Life tuned differently

"You have no idea what life would be like in a universe with different constants," [says Fred Adams]...[He] reckons his results, which will be published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, suggest that the "specialness" of our universe could well be an illusion. And this is only the very beginning of what can be probed to undermine the idea that our universe is fine-tuned for life. There are plenty more constants and processes that can be tinkered with, he says.

-- from In the multiverse, stars burn black, a report on work that indicates that very different life forms to the ones we know might be better suited to some other universes in which the range of possible values for three constants involved in the formation of stars are different.

We are alone

A couple of reminders this week that belief in the presence of alien beings on earth [1] is widespread and/or goes deep in parts of the culture:

a) the Brit who lost his appeal against extradition had hacked into U.S. military and space systems because he wanted to find out whether aliens really existed; and

b) 'Area 51' is the most popular conspiracy theory in the U.K.

The beliefs are peculiar to the times. As Hilary Mantel puts it, "until the idea of space flight became credible, there were no aliens; instead there were green men who hid in the woods" [2].

Imaginitively inhabiting the present extinction event in our own biosphere (if that is what it is) looks like a tougher call [3].

Der Erlkönig

Footnotes

1. The existence, or otherwise, of life in parts of our universe at present remote from us, or in other universes, may be a different matter.

2. In the same piece Mantel writes:

On the lonely road by moonlight, the parts of ourselves oppressed by our intelligence come out to play. We meet ancestral selves, neither gods nor demons but short semi-humans with hairy ears and senses differently attuned – the eyesight of an eagle, the nose of a hound. The phenomena are internal, generated by the psychological mechanisms that connect us to each other and to our evolutionary past.

She has noted elsewhere that we are full of ghosts, but largely human ones.

3. [Added 1 Aug]: An example: CI e mails its supporters:

Can you imagine a world without [our closest relatives]? Visit Conservation.org every day next week to discover the state of the world’s primates and what you can do to save them.

Love, loyalty and goose liver pâté

...To this day, when tucking into a pork chop, I always feel as if it is my intellectual equal.

Then there were the geese, the most admirable creatures I’ve ever met...

-- from A farm boy reflects on animal rights by Nicholas Kristof

Super-toys last all summer long

in A robot 'love story'.

Barely sober beings

Jungle shrews take a tipple, but eschew (ha ha) intoxication (It’s Always Happy Hour for Several Species in Malaysian Rain Forest):

The findings...suggest there must be benefits to having chronic low levels of alcohol in the bloodstream — otherwise the behavior would not have evolved.

Those benefits may be psychological...perhaps enabling the animals to cope with stress of some sort.

According to popular TV, a minority of macaques just like to get smashed.

Manta magnifica

Deep Sea News praises manta ray research in Mozambique that "takes a holistic, nearly ideal approach to science and community-based conservation", and links to stunning images from the project.

On balance

Few beings are more bizarre when you come to them for the first time than the Crown of Thorns Starfish (COTS). What could be stranger than an animal with multi-axis symmetry that digests living 'rock' (coral) by extruding its stomach? [1]

Monster Mash

Their role in a so-called 'balance of nature' ['dynamic system'?] has been debated (see, for example What is natural? by Jan Sapp). A recently published paper by Hugh Sweatman suggests that a 'healthy' coral reef, with plenty of small inverbrates to eat the juvenile starfish, copes better with COTS (press report). Good news, perhaps, until something bigger comes along.

Note

1. There's a useful Q&A on COTS by Peter Moran of AIMS

Gigantopithecus?

'Yeti hair' to get DNA analysis - a resolution for Kevin Kelly's bet? Maybe. Maybe not.

