is soon likely to be, increasing fast and by the the time it approaches the lowest level of human intelligence it is likely to be traveling so fast that it will pass by both the lower and upper bands of human intelligence in a very short time. Further (the argument continues), we cannot say with confidence that this will not happen within a few decades. [3]

The second argument is that Rees is looking at the wrong thing. Very roughly speaking, the intelligence that is changing is that of extended mind or minds in which individual human brains are only a part. [4] New technologies are changing the nature of cognition and experience in profound and significant ways. The Minority Report-type technology of the kind shown below could be just a start.



Footnotes

[1] Mathematics: The only true universal language

[2] The example Rees gives in support of this assertion-- that a supercomputer may be able to beat grand master at chess but cannot recognise and manipulate the pieces on a chess board as well as a five year old human -- does not help build a strong case. See, for example, this from Conscious Entities.

[3] This is my very crude account of an argument outlined by Eliezer Yudkowsky at a conference on global catastrophic risks. The hope is for Gandhian AI. An intelligence without compassion could be like the psychopath mentioned by Daniel Goleman here. [Intelligence may be more than one thing in more than one dimension, or course.]

[4] See, e.g., A new kind of mind and Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind, alluded to at Out of Mind.

Baby Southern Keeled Ocotopus. Photo credit John Lewis