De dugong gone

Overall, seagrasses are in a vulnerable state. Seagrass habitats are already declining due to increasing water temperatures, algae growth and light reduction, which are all effects of global change. [1]

Seagrass provides shelter for many animals, including fish and shellfish, and can also be a direct food source for dugongs, turtles, sea urchins and seabirds. [2]

One of the things I'd like to know more about is the cognitive and emotional lives of the still existing Sirenia (the dugongs and manatees). Do they approach anywhere near the complexity of their cousins the elephants? Are they a lot 'dimmer?', like their even closer cousins the hyraxes, or just different? [3] For Steller's Sea Cow we have only a few fragments in the historical record:

I could not observe indications of admirable intellect...but they have indeed an extraordinary love for one another, which extends so far that when one of them was cut into, all the others were intent on rescuing it and keeping it from being pulled ashore by the close circle around it. Others tried to overturn the yawl. Some placed themselves on the rope or tried to draw the harpoon out of its body, in which indeed they were successful several times. We also observed that a male two days in a row came to its dead female on the shore and enquired about its condition. Nevertheless they remained constantly in one spot, no matter how many of them were wounded or killed. [4]

Notes

1. Mats Björk, a co-author of the IUCN report Managing Seagrasses for Resilience to Climate Change (released 25 July 2008). The report "analyses the threats faced by these marine flowering plants and provides survival strategies". "Managing for resilience" is a key theme for IUCN - for example, with regard to mangroves and coral reefs.

2. Carl Gustaf Lundin, Head of IUCN’s Global Marine Programme.

3. And how much if anything can we reasonably deduce about attitudes to these animals in ancient cultures? What, for example, does a 5,000 year old wall painting of a dugong, found in Tambun Cave in Malaysia, indicate? [And how strange is this?].

4. from Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741-42 by Georg Wilhelm Steller, quoted by Callum Roberts in The Unnatural History of the Sea.

Les chiens, les pensées

Quietly [Gilbert] adds that the soldiers also murdered 37 members of his family.

"My little cousins," he says, "I still can't forget the little cousins you see, I used to play with them and they were so..."

But then his voice trails away and I can see him pushing the memory back under.

Instead he tells me his story of survival, how for two nail-biting hours his mother, sisters and the two sheep dogs hid silently in a stream under a bridge while unsuspecting German officers yelled orders above them.

"Why didn't they discover us?" Gilbert asks. "Why didn't the sheep dogs who always barked at loud noises, give us away?"

-- from The forgotten French village massacre.

From so simple a beginning

Graeme Lloyd...and his team studied all of the existing dinosaur taxonomic literature to produce a 'supertree' of dinosaur species. The new supertree, which includes 440 of the 600 known dinosaur species, shows that the dinosaurs evolved rapidly during their first 50 million years. By the Middle to Late Jurassic, a period famous for its giant dinosaurs including Diplodocus and Allosaurus, dinosaur evolution had slowed to a crawl.

-- from Dinosaur evolutionary tree unveiled. Go here for larger image.

Bombs

Deep Sea News notes that the practice of "dynamite" or "bomb" fishing has spread recently to Central America. Seven hawksbill turtles are said to have been blasted to death in the Biosphere Reserve of the Bahia de Jiquilisco, El Salvador

Reflection, isolation

Our gregarious great ape cousins — chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas — along with dolphins and Asian elephants, have passed the famed mirror self-recognition test, which means they will, when given a mirror, scrutinize marks that had been applied to their faces or bodies. The animals also will check up on personal hygiene, inspecting their mouths, nostrils and genitals.

Yet not all members of a certifiably self-reflective species will pass the mirror test. Tellingly,...“animals raised in isolation do not seem to show mirror self-recognition.”

-- from an article on mirrors and psychology.

'Assisted colonization'

We must contemplate the possibility that some regions of the Earth will experience high levels of warming (>4°C) within the next 100 years, as well as altered precipitation and ocean acidity. Under these circumstances, the future for many species and ecosystems is so bleak that assisted colonization might be their best chance.

-- say Ove Hoegh-Guldberg et al in Assisted Colonization and Rapid Climate Change.

Going ape

In 2003 Kevin Kelly bet Stewart Brand that:

by 2025 the scientific evidence of a hither-to-unknown large bi-pedal great ape will be sufficient to convince at least 50% of primatologists that a yeti/bigfoot-like creature exists.

I wonder if by 2025 the only living orangutans will be those associated with artificial breeding programmes.

Alfred Russel Wallace wrote:

On the 12th of May [1855] I found another, which behaved in a very similar manner, howling and hooting with rage, and throwing down branches. I shot at it five times, and it remained dead on the top of the tree, supported in a fork in such a manner that it would evidently not fall. I therefore returned home, and luckily found some Dyaks, who came back with me, and climbed up the tree for the animal. This was the first full-grown specimen I had obtained; but it was a female, and not nearly so large or remarkable as the full-grown males [I had previously shot]. It was, however, 3 ft. 6 in. high, and its arms stretched out to a width of 6 ft. 6 in. I preserved the skin of this specimen in a cask of arrack, and prepared a perfect skeleton, which was afterwards purchased for the Derby Museum.

Only four days [later] some Dyaks saw another [one] near the same place, and came to tell me. We found it to be a rather large one, very high up on a tall tree. At the second shot it fell rolling over, but almost immediately got up again and began to climb. At a third shot it fell dead. This was... a full-grown female, and while preparing to carry it home, we found a young one face downwards in the bog. This little creature was only about a foot long, and had evidently been hanging to its mother when she first fell. Luckily it did not appear to have been wounded, and after we had cleaned the mud out of its mouth it began to cry out, and seemed quite strong and active. While carrying it home it got its hands in my beard, and grasped so tightly that I had great difficulty in getting free...

Wallace and his servants looked after the orphaned infant for some time, but it contracted a fever and

lost all appetite for its food, and, after lingering for a week a most pitiable object, died, after being in my possession nearly three months. I much regretted the loss of my little pet, which I had at one time looked forward to bringing up to years of maturity, and taking home to England. For several months it had afforded me daily amusement by its curious ways and the inimitably ludicrous expression of its little countenance...

Exactly a week after I had caught this interesting little animal, I succeeded in shooting a[nother] full-grown male Orangutan...

Fox

...And he went back to meet the fox.

"Goodbye," he said.

"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

"It is the time I have wasted for my rose — " said the little prince, so that he would be sure to remember.

-- from The Little Prince (XXI).


image: Wadi Al Rayan

Humans, chimeras, humility

Many bioconservatives are addicted to a notion of humanness that is very specific to Judeo-Christianity. [But] when you look at India and Thailand, Japan, Korea and China, and you ask should parents be able to use biotechnology to make their children more virtuous or more intelligent?, the vast majority in those countries say yes. But in Europe and North America people are very pessimistic. And that’s largely because of the Judeo-Christian hangover that there's a certain humanness was created by God at the beginning of time, and by playing around with this you’re playing God. There are natural boundaries beyond which it’s hubris to go. And those are western problems, for the most part. In eastern cultures you don’t have that problem. You have chimeric gods in Hinduism which are half-human, half-animal. In Buddhism you have the implicitly notion that humans can become more than the gods, achieve greater states of mind and physical abilities than the gods.

--James Hughes in conversation [1] on existential threats at Buddhist Geeks.

Yes, but hubris (ὕβρις) predates Judeo-Christianity. The word comes from a culture that had no problem imagining chimeric beings and gods that could take animal forms but still thought Man could over reach with terrible consequences. [2]

Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans.

-- from the Twelve Virtues of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Notes

1. this is a rough transcript, not verbatim.

2. In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams argues that the basic ethical ideas possessed by the ancient Greeks were "in better condition" than modern ones

Pleasured to death

This is a story for the likes of Shifting Baselines:

Irrational preferences for caviar from rarer species are likely to drive the few remaining caviar sturgeon in the Caspian sea to extinction...

Tasters were presented with samples said to be from "rare" and a "common" species - although both actually came from farmed sturgeon. Even before tasting, 57 per cent of people at...luxury receptions expressed a preference for the "rare" caviar, while none preferred the "common" alternative. After tasting the two identical samples, 70 per cent of the experienced consumers said they preferred the "rare" caviar. It was the same story [with tasters] in supermarkets.

-- from A taste for the rare may drive sturgeon to extinction.

Vegetable love

Brian Aldiss's 1962 novel Hothouse (shortly to appear in a new edition) portrays a world of fantastic, semi-sentient carnivorous plants, where human and animal life have been driven to the edge of extinction.

In the real world, meanwhile, poison ivy is "proliferating like mad as rising levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide heat up the atmosphere" (It Eats CO2 for Breakfast), and Americans are re-examining their attitude to the well-behaved lawn (Turf War).

It could be worse

'tis but a scratch.

I'm going to a conference on global catastrophic risks which runs from 17 to 20 July in Oxford. This may seem is an odd way to pass time, but the case for looking seriously at a range of catastrophic scenarios, up to and including human extinction, has been well made a few times. In this lecture, for example, Martin Rees does a pretty good job of outlining some cosmic challenges for humanity.

By way of background, a new book edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic is helpful (its introduction is available via the conference reading list). Also useful (although not directly connected to the conference) are posts by James Cascio on An Eschatological Taxonomy and The Big Picture: Collapse, Transcendence or Muddling Through.

I am less convinced of the transhumanism agenda [1], apparent in Bostrom and Cirkovic's inclusion of ageing in the category of catastrophic risks. I hope to keep an open mind (and better understand a range of arguments including those advanced by Russell Blackford of the IEET), but my initial skepticism is informed by the following points (which are unlikely to be original and have probably been better stated, and answered, elsewhere):

* acceptance of human fragility is a starting point for compassion and 'humanity' as we know it. Renewal, including the complete innocence of the new born, is part of the glory. The great chain of love over generations is part of us.[2]

* what's good for the individual may not not necessarily be what's good for the species. The very old but indefinitely strong, fit and active would accumulate all the power, rather as Swift's Struldbrugs: "[these] immortals would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public." [3]

* even if they pan out, the efforts of Aubrey de Grey et al may be aimed at the wrong target. The idea of a singularity should be treated with critical distance [4], but if you accept that, as Rees says, there is more time ahead in the cosmos for complexity and intelligence to develop than there is time behind then he's probably right that future life will be as different from humans as we are from bacteria.

Of course, continuing to be able to have these debates depends in part on whether humanity gets through the existential risks [5] of the next few decades or so intact. For this we have our current abilities as humans and the institutions and networks we are capable of developing over those decades. But at heart our success or failure will probably depend, as Rees says, on whether we show at least as much moral courage as the likes of Joseph Rotblat and those who shared his view, perhaps sentimental, of humanity:

We appeal, as human beings to human beings. Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open for a new paradise; if you cannot there lies before you the risk of universal death.[6]

Footnotes

1. In John Gray's view (Black Mass, p. 56), there is a straight line from Leon Trotsky's revolutionary violence to transhumanism. I'm not convinced this is right either -- particularly not in reference to those who think about transhumanism/singluarlity in a sophisticated way.

2. I realise this starts to sound almost 'religious', but it's an interesting exercise to try to articulate what one thinks are his cherished beliefs. Of course I am in favour of as long, healthy and rich a life as possible for as many as possible. But remember the warning against megalomania whispered to Roman generals at a triumph: 'Remember you are mortal'.

3. Quite independently of this discussion, someone put it to me that the existence of people like Sheldon Adelson (profiled here) was the best argument against indefinite life extension. [On similar grounds, this person said, 'personhood' in law for corporations was extremely dangerous. It's familiar argument, but interesting that it should come from someone who works at the most senior levels of American business.] One counterargument, I suppose, would be that in the right circumstances those who lived a very long time would become wise and/or know that they would live to see the long term consequences of their actions.

4. A good very short intro to thinking about the idea is provided, again, by James Cascio in Singularities enough and time.

5. Including climate change. See, for example, James Lovelock here.

6. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto.