Diary

I've decided to continue reading a biography of Simone de Beauvoir that I recently started, even though I don't think that it will provide a full picture of her. The problem with de Beauvoir is that she wrote mountains of memoirs while conveniently omitting a lot of important information. I think that some of that has come out since she died, but there does not appear to be a high-quality biography that covers all aspects of her life. That could easily be one-thousand pages long, and the one I'm reading is less than three-hundred, excluding the notes. De Beauvoir is currently on my second tier of imaginary friends, because I don't consider her completely honest. I may also place Carson McCullers in the second tier, because she was a lot of fun, but she loses points for not being intellectual enough. I like some poets so much that Emily Dickinson or Denise Levertov might also become second-tier imaginary friends. My only current first-tier imaginary friend is still George Eliot, and I've read so much about her already that I may know her better than her own family did.  

I've been thinking about my criteria for imaginary friends, and will write a little about that today. First I should discuss why I have imaginary friends. In my case, these friends represent a thinking or style with which I can identify. Rather than imagining them as invisible people in the room with me, they are more like figureheads for some of the things that interest me. You may wonder why none of my imaginary friends are male. That is because there is much that I dislike about male behavior: competitiveness, grandiosity and superficiality. These traits can also be found in women, but they are usually less conspicuous. It may simply be that men are generally more stunted emotionally than women. I think that George Eliot, as a novelist, was occasionally able to convey her nuanced reaction to life better than anyone else, including Gustave Flaubert. Similarly, in my opinion, Emily Dickinson and Denise Levertov may occupy a rarefied class of poets.

Although I've never had completely successful relationships with women, I barely had any successful relationships with men. My male friendships have tended to be superficial and transient. It may be relevant that I'm not gay, but I always notice crudity in men that isn't as readily apparent in women, though there are some masculine women around. When I read fiction or poetry, I am likely to tune out male writers faster than female writers, but most of the females eventually get screened out too. There are good male writers of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, but I usually detect an element of vocational expediency that reduces their interest to me. The writers I like don't have gimmicks. 

In other news, as you might expect, I am still having difficulty finding good films. I just watched "North by Northwest," a classic Alfred Hitchcock film. I enjoyed it and thought that it was well-made, but it's not my favorite Hitchcock film. I like Eva Marie Saint, and apparently Hitchcock personally coached her for her role. I thought that she did an excellent job portraying a complex woman – something that you rarely see in films these days. She also appeared in "On the Waterfront." I was amazed to learn that someone who worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Marlon Brando and Cary Grant is still alive. She is one-hundred years old!

The snow has all melted here, and I'm watching the birds at the feeder. A few minutes ago there was a Carolina wren, which I hadn't seen before. There is more activity at the feeder now than there was at this time last year because of the snow. The goldfinch count is still very low.

In the Trump department, I am getting used to his return, and, though there are still ominous elements, as a practical matter, I don't think that he will have much effect on me, so I don't waste time on him. The main way that he could actually have an adverse effect on me personally would be to cause an economic collapse, with a stock market crash. At present, much of my discretionary income comes from investments, and another stock market crash would adversely affect me financially. However, whatever he says, he is actually in the pockets of Wall Street and the billionaire's club, and he heeds their directives like a crybaby – so I'm not losing sleep over that at the moment.

The Origin of Language

I did end up reading From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language, by Ronald J. Planer and Kim Sterelny, but overall found it too academic to be enlightening. After over 200 pages, they conclude:

For us, then, the honesty and uniqueness questions become: Why did hominins evolve such cooperation-dependent lifeways? Why did only hominins develop such cooperation-dependent lifeways? Why (perhaps) did only sapiens develop the complex forms of cooperation that required the resources of full language? We have not answered these questions in this book, though we have said a little about the third. Rather, we have embedded our account of the evolution of language within the framework of a broader picture of the evolution of hominin cooperation. We have elaborated and defended that framework, but not here, as it requires book-length treatment in its own right (Sterelny 2012a; Sterelny 2021). If that account of the emergence and changing character of hominin cooperation is seriously wrong, this account of language falls with it. If, on the other hand, it is broadly correct, it answers the honesty and uniqueness questions.

Putting all this together then: we do not claim to have provided even a close approximation of a proper lineage explanation, taking us from an independently supported baseline identifying the communicative skills of the earliest hominins to language-equipped modern humans. But we do claim to have outlined, and in places done a little more than outline, an expandable lexicon, displaced reference, the core cognitive capacities on which syntax depends, the gesture-speech transition (assuming there was one), and the expanded functionality of language.

As you can see, these authors are not exactly bold in their assertions. I am primarily interested in the main process of language acquisition and how it led to what Ian Tattersall calls symbolic reasoning, i.e., intelligence. For this reason, I read another Tattersall essay, "Language Origins: An Evolutionary Framework." This contains the same ideas as "Brain Size and the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition," which I discussed earlier. Homo sapiens came into existence 200,000-300,000 years ago and began to move out of Africa 70,000-100,000 years ago. Tattersall relies on human-made items to judge cognitive ability, and he thinks that although humans may have been relatively modern in a neurological sense 200,000 years ago, modern human cognition did not develop until about 100,000 years ago:

In the period between around 100 and 70 thousand years ago we begin to find, at sites in the eastern Mediterranean and northern and southern Africa, evidence that hominids – almost certainly Homo sapiens – were piercing, stringing, and sometimes ochre-staining small gastropod shells, presumably for use in body ornamentation (Henshilwood et al. 2002, 2004; Vanhaeren et al. 2006; Bouzougger et al. 2010). In all documented modern human societies such ornamentation is redolent with implications of status, occupation, group membership, and so forth; and it is widely accepted as a robust proxy for self-identification and symbolic cognitive processes on the part of humans who decorated themselves....

Tattersall concludes:

Our cognitive and linguistic skills are, of course, built on a foundation of hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate brain evolution; and nothing would be the same today if even one of the innovations that accumulated over that long period had not been acquired. But there is something emergently different about us: something that was not fine-tuned by natural selection over a vast period of time, and that in consequence makes our behavioral repertoire infinitely flexible – just like language itself.

I am reminded of Improbable Destinies, by Jonathan B. Losos, which I discussed in 2018. In his experiments with lizards in the Bahamas, he found that evolutionary changes could occur in just one generation if long-legged ground lizards were pressured to live in the vegetation above due to the introduction of larger, predatory lizards at ground level. Because long legs were disadvantageous above ground level, the lizards immediately evolved shorter legs. Losos doesn't discuss the mechanism for the reduction in leg length – I would think that this would be too short a period for a genetic change. It seems more likely that the genotype allowed flexible outcomes in the phenotype for situations like this. A similar process may have occurred among humans. It seems plausible that Homo sapiens built up various cognitive skills through the use of language by living in cooperative groups for thousands of years. The advanced cognition of modern humans may have been precipitated by adverse environmental conditions during the late Pleistocene period. It seems unlikely that the extinction of all of the other Homo species alive at that time could have been a coincidence.

I should also add that the emergence of biological phenomena, including neural development, as discussed by Robert Sapolsky, adds a new dimension to how we now think about evolution.

Diary

All of a sudden, we seem to be having a normal winter again. This is probably because there is currently a La Niña effect, making the temperatures cooler here. They say it may not last, though. There has been snow on the ground since Thanksgiving, and I've put up the birdfeeders. This year, the birds came almost immediately. The chickadees always come first, and they were followed by tufted titmice and nuthatches. There are usually juncos in the yard, and they joined in. After a few days, the hairy and downy woodpeckers found the suet. The goldfinches always form the largest group, but they build up slowly, because they prefer to come in flocks; I've only seen a couple of them so far. All of the squirrels are coming over and having a try and failing at the sunflower kernel feeder; they eventually give up. So now I have something to look at outside while I'm sitting at my computer. The squirrels can be a little annoying at first, because they crawl all over the outside of the house. Also, some of the woodpeckers tap on the house occasionally. They don't seem to do any serious damage, but I check to make sure that they don't create any large holes. One nice thing about log cabins is that the siding is durable and low-maintenance. I spent many hours painting clapboard in Middlebury, and it also rots. I don't seem to have a carpenter ant problem, and there are no termites here. 

This is the beginning of cabin fever season, and I'm attempting to read more now, since I don't spend as much time outdoors. I've been dabbling in a couple of biographies but so far haven't become excited enough to finish one. I've also started on a scientific book that attempts to explain the evolution of human language from the time of our earliest ancestors to the present. This is right up my alley, and I will definitely finish it. I agree with Ian Tattersall and think that human language is what distinguishes us from other primates and is the source of our particular cognition. This is an extremely difficult subject, because you can't go back in time to see exactly how it developed, and there aren't many cultural or physical clues. Nevertheless, it would be nice to know, because that is what makes us distinctively human. Ironically, I don't think that this type of research will end up making us feel better about ourselves: we'll just find out that through ordinary biological processes, mutations and the right mix of environmental conditions we came into existence; God didn't roll out the red carpet for us, and we don't even know why the universe exists.

Speaking of red carpets, I just watched "The Silence of the Lambs" again and can see why it won so many awards. Although the plot has lots of holes in it, the acting by Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, and even Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill), is quite good. The problem is that the film is based on a popular suspense novel and I don't think that anyone exactly like Hannibal Lecter or Buffalo Bill ever existed, though there have been serial killers with some of their characteristics. One scene is borrowed from the actual Ted Bundy. I also didn't like the fact the the FBI and police are depicted as inept throughout the film. On a side note, there are internet discussions about whether the film is anti-transgender, since Buffalo Bill behaves in a transgender manner. Anyway, I found the film entertaining, but wouldn't call it art. Without the acting, I don't think that it would have been as impressive.

Like many people, I am attempting to follow the news without paying much attention to Donald Trump. It is somewhat of a consolation to think of Trump as a complete idiot and recognize that as harebrained as his ideas are he can't have much effect on world history. You have to consider that he was named one of the worst presidents ever by political experts after his first term, and he hasn't changed at all. He isn't in the least bit creative, and right now the only thing he's doing is coming up with new versions of his old bad ideas that didn't work. Because of his ego, he never admits mistakes, so he tends to repeat them. You can see his little mind working and look ahead to his future certification as the worst president in American history. So far, many of the Republicans in Congress are still supporting him, but I think that their loyalty is wearing thin. He may be just a couple of blunders away from being impeached again. If he damages the economy at all, he won't have anything to hang his hat on.

Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar

Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar

Unless thou know'st the Tune

Or every Bird will point at thee

Because a Bard too soon—

—Emily Dickinson

Paradigm Shift Overload

Because I'm tired of biographies at the moment, I thought that I would instead write about how I see the current malaise that seems to be affecting people, especially in the U.S. The phrase "paradigm shift" was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although that's really just a fancy way of saying that scientific models change over time, you can extrapolate from it that most conceptual models generated by humans change over time, and sometimes they are completely replaced by new models. A simple example is the change from the geocentric model of the solar system to the heliocentric model. Scientists are constantly attempting to explain the universe, and occasionally one theory completely replaces another. Sometime theoretical fissures last for many decades, and there has been a dual model in physics where gravitational theory operates independently from quantum theory, and the two models seem incompatible. This state of affairs has been around since Einstein, and he was unable to reconcile the two systems. Other conceptual models in science can become problematic over time, and, as Sabine Hossenfelder laments in Lost in Math, some physicists have recently become so enraptured by mathematical aesthetics that they seem to have lost interest in experimental data, which is the basis for empirical models.

The reason why I'm bringing this up is that, as an observer of people, it is fairly obvious to me that a rapid increase in the number of public conceptual models employed by people in the developed world is causing a higher level of stress than that which occurred during earlier historical periods. Broadly speaking, humans have evolved to live in groups, and, historically, that required the members of each group to operate on similar ideologies and worldviews. When the world population was much lower, ideological conflict between groups was less common than it is today, because groups simply didn't run into each other as often as they do now. With a much larger world population, and with most religions evolving into various sects, individual countries may have conflicting ideologies both internally and externally. Probably that kind of conflict was rare two-thousand years ago in the individual lives of people, but it has gradually increased and accelerated in the last two-hundred years. In the preceding colonial period, Europeans simply traveled to North and South America and took whatever they wanted, and if the natives caused too much trouble, they just killed them. A similar attitude was adopted more recently in the American South, where slaves were considered personal property until after the Civil War. The gist is that, within a long-term historical context, people didn't recognize belief systems that differed from their own, and, even up until the late nineteenth century, it was often thought that indigenous populations were subhuman species.

What has changed since the end of the last century is a partial migration of group identities from regional cultures to social media cultures. There have been many negative consequences to this, and I'll discuss some of them here. Before the internet came into existence, people often had face-to-face encounters with people who lived in their areas, and this was the primary source of their worldviews and was supported by local news media and local governments. Unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, the internet has gradually taken on an important role by replacing traditional TV programming and news with material that can be produced anywhere, with content and ideas that did not originate locally. This phenomenon has been influencing local ideas for over twenty-five years now, and some of the perspectives that have arisen in particular locales do not represent the historical ideas of a region. One of the effects of this change has been the rise of various opinion leaders and politicians whose careers would have been impossible fifty years ago. The best example that I can think of is the disgrace and resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 compared to the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024. In Nixon's case, indications of bad character alone forced him to resign or else be removed by impeachment. In Trump's case, although his behavior has been considerably worse than Nixon's – he is a convicted felon and a known rapist – he won reelection by a margin. In the culture of 1974, that could not have occurred.  

In recent years, many individuals have mobilized on social media for their personal benefit. They are now able to reach groups that were invisible a few years ago and seed them with propaganda that places them in the role of opinion leaders without having to face any consequences. They can convince people that the shooting of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax or that they are successful executives when they are not. If you think about it, it is truly astounding that Donald Trump was reelected after several members of his own administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, stated publicly that he was unfit for office. While there are probably false ideas floating around most of the time, there have never before been as many as there are now. If you look at this from the point of view of human cognition, many people are unable to navigate an environment like this on their own. Few people are able to form opinions independently from a group that they identify as their peers. Unfortunately, the people whom they think are their peers may just be internet hucksters these days. It is possible that new regulations will correct this in the coming years, but that is certainly unlikely to occur under the new Trump administration. Trump has been one of the most successful corrupt abusers of social media. 

When I see people viewing their cell phones in public constantly, they are starting to resemble addicts in need of a fix. It seems that some sort of therapy could be developed for these people, but I'm not sure that it exists now. I think that the core of the problem is that humans in general have not adapted to an environment in which numerous worldviews, which are often incompatible with each other, are presented to them. 

Diary

I had planned to begin commenting by now on a biography of Gustave Flaubert that I've been reading, but I just got sick of it and gave up. Several years ago I read a shorter biography, and I thought that this one might be more informative. However, I found the author's writing style too distracting with respect to the elements that are important to me. I like to focus on family background, upbringing, early influences, personality, interpersonal relationships and career. This book does include that information, but, unfortunately, because the author is an academic, he has to throw in the the history of Rouen, where Flaubert was born, and the history of French medicine, since Flaubert's father was a doctor. The author is an American academic, and this may work in American academic circles, but, as I've said, I generally dislike academic writing styles. As an alternative, I've ordered a biography of Ottoline Morrell, and will probably be reporting on that soon. I'm not especially interested in the Bloomsbury Group, with whom Morrell interacted, but she seems to qualify as an interesting person, in part because of her relationships with Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. She was a fringe bohemian – not common for a British aristocrat. We'll see how that goes.

I am sorely in need of reading material with winter closing in. Because of the weather, I usually don't hike as much at that time of year. At this point I don't have any special projects, because the house is in full working order, there are no rodents inhabiting it, and I'm not interested in improvements. Many suburban housewives would prefer a larger stove, a dishwasher and an island – but I'm not a suburban housewife. Some of the walls are white, but I have no reason to paint them. I could probably use a few area rugs, but I don't really need them. The house isn't exactly swarming with visitors. As far as the outside is concerned, even though the yard is surrounded by trees, I haven't had to remove any fallen trees or limbs, because it hasn't been as windy here as in Middlebury.

Another reason why I need distractions is that I don't really want to follow the news now. Consciously or unconsciously, it can be disturbing to see images of a free active criminal on a daily basis. In the news coverage, you can watch as he assembles his new criminal gang, and it is disconcerting to think about the chaos that may ensue. The news media are continuing their unprofessional neutrality on the behavior of the people in power. It seems possible that corporations, if not the billionaires themselves, will actually take over the federal government. That would include Congress, the Supreme Court and the President. The silver lining, though, is that Trump is such a poor executive that he is almost guaranteed to fail. He will still make horrendous mistakes even when his advisors recommend otherwise. So, as I said, it's only a matter of time before he disappears.

I've been thinking a little about the Republican and Democratic ideologies of recent years. Actually, neither were ever very good. The Republicans have long been about business and personal wealth, but they used to have a sense of noblesse oblige that has gradually disappeared. Republicans usually had fairly selfish outlooks, but those were held in check by their religious beliefs or a vague moral sense in their peer group. Now they seem almost exclusively selfish, to the extent that they don't even trust each other and are literally becoming a band of thieves. The Democratic tradition from FDR up to Jimmy Carter focused on helping the needy in the aftermath of the Great Depression. That all changed under Bill Clinton, when the presidency suddenly became business-friendly. Today, under neoliberalism, both parties favor business over people, and this partially explains why voters didn't get excited by Kamala Harris: she didn't represent a discernible populist change as far as low- and middle-income people were concerned. Other reasons for her failure were her sex, race and the relatively limited exposure to the public that she had compared to Donald Trump. Unfortunately, voters are really stupid and vote mainly on the basis of familiarity. Trump is proof that you can now become President if you have enough photo ops. He has inadvertently created a dangerous copycat phenomenon in which people say to themselves "God, if that idiot can become President, I could do it!" Unfortunately, this has caused a large cadre of slimy Machiavellians to cluster around him. However, I don't think that this situation will necessarily turn out as badly as you may think – eventually Trump will fail and lose his attractiveness to followers. How many people are emulating Joseph McCarthy today?

Diary

I've sort of been waiting for the election season to end. But now it looks as if we're going to be hearing about politics nonstop for several years. For me this is about as much fun as being forced to watch Roseanne reruns every night. That is a sitcom that I permanently gave up on after less than one episode. Since I'd prefer not to think about Donald Trump, I'll just make a few comments now so that I can move on to more interesting topics. 

At this point, since everything that Trump says is a form of hype, and his worldview is comparable to that of a character in a low-grade sitcom, it isn't clear where things will go from here. He doesn't have the slightest idea how to fix anything, but he always tries, unconvincingly, to appear knowledgeable and in control. The worst-case scenario might be his immediate transformation of the country into a fascist state, but I don't think that he is competent enough to pull that off. This is an ironic situation, because he won by convincing lower- and middle-income people that he will improve their economic prospects, and most of his career has been devoted to abusing ordinary workers either financially or sexually and then protecting himself by making litigation prohibitively expensive for them. If his father hadn't handed him $500 million, he would have been in jail decades ago. The evolution of his career consisted of starting as the front man for his father's unscrupulous real estate business and then becoming the front man for miscellaneous unscrupulous billionaires. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos do not want a federal government that increases their personal or business taxes, and they want as little regulation as possible for their corporations. If Trump accommodates them, the federal deficit will skyrocket, since he has promised his supporters lower taxes. He has also boxed himself into a corner on higher tariffs on foreign goods, since that would cause inflation. What Trump, like most crooked politicians, will probably do is raise the deficit as much as he can in the short term to create an illusion of prosperity and time his inflationary policies so that inflation remains relatively low until the end of his term. He is too stupid to do this on his own, but he has hordes of political lackeys dying to help him.

Besides Trump's avoidance of appropriate tax-based wealth redistribution that would benefit his voters, some of his appointees could be dangerous. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could potentially open the floodgates to pandemics that kill millions of people. Ironically, if Trump's administration adopts a global-warming-denial policy, many of his supporters, who are located in the South, will face the direst consequences. Then you have to consider Trump's membership to the international kleptocracy, which may prompt him to withdraw aid to Ukraine, which is what his master, Vladimir Putin, would prefer. This could add a few thousand more deaths to Trump's account. As far as the Israel-Hamas war is concerned, that is completely over his head, and Trump has little incentive to get involved.

On a more positive note, it is worth mentioning that civil war is probably off the table. That is because the federal government is now under de facto corporate control, and civil wars are bad for business. That could hurt Tesla and Amazon sales!

As for me, I am staying in place. In my neighborhood I could pass for a Republican, and if things got really bad, I could put a bomb shelter in the back yard. 

In other news, though it is currently unseasonably warm, I'm all prepared for snow. I just made a rare family road trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This was my first road trip to a city in ten years. I thought that it was a good museum, but not as good as the ones, collectively, in Manhattan, London or Paris.

The Controversial Origin of War and Peace: Apes, Foragers, and Human Evolution

I came across this article, by Luke Glowacki, in 3 Quarks Daily. It is an unusually academic article for them to post, but I read it with interest, because war has been so much in the headlines recently. Unfortunately, the article is extremely narrow in scope and focuses mainly on the timeline in the history of war. The questions become "Did war originate with our common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos or later?" and "If it originated much later, was it present among Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers?" I think that the article could have been improved by spending more time defining the role of war and aggressive behavior within a species.

Chimpanzees are known to behave aggressively toward other chimpanzee groups. Bonobos are not as well understood, but they don't seem to be as aggressive as chimpanzees. Glowacki fails to mention that bonobos operate in matriarchal hierarchies, and I think that gender could be a useful lens for discussing war, since female primates are generally less physically violent than male primates, and are accordingly smaller and weaker. Although there is evidence that human hunter-gatherers engaged in warlike behavior, it is somewhat unclear how that manifested itself prior to the development of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Glowacki does at least mention that, as a practical matter, it would be difficult for early hunter-gatherers to organize and coordinate anything that would resemble a modern army. He finishes by saying:

Recognizing that the capacity for both war and peace may be an outcome of our evolutionary history better explains how our species today can create durable peaceful relationships among societies that encompass billions of individuals but at the same time petty grievances and disputes can precipitate war with little provocation. We carry their evolutionary legacy today in our own struggles to create a more peaceful world, but one in which we all too often turn to violence.

I did not find this saccharine conclusion very enlightening.

My preferred way of looking at human behavior is through the lens of our evolutionary development of eusocial behavior, or, more broadly, cooperation. This occurred in tandem with bipedal gait and, later, the development of language. Through this process, Homo sapiens in effect outcompeted not only chimpanzees and bonobos, but all other hominids. Evolutionary processes permitted humans to achieve greater fitness than all other primate species. Rather than pretty this up for a feel-good moment, I prefer to compare humans to eusocial insects. I am reminded of my earlier post, "The Brutality of Life," in which I described honeybees:

Every spring, a fertilized queen sets out to start a nest. She finds a site, often a hole in the ground, and begins to lay eggs. The queen emits chemicals that cause all of the eggs to become females that do not reach maturity. The nest then becomes a factory where the queen continues to lay eggs and her daughters tend to the eggs, find food and defend the nest. Toward the end of summer, the queen stops emitting the chemicals that control the development of her eggs and offspring. Some of her daughters mature to adulthood, and some males are born. The daughters start to lay their own eggs. Initially, the queen attempts to eat all of the eggs laid by her daughters, but eventually, her mature daughters attack and kill her. The mature daughters that have been fertilized leave the nest seeking shelter for the winter. In the spring, the process starts again.

It seems to me that scientists often ignore the most basic principles of Darwinism. Natural selection is not a pretty process, and for the most part it's just a numbers game: did a species survive, and, if so, how? We like cooperation and social harmony, but that is only because we have evolved to feel that way. Most species don't, and that includes honeybees. While, ostensibly, honeybees are eusocial, like us, the queens exert complete biological control over all of the other members of their hive. Eusociality itself does not imply equality. The end result is that honeybees are an extremely durable species, while nearly all honeybees are, in effect, slaves. In his essay, "Brain Size and the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition," Ian Tattersall describes how modern humans evolved in a rather haphazard manner during periods of vacillating climate change. In an evolutionary sense, this means that we just happened to have the right characteristics at the right times, and we could easily have become extinct with slight environmental differences. As a cautionary note to optimists, I often feel compelled to point out that our notions of morality do not correspond with the universe in general and are simply evolutionary characteristics that have helped our species survive. On the other hand, on a more purely rational basis, there is ample reason to remove from office leaders whose aggressive military actions cause the pointless loss of human life and unnecessary humanitarian crises. The long list of offenders includes not just Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin, but Benjamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush.  

In my opinion, the major problems that we are facing now are human overpopulation and anthropogenic climate change. Those two conditions alone are generating pointless wars. Most countries, including the U.S., currently lack governments that seem capable of addressing those risks.

Diary

I've started on a longer biography but haven't made much progress in it so far. There are more distractions than usual this year, and I only like reading when I can really concentrate properly. One distraction has been a stream of solicitations from my dear friend, Kamala Harris, for more money, and I've sent all that I'm going to send and put "STOP" on messaging and opted out of emails. I also have to admit that it is unnerving to think that Donald Trump could be elected president in a few weeks. I still think that the odds are against it, and, even if it does occur, you have to remember just how incompetent he is. He isn't as talented as Hitler or Napoleon, and nearly every venture that he has undertaken failed. The main problem associated with Trump is that he is an enormous waste of resources when there are many serious national issues that need to be addressed.  But you have to remember that Joe Biden, who already seemed senile in 2020, beat Trump after just one term. At this point, there are more young non-neoliberals in the Democratic pipeline, so the party could recover. Therefore, in my view, Trump is on the way out, and it's only a question of whether it will be in a few weeks or in four years at the most. One consolation for me is to be living in a state where Trump could never win. While Rutland County is a little more conservative than Addison County, it is still Democratic. I recently met my Vermont representative, Stephanie Jerome, who drove to my house to introduce herself to me. She is a Democrat, and I've already voted for her. 

My tomatoes are still holding out, though the weather is turning cold. A local man, who is living with a large family that includes his children and grandchildren, took a large bag of ripe tomatoes and all of the green tomatoes. He said that he would take whatever is left at the end of the season and feed it to his pig. Our local social media is Front Porch Forum, and it comes in handy for getting rid of things that you don't want. Vermonters are less wasteful than most Americans. I still have plenty of tomatoes for myself and eat a tomato salad for dinner every other day. Next year, I think I'll grow two of the same plants plus one cherry tomato plant.

I currently seem to be all set with my mouse friends. I heard them in the walls recently and did another full inspection of the house exterior. At the top of the roof, under the eaves, they had enlarged a small opening by chewing on it. In order to see it, you had to hang over the eaves and look underneath. The evening after I sealed it, the two remaining mice panicked and ran through the house to the back porch, where I trapped them. I released them in the yard, since they can't get back in now. The mice here are wild, and they don't enter the house looking for food. They primarily seek shelter during the winter. They also like to store food in dry places. Before there were humans here, they were doing the same things in trees. As far as they're concerned, the house is a big tree.

I will have a visitor here next week, so my blog posts may be delayed a little.

Diary

The fall colors are intensifying now, and it looks as if they may almost be peaking in the mountains. I think this is the best time of year here, followed by May. When I lived in Oregon, I didn't enjoy the climate much. There weren't enough deciduous trees to make the fall spectacular. There was no snow in the winter. The spring was hardly noticeable. The summer was boring, with no thunderstorms. The lack of dynamism in the climate seemed to translate into the insipidity of the local population. I think that the only things I liked there were the mountains and the rugged coast, but I spent most of my time in the Willamette Valley. Although I like some of the progressive aspects of the West Coast, I can't say that I've met anyone from there who appealed to me. In my readings, I've noticed that Czeslaw Milosz, Bertrand Russell, Carl Zuckmayer, and Vivian Maier disliked it. Even though I'm not really European, I still feel that way. The Northeast isn't exactly European either, but it's physically closer and still slightly connected.

I've been trying to find some good reading material but haven't come up with anything suitable yet. I gave up on two books that I started and am about to begin searching again. Every few years I get rid of a pile of unread books because they are a waste of space. I am the opposite of a hoarder. 

The presidential election is drawing closer, but I can't exactly say that I'm excited. Trump has demonstrated time and again that he is not qualified for the job, and there is now a large chorus, including Republicans, saying the same thing. Just to show how bad Trump is, Liz Cheney is campaigning with Kamala Harris. Almost no economists endorse his economic plan. While campaigning, he is usually incoherent. Experts on geopolitics think that world leaders find him easy to manipulate. So, what we're talking about is voter psychology. A majority of men prefer Trump, probably because he is an alpha male and can bully women or whomever he chooses. A majority of women prefer Harris, probably because she is pro-abortion and supports women's rights. This generally has little to do with policies. If Harris is weak on policies, she is more likely to use her available resources to find new ones. Trump, on the other hand, makes most of his decisions on an ad hoc basis; he is a "shoot from the hip" thinker who regularly demonstrates that he doesn't understand economics or foreign policy. His only goal in life seems to be to increase his self-esteem – whether he deserves it or not.

The other big story is the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran. It's also hard to get excited about that. I think that Biden has handled this incorrectly and ought to  have reigned in Netanyahu long ago. A commentator recently said that Israel has tactics but no strategy. That seems to be correct as I've been observing this. Over the years, Israel has built up its defenses without a real plan, and whenever an opportunity arises, they just say "Hey, we can blow that up!" I have seen no evidence that they give any thought to the long-term consequences of their actions. Of course, I tend to view this in terms of evolutionary biology. Like chimpanzees, the Israelis and their neighbors are incapable of producing effective long-term plans, and all they can do is engage in tit-for-tat confrontations. To my way of thinking, this is primarily a case of animal crowding, in which physical violence is the default solution whenever a conflict arises. With the Israel lobby, Netanyahu thinks that he can ignore the U.S. and U.N. whenever he feels like it. He has the insight of an alpha chimpanzee. It seems to me that Israel has created an unnecessary humanitarian crisis along with millions of victims who will seek retribution for decades – simply because they could do it.

At the moment, I am concerned that the Israel situation, Hurricane Helene and the dockworkers strike may add further confusion to the U.S. election. However, it is possible that people's common sense will kick in and Trump will be permanently ousted. It doesn't take much intelligence to recognize that, when circumstances are becoming more chaotic, a person who is known for creating pointless chaos is not the best choice for addressing those conditions.

We do not know the time we lose—

We do not know the time we lose—

The awful moment is

And takes its fundamental place

Among the certainties—

A firm appearance still inflates

The card—the chance—the friend—

The spectre of solidities

Whose substances are sand—

—Emily Dickinson

Diary

I haven't been doing much of anything for the last few days or had much to say. I do have another book to read but haven't started it yet. At the moment I have lots of tomatoes and will have to start giving them away soon, because I can only eat so many of them per week. Next year, maybe I'll have just two tomato plants and perhaps something else. This little garden has been more productive than the one in Middlebury: the tomatoes are larger, and there are more of them. They get more sun here, and also more water, because they are right next to a hose and the house.

It's already becoming very autumnal, with the leaves changing and starting to fall. But it's still a long way from the peak. As in most years, the weather is dry now. I am all set for winter, and they say it could be colder and snowier, which is what I prefer. So far, heating costs haven't been much of a factor, and I can keep the house in the low seventies during the winter without using much fuel.

The mouse situation seems to be under control at the moment. As in Middlebury, they prefer to enter near ground level, and when you block those entrances they go higher up. They don't like the high-up entrances, so they go through the house once they get in and look for lower entrances, but there aren't any now. The high entrances are dangerous for them, because they could fall and die, or they could be spotted by owls or other predators. The high entrances also leave them farther from food sources. The last entrances I've blocked have been at the edge of the roof, and they can't go any higher. Fortunately, it is very easy for me to get onto the roof, and it's not very steep. I'm not sure how many actual mouse holes I've blocked, but I think it's at least ten. My mouse research also extends to the shed. I think those entrances are also blocked. They had nest entrances in the dirt in front of the shed, and I noticed that, as soon as a small milk snake came by, they closed off those entrances. It is often difficult to distinguish instinctive behavior from intelligent behavior.

I think I'm doing a lot better than Henry David Thoreau. His cabin had no running water or toilet, and he considered a mouse that lived in it with him to be his pet.

I don't make many campaign contributions, but I sent money to the ActBlue PAC for Kamala Harris, and now I'm being barraged with donation requests – very tiresome. It always seems pathetic to me that political success often depends on fundraising and advertising, because I've never voted for anyone on the basis of an advertisement. Advertising of any kind usually has no effect on my behavior. When I make a campaign contribution, it is like an affirmation that I have little in common with most voters. I don't think that's how democracy is supposed to work. To me, the fact that a voter needs to see an advertisement in order to vote indicates that he or she is unqualified to vote. Furthermore, all adult Americans should know by now, without being told, that Donald Trump is a lying criminal with purely selfish motives and no identification with any constituency, except perhaps self-centered billionaires. 

The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life

This 2023 biography of George Eliot, by Clare Carlisle, was recommended to me by a reader. Reading it was like a walk down memory lane, because I had already covered most of the same material, but in the last century. Even so, I never stopped being a George Eliot admirer, and Carlisle, who is a philosophy professor, does offer some useful insights at the end.

I tend to evolve intellectually, and I have always found George Eliot to be an interesting case study. I came across her when I was about forty, and I was gradually working my way through various fields at the time. By that point, I had already decided that philosophy, particularly as an academic discipline, is mainly a waste of time, and I was taking a shot at literature while also becoming interested in evolutionary biology. Since starting this blog in 2014, I have gradually given up on literature, but I think that Middlemarch may be the one novel that is worth reading. I find it interesting because it successfully represents a local culture at a particular place and time and accurately depicts a variety of its inhabitants, including unvarnished descriptions of human behavior. When it was written, Darwinism was being discussed in London, and Eliot would have been exposed to it through G.H. Lewes and Herbert Spencer. Lewes himself had transitioned from the arts to the sciences and was personally acquainted with Charles Darwin. In addition, though modern psychology didn't exist then, Eliot understood people well. After reading Middlemarch, I eventually came to think of it as an insightful book, unlike most novels, because it provided more than the usual fictional entertainment. While it does contain predictable romantic intrigues and relationship failures, it is of much greater substance than a Jane Austen novel. Unlike some of Eliot's other stories, religion, mysticism and the occult are not at the forefront. At this point in my life, I prefer to view the world through the lens of evolutionary biology, because, if nothing else, it provides you with a way of understanding why things are the way they are now.

Where I think Carlisle does a good job is in showing how difficult it is to know how George Eliot made some of her decisions and whether she regretted any of them. The "double" in the title refers to how and why she paired up with G.H. Lewes and, later, after Lewes had died, with John Cross. I had thought about this before and have some thoughts now. First, I should say that it was largely an accident that she became a writer. Her father happened to retire near Coventry, Eliot happened to still be living at home, and their new neighbors happened to be the Brays. Charles Bray was a progressive ribbon manufacturer, and his home became a salon for progressive intellectuals. He was a follower of Robert Owen, who visited there, along with various London intellectuals. Unlike modern manufacturers, Bray and Owen cared about their workers. Eliot befriended Bray's wife, Cara, and her sister, Sara Hennell. In any case, it seems that Eliot may never have established any connections with London intellectuals if she hadn't lived there, and her life could easily have taken a different course.

In London, though she was recognized as a talented writer, editor and translator, she was not physically attractive and came from an ordinary rural family, so she did not have many suitors. She "dated" Herbert Spencer, but was crushed when he dumped her. That is just as well, because Spencer was cold and would have been unacceptable to her, since she was emotionally needy. The only other prospect to turn up was G.H. Lewes, who, though warm, had several shortcomings. He was short and pockmarked, and was an illegitimate son of a man who had abandoned his mother. Furthermore, his wife had cuckoled him by having four children with his best friend in addition to his three, and he couldn't divorce her under existing law without an embarrassing trial. He was struggling to support his wife and children, and, having generally failed as a playwright and a novelist, he eventually became a science writer – with little formal education. On top of this, he was an avowed atheist, while Eliot had a devout childhood. Nevertheless, the relationship met Eliot's needs, and, after he encouraged her to write fiction, they became extremely wealthy. Lewes was an extroverted man-about-town and did an excellent job as her manager.

The question that comes up is whether he was the sort of man who suited Eliot. From her point of view, I would say no. He was a slightly disrespectable bohemian who drew disparaging comments from his social superiors – to be expected in England. She preferred people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she had met through Charles Bray. Emerson was a tall, handsome, elegant and religious college graduate, and she was instantly attracted to him. Part of the point of Carlisle's book is that the choice of a partner can be somewhat inscrutable. Because Eliot tended to be conservative and religious, I would say they there was a certain amount of expediency in her pairing up with Lewes. I think that she was quite aware that, from a social standpoint, Lewes was an inappropriate partner for her.

Following this line of reasoning, it makes sense that she married John Cross after Lewes died. She had taken a lot of flak for living with Lewes out of wedlock. Cross was tall and came from a good family. In person, I think that he must have been boring to an intellectual woman like Eliot. My guess is that she had the same social-climbing instinct as many women. There is some evidence of a problem in that he inexplicably dove into the Grand Canal in Venice on their honeymoon, apparently because he was having some sort of breakdown. This was all swept under the rug, and Eliot died a few months later.

I might add that the biography that Cross assembled after Eliot died was so bad that her literary reputation declined for several years. I've read it myself and can see why. On balance, I would have to say that Lewes was a better choice than Cross. If she had been a little more adventurous, she may have found a less burdened partner than Lewes and a more interesting partner than Cross.

Diary

I've been reading some new and old poetry for the last few days but haven't found anything that I like. The new poetry generally seems stilted to me, and I don't think that I agree with the current norms within the publishing industry. I have yet to find a poem that I like in the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books, and the ones that I do like I usually find only occasionally in anthologies. Of course, a lot of this is just a matter of personal taste, and what is considered a good poem at any particular time may not match your preferences at all. The impression I have is that this is not an exciting time in American poetry, and you may just be stuck with what some editor thinks is good – or what some poet thinks some editor thinks is good. Although I like New Yorker cartoons, I'm letting my subscription expire – again. I've also been trying to find some long biographies but so far have only found a couple of short ones.

The late summer here has been cool. I think that all the hummingbirds are gone. I have ripe tomatoes, but the ripening process is slowed by shorter days and cool temperatures. Now that the plants are exposed, they occasionally get nibbled by deer, but the deer don't like the tomatoes themselves and only eat some of the new shoots. I haven't seen any hornworms and may never, because the yard is enclosed by the woods. At first I missed having views from the house, but I now like the privacy and quiet, and I think that the air quality here is better than it was in Middlebury. Since I hike more often now, I still get in plenty of scenery. In this neighborhood, rain made it a soggy summer, and there were blights. I trimmed out the dead leaves from my purple lilacs. My tomatoes are fine, but all of my neighbor's died. There are lots of puffballs in the yard, and on Saturday I held a puffball puffing event.

At the moment, I'm very satisfied with the house. The well and its filtration system are working properly. The plumbing ventilation was blocked, and I fixed that. My indoor plants are happier here than they were in Middlebury. All of the appliances are working properly, though they're old. I think the clothes drier is 42. The refrigerator is 15. The stove is ancient, but it works fine.

I gave up on the new telescope mount that I bought and returned it, because I think that it was defective. Since winter is approaching, I'm going to wait until spring to buy a different model. The viewing is usually bad here during the winter because of clouds. Amateur astronomy has changed since I started in 2013, and there has been a shift from direct viewing to astrophotography. Because long-exposure photography doesn't require large telescopes or mounts, the equipment is somewhat less expensive. I prefer direct viewing, and photography doesn't interest me. Astrophotography attracts a different kind of person and can be competitive when you submit your photographs for publication. Although they can be spectacular, they are usually so doctored up that they look nothing like what you would see with the naked eye. You do get more bang for the buck, because a long exposure time can provide you with the equivalent of a large telescope. However, it's still just a photograph, and no optical telescope on earth can match the Hubble or James Webb telescopes.

The problem with my new mount had to do with the fact that it was made in China, and they are dumping them on the U.S. market and putting local manufacturers out of business. Their U.S. vendors are complicit in the process. It is impossible to get reliable reviews, and the vendors never tell you their true opinions of the equipment. Rather than alienate the Chinese manufacturer, they just allow you to return the equipment – as long as you pay a restocking fee and the return shipping cost. This removes the risk for vendors, but hardly qualifies as good customer service. I plan to buy an American-made mount of known reliability from a different vendor. 

It looks to me as if the Trump era is about to end. For the first time since 2016 there is open discussion about how the press has mishandled reporting on political candidates. Because the liberal newspapers knew that they had already locked-in readers who prefer progressive candidates, they had no incentive to attack Republican candidates, because that was the only remaining segment in which they might increase their readerships. They have been covering this up by pretending that it is their journalistic duty to remain neutral on political matters, but the real reason is that they would love to pull readers from Fox News – or anywhere. In any case, newspapers have been dumbing down for decades to attract readers, and they all resemble the National Enquirer now more than they did twenty years ago. Clickbait has taken off everywhere, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. I am hoping that Kamala Harris will rise to the occasion and publicly eviscerate Trump in the debate tomorrow. He eventually fails at everything he does, and this has the potential to end his political career.

Brain Size and the Emergence of Modern Human Cognition

This essay, by Ian Tattersall, from Rethinking Human Evolution, is probably the last I'll discuss from the book. Like the other essays, it challenges conventional wisdom regarding human evolution and makes some good points.

For reasons previously explored both by this author (Tattersall 1997, 2015) and by the editor of this volume (Schwartz 2006, 2016), paleoanthropology has been mired since the mid-twentieth century in the beguiling notion that evolution in the hominid family (hominin subfamily/tribe, if you prefer; the difference is notional) has consisted essentially of the burnishing by natural selection of a central lineage that culminated in Homo sapiens. Yet accretions to the hominid fossil record over the same period have, in contrast, consistently shown that hominid phylogeny instead involved vigorous evolutionary experimentation. Over the seven-million-odd years of our family's existence, new species and lineages were regularly thrown out onto the ecological stage, to be triaged in competition with organisms both closely and distantly related. Extinction rates were high to match. Further, it is by now well established that all this took place in the context of constantly oscillating climates and habitats (deMenocal, 2011), to which steady, perfecting adaptation would not have been possible, even in principle.....the gradualist interpretive framework has tenaciously lingered, leading to the widespread application in practice of a strictly minimalist systemic approach that has often been justified by spectacularly contorted reasoning (see Spoor et al. [2007], and Lordkipanidze et al. [2014] for classic examples).

Tattersall looks closely at brain size in various hominids. The generally accepted narrative, which I've mentioned before, is that our ancestors first became bipedal due to climate change and the replacement of forest with savannah; this led to dietary changes in which meat provided a more efficient energy source, and cooperation increased, leading to language development and increased brain size. Tattersall says that, although brain size did increase generally in hominids, there is no evidence that this increase alone correlates with increased intelligence. One hypothesis is that the demands of human childrearing required higher intelligence. Tattersall adopts a different position. He thinks that the development of language in early Homo sapiens provided the main impetus. By about 100,000 years ago, humans were sufficiently adept in the use of symbolic language that they were able to manipulate symbols in their thinking processes, which roughly corresponds with what we think of as intelligence. So, Tattersall's view is that what we think of as intelligence is an unexpected byproduct of the acquisition of language. And, although brain size did initially play a role, it doesn't necessarily now. For example, the now- extinct Neanderthals had larger brains than us but apparently lacked our capacity for symbolic manipulation. Additionally, human brain size has been decreasing for tens of thousands of years. Tattersall compares this to early brute force computers (such as Deep Blue), which had to be large to solve problems, whereas recent, smaller algorithmic computers solve even harder problems more efficiently. On the whole, Tattersall's point is that the development of human cognition did not occur within a context of steady movement toward a likely end; a more accurate description is that, at any given time, nature seems to be conducting various survival experiments for which no outcome is clear. Additionally, energy usage often plays a role in evolution. Neanderthals had large bodies and brains, so they were energy-inefficient compared to humans. Strangely, we are now running into similar constraints with cryptocurrencies and AI, which are already straining our energy resources. It looks as if the evolutionary model for both animals and machines may be the movement to lower energy consumption combined with higher performance. Without the sun, we wouldn't be here.

These thoughts relate to those of other writers I've discussed. For example, Giorgio Vallortigara has shown that even chicks use basic arithmetic and geometry, but without symbols or language. This is a good example of how a cognitive function can become more useful through the use of symbolic reasoning. There is also somewhat of a connection with the work of Vinod Goel, who discusses the evolution of the human brain, which is actually a wider look than Tattersall's discussion. Tattersall is probably only talking about the prefrontal cortex, which is relatively small, and the rest of the human brain is mostly quite ancient. Looking at this only from the present, the determinists I've discussed may have some relevance, because they specifically emphasize human limitations and the variability of skills within the current population. This group includes Robert Sapolsky, Robert Plomin, David Reich and Kathryn Paige Harden. While Tattersall is apparently happy that evolution managed to allow us to be here today, he doesn't discuss the liabilities that we've inherited from our evolutionary past. Having myself observed human behavior for seventy-four years now, there is a lot not to like about it.

Human and Mammalian Evolution: Is There a Difference?

This short essay, by John de Vos and Jelle W.F. Reumer, is another from the book I'm reading. I found it interesting and will just sum it up.

From ancient times to the present, there has been a conceit regarding the place of humans in the world. De Vos and Reumer state this nicely as follows:

When God created the world, he did so in a succession of different steps. The creation of animals was one such step. The creation of mankind was another one. Ever since, mankind has been considered (i.e., has considered itself) not to be part of the animal kingdom. This notion—that Homo sapiens is a species next to, above, or outside the mammalian world—has long perverted science. Ernst Haeckel's famous "Stammbaum des Menschen/Pedigree of Man," published in 1874, shows "man" in the highest branch of the tree, above the rest of the living world, although part of the apes.

Commendably, these authors prefer to study humans as mammals, and their research shows that, in the past, environmental changes affected humans just as much as other mammals. The Pliocene period, 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago, entailed a cooling of the planet, during which forests were transformed to grassy plains in the American prairies, the Eurasian steppes and the African savannahs. Horses and antelopes evolved from smaller, shorter-legged animals to have longer legs, new dental characteristics and increased socialization. The Pliocene, with its increase in grasslands, was also the time of origin for early hominids such as Australopithecus.

Thus, both the evolution of human bipedalism and erect posture on the one hand, and of the long-legged running gait in horses on the other, are the result of Miocene-through-Pleistocene climate change in conjunction with the reduction of forest ecosystems and increase in open habitats....Humans, antelopes and horses are mammals that adapted to a new environment, and their evolution reflects their convergences.

There are also parallels between humans and other mammals seen in studies of island paleontology:

Although the mechanisms leading to observed phenomena remain unclear, these studies have given rise to what is called the "Island Rule." That is, in general, small mammals (shrews, hedgehogs, rodents, leporids) become larger when isolated on islands, and large mammals (elephantids, hippopotamids, bovids, cervids) become smaller....Although until fairly recently one might have wondered if humans would be an exception to the Island Rule, the possibility emerged with the discovery of the remains of a Late Pleistocene hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores....Claims of microcephaly notwithstanding, the specimens are more reasonably seen as evidence of island dwarfing and of a separate species.

During the Late Pleistocene, many large mammals became woolly: the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, musk ox and cave bear. At that time, the climate was cold and dry. But at the end of the Pleistocene, the climate became warmer, and most of the woolly species became extinct. As a speculative matter, the authors suggest that Homo neanderthalensis, which had evolved during the Pleistocene, may also have been "woolly," and became extinct along with the other woolly mammals.

The point of the authors is that large mammals are large mammals, and there are probably convergences when different species experience the same environmental changes. From a scientific point of view, I think this is fairly obvious – though it would be heresy to many.

Sex, Reproduction, and Scenarios of Human Evolution

This is a short essay by Claudine Cohen in Rethinking Human Evolution, edited by Jeffrey H. Schwartz, which is part of a series in theoretical biology. I will probably read several of the essays and comment separately on each one. I am attempting to update myself in a field that I find interesting.

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin speculated that in early human history mate selection was performed by females, based on the physical and social characteristics of males, and that these choices affected the characteristics of males over time. This is the same idea that I mentioned a few years ago, regarding speculation that Dutch men are the tallest in the world because Dutch women selected them, considering tall men better providers than short men. However, Darwin thought that mate selection later became a male behavior, and that women began to adorn themselves so as to make themselves more attractive to men. While Darwin admitted that sociocultural practices can affect mate selection, he thought that, after the early period, males generally tended to dominate women.

From the 1920's to the 1970's, cultural anthropologists rejected biological evolutionary models in favor of human social structures. In the mid-1970's sociobiology was popularized by E.O. Wilson and gene-maximization was popularized by Richard Dawkins. I think that Cohen may conflate Wilson's views with those of Dawkins, because they are not identical. She thinks that Dawkins's support of gene-maximization is reductionistic and provides an unsubstantiated advantage to males. Wilson's views are more concerned with group or multi-level selection, which are different things entirely. In any case, Cohen favors maintaining the importance of socio-cultural factors in human sexual behavior and she seems to dislike genetic explanations of this subject. When she wrote this essay (in about 2016), other deterministic models, such as Robert Sapolsky's, were not well known. I think that the clunky old cause-effect model of determinism, especially through genes, is giving way to a messier model such as Sapolsky's. Under that model, specific behaviors of humans do emerge causally, but we can barely comprehend how. Different sexual behavior does emerge from different social contexts, but those contexts also fit within broader deterministic models. While Cohen does seem to approve of Darwin's views, she does not focus on the central Darwinian idea that species go extinct for a wide variety of reasons: if a species goes extinct as a result of its social practices, it lacks fitness, according to Darwin, and social causes may be just as causal as the earth being struck by a large asteroid. I think that many people, even in the sciences, inject free will into their theories because it provides the feeling that we have control over our destinies – even though we don't. 

I found Cohen a bit more enlightening in other areas. The fact of concealed ovulation in humans, but not in other primates, had been a puzzle to me. Was it to conceal paternity? There is a convincingly simple hypothetical explanation for this: bipedal gate. The genital exposure of female humans is much less conspicuous than that of other primates, not attracting as much attention. So it is quite conceivable that, with the gradual development of other erogenous zones in the female body, the role of sexual signaling from the vulva gradually declined. The increasing complexity of human social structures, including the use of clothing, may also have reduced the desirability of conspicuous estrus:

In the absence of visible estrus, human sexual behavior and reproduction become disconnected (Godelier, 2004). Consequently, the uniquely human manifestations of eroticism and sexual pleasure (see Bataille 1957, 1961), coexist with, and may even replace, the physiological function of procreation (Zwang 2002).

More generally:

The acquisition of concealed ovulation has been viewed as a key event leading to the transformation of gender relationships and roles in human groups. If it was related to the acquisition of Hominin bipedal gait, its roots lie well before the origin of the genus Homo. Understanding concealed ovulation – its origin, causes, and effects – is likely fundamental to understanding human evolution and the emergence of social structure, as is reflected in its being the starting point of several scenarios of "hominization."

Another interesting area that Cohen delves into is the social and other effects of the demands of raising human babies. The workload is so high that a male partner is generally needed to at least provide food. But cooperation spills over into the surrounding group, leading to general cooperation within that group. More interestingly, humans are the only primates with menopause, and other female primates remain fertile up to their deaths. 

Whereas young female apes leave their mothers to join their male partners' territories (patrilocality), the positive role of grandmothers is favored by matrilocality, that is, the cohabitation of daughters with mothers (in contrast to cohabitation of the son's mother and his wife). In turn, this leads to a close and harmonious distribution of roles for caring and educating children. In humans, matrilocality permits a better environment for raising young children. Older women, freed of reproductive constraints, can achieve the status of a wise and dominant figure, and contribute to the welfare of their group, by virtue of the knowledge and experience they acquired over a long period of time, one that extends well beyond the cessation of fertility.

In this vein, Cohen suggests that figurines such as the Venus of Willendorf (28,000-25,000 BCE) are not symbols of fertility, but represent the importance of postmenopausal women in those societies.  

Diary

I've been distracted by some minor inconveniences for a few days. The remains of Hurricane Debby came through here on August 9, with wind and rain. My neighborhood was hardly affected, but the power and my internet went out. The power outage lasted only a few hours, and, since I have a generator, that wasn't a problem. But then, after Comcast informed me that the internet was back up, it actually wasn't. I contacted them, and they set an appointment on August 16 for a technician to come. I put myself on a wait list for August 11 and then August 12, and a technician arrived yesterday. He thought that the problem was my modem, though it's only a year old. I spent yesterday driving down to Rutland and back, buying and installing a new modem, identical to the old one, only to find that it also didn't work. From that point onward, I was unable to communicate with a human at Comcast. Consequently, in an effort to examine every possibility, I tried using the new modem's electric adapter, and subsequently found that it works on both the old and new modems. So, now I have two good modems. I've ordered a extra adapter for both modems and should have no modem problems for several years. I might add that cellular signals are very weak in my neighborhood; when the internet is down, I often have to drive to a location with a better cellular signal. For wireless internet I park outside the Brandon library. Without internet at home, I'm significantly cut off from the world. For me, this is yet another example of the decline in customer service in the current economic environment. Customer service is so bad now that I am hesitant to participate in many previously accessible activities, such as air travel. I haven't flown on a plane since 2016.

The cooling trend here has begun, and the hummingbirds are flying south. Yesterday, one of them scared the Comcast technician on the front porch. The atmosphere is already fall-like, and there have been some clear nights. There is a glitch with my new stargazing equipment, but I should be able to fix it eventually. The tomatoes have recovered, and there will be a lot of them soon. After the late germinations and deer attack, they're not all the same size, but they all have tomatoes growing on them: more than I can eat. The germination problem, I determined, was that I had stored the seeds in the basement, which gets humid in the summer. In the Middlebury basement there was a dehumidifier.

I'm dutifully trying to pay attention to the presidential election, but it's a bit like watching a bad soap opera rerun. I find it difficult to watch a dishonest, fat and stupid old rich guy pretend that he actually has something to offer. J.D. Vance complements him as an unscrupulous opportunist. He represents the next generation of political grifters. When I see the news media and the public taking them seriously, I start to experience violent paroxysms of cognitive dissonance. For example, we have to watch the Republicans question Tim Walz's military record and ignore the fact that Trump himself engaged in a carefully-orchestrated draft-dodging scheme during the Vietnam War. If I were an authoritarian dictator, I would deport Trump and Vance to Venezuela to spend the rest of their days with their friend, Nicolás Maduro. On the other hand, Kamala Harris is a nice change of pace, and I like Tim Walz. At the moment, they are gaining momentum and seem likely to win. Trump has very little self-discipline, and he seems to be digging his own grave. Still, the underlying problem is the idiotic voters who elected him in 2016.

I will be starting a book of essays on human evolution soon and may have something more interesting to say.

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

This is a new book by Anne Applebaum, the journalist. Politics isn't one of my favorite subjects, but global politics have become so complicated in recent years that I thought that I should get an update. Although this book is written in a journalistic style and lacks an index, Applebaum is experienced and insightful regarding the topic. The writing is a bit jerky at times, because it integrates magazine articles that were written separately. 

 Autocracies have been around for thousands of years, but there was somewhat of a lull following World War II, when world leaders founded organizations such as the UN in order to keep global order. What is confusing now is that, not only have they made a big comeback, but that there is a new ecosystem in which autocrats regularly assist each other even when they have different goals and ideologies. A good example comes from the relationship between Venezuela and Iran:

Since 2000, Iran has systematically increased its aid, first for Chávez and then Maduro. Iranians bought Venezuelan gold and sent food and gasoline in return. Iranians are believed to be advising Venezuela on repressive tactics against dissidents. Iranians helped Venezuela build a drone factory (apparently with mixed success) and have sent equipment and personnel to help repair Venezuelan oil refineries. The Venezuelans, for their part, might have helped launder money for Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group, and are believed to have provided passports for Hezbollah and Iran officials as well.

Besides Iran, Venezuela is getting help from Russia, China, Cuba and Turkey.

In the most general sense, today's autocrats don't have rigid ideologies and are tolerant of other autocrats who are willing to work with them. This sometimes means that large, well-organized countries such as Russia and China are working directly with brutal thugs who like wealth and power and don't care about their own countries at all.

The king of evil autocrats seems to be Vladimir Putin, who has spent much of his adult life working on autocratic schemes. He benefited from his familiarity with techniques employed by Stalin long ago. The Nord Stream natural gas pipeline to Germany began operation in 2011 and has provided stolen funds to Putin that are used to finance his various projects. This helped Russia become a leading kleptocracy, as Applebaum describes it. The stolen funds go to Putin's facilitators all over the world through a vast network of money laundering. Because the money is stolen, it doesn't have to be invested carefully, and it can end up in unneeded new buildings. Applebaum advocates transparency in real estate ownership, because kleptocrats currently live in unidentified homes all over the world, including the U.S. and U.K. 

Applebaum's main solution to the autocracy problem is as follows:

...the democracies of North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, together with the leaders of democratic opposition in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and other autocratic states, should think about the struggle for freedom not as a competition with specific autocratic states, and certainly not as "war with China," but as a war against autocratic behaviors, wherever they are found: in Russia, in China, in Europe, in the United States.

Since American social media sites are hardly regulated, she also advocates legislation to correct that for the users.

Trump does come up in the book in a couple of places. For example: 

The fact that anonymous shell companies were purchasing condominiums in Trump-branded properties while Trump was president should have set off alarm bells. That it did not is evidence of how accustomed to kleptocratic corruption we have become.

My view is that, because Trump is a narcissist and isn't particularly talented, in the course of his life he has moved from one field to another, and each time he fails. He wasn't particularly successful as a real estate developer and failed as a casino operator. He also tried and failed at leveraged buyouts when they were popular. His main success was in becoming an actor specializing in characters who are great businessmen. I think that he admires autocrats because he would like that job. He would love it if everyone had to agree with him and praised him all of the time.

Overall, autocracies are a complex topic, and they are still evolving. This book provides some of the basic information that you need to know now. I would have liked to know more about Xi Jinping, because he remains somewhat of a mystery to me. Applebaum is not unrealistic about the difficulties of democratic processes, which are the main alternative, but seems less skeptical of them than I am. Because I look at humans biologically, it is obvious to me that we have gradually been creating greater and greater risks to our continued existence, and that one of these days our luck may run out.

Diary

With all of the recent political developments, I thought I'd comment on the election again. In my opinion, it's a good thing that Biden dropped out. While, technically, he was a good president, there was little enthusiasm for him, and Kamala Harris is an improvement for the Democrats. She is currently producing enough excitement that she could actually win. During the 2020 primary, I initially liked her, but, since she wasn't much of a policy wonk, I went for Elizabeth Warren. Harris is more charismatic than Warren or Hillary Clinton, and she should do well in the coming election. She does have several negatives, however: she is definitely a Californian, which many Americans can't relate to, and her political experience is still somewhat limited. And then, a dark-skinned woman with foreign-born parents and a Jewish husband would have been unthinkable as president a few years ago. But this could turn out to be a rare opportunity, because of the Trump scenario: for many, he is the most hated president in their lifetimes, and he could potentially become a right-wing dictator if reelected. Furthermore, Harris seems to have enough chutzpah that she might successfully attack Trump in a debate – something he's never faced before. Some say that, as a former prosecutor, she would be good at that. It really is quite unbelievable that a convicted felon, rapist and well-documented liar is the Republican candidate for president. Although it's far from certain, the tide could turn on Trump very quickly.

In other news, in my summer doldrums, I'm having some difficulty entertaining myself. I did, however, have a pleasant surprise last Saturday, after Middlebury College suddenly announced the appearance of Duo Ondine at the Middlebury Chapel. They play orchestral pieces transcribed for two pianists on one piano. One of their pieces was a Debussy favorite of mine. This was quite different from most Middlebury performances. There seemed to be no Middlebury staff present, and the program was in French and looked as if it were printed on a copier. The artists introduced themselves on the stage, speaking only in French. They made a lot of eye contact with me, because I was sitting in the front row.

At home, I'm having a hard time finding new films that I like. Besides Taxi Driver, I watched On the Waterfront, which I still think is very good. I don't get excited by Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, or most of the other leading males now. Russell Crowe and George Clooney aren't much better. Anthony Hopkins is eighty-six! We no longer have the equivalents of Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart or Clark Gable. Jennifer Aniston is no Ingrid Bergman. The newer directors aren't that great either. I've tried several Coen brothers' films, and the only one that I liked was Fargo. So there are no equivalents today of Stanley Kubrick, Éric Rohmer, Milos Forman or Roman Polanski. As I've often said, this is all part of the corporatization of the arts in the U.S. Besides that, the internet and social media seem to be redefining entertainment in a manner that removes psychological complexity and replaces it with a sort of personality blandness that is suitable for children. This is reflected in the Marvel superhero films, and Barbie had the same problem.

I do, however, have a new book to read and will start on it shortly.

Robert Owen

I seem to be past the point when I was interested in finding a better place to live. After I graduated from college in 1972, I stayed temporarily with my family in Connecticut but wasn't sure what I wanted to do or where I might go. For a time, I considered moving to New Zealand, but then I ended up moving in with my girlfriend, who was living in Columbus, Ohio, not exactly a utopia. I unenthusiastically got married, and, after an exploratory trip to parts of the U.S. and Canada, moved to Eugene, Oregon for a year, during which I lost enthusiasm for that part of the country. After moving to Indiana, having children and getting divorced, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky for a couple of years and then, with job changes, lived in northern Illinois for about twenty-four years until after I retired. Then I decided on Vermont and moved here in 2011. While I don't usually get very socially engaged with the locals wherever I live, I find west-central Vermont appealing for a number of reasons. Besides the low population and pleasant scenery, there are still hints of utopianism here. The U.S. became a testing ground for a wide swath of utopian ideas early in its history, but nearly all of them had some level of religious motivation. The more interesting ones to me are less religious and are related to optimal social structures, and those didn't become popular until the early 19th century. 

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a Welsh textile manufacturer of humble origins who operated a highly successful plant in New Lanark, Scotland. He had worked in Manchester and hated the miserable living conditions created there by the Industrial Revolution and used New Lanark as a testing ground for some of his theories. His main goals at the time were to improve working conditions for his employees and provide them with better educations. 

When I lived in Indiana, I was not far from New Harmony, which I mentioned in an earlier post. At that time it was a tourist attraction, and I visited it. It was a town built by a religious German group called the Rappites, who were productive and successful, but they eventually ceased to exist because they didn't believe in sex or reproduction. It may be that they had expected Armageddon to occur, and when it didn't, they had no Plan B. They had purchased the Indiana land, which was wilderness at the time, in 1814, developed it considerably, and then moved away to Pennsylvania in 1824. Robert Owen purchased the town and surrounding acreage in 1825 with the goal of setting up an experimental utopian community. Owen became a notable social reformer and later influenced Marx and Engels. To some extent I agree with his main ideas, because he opposed religion, private property and marriage. However, his idea of integrating those ideas into a workable society in the early 19th century was unrealistic, to put it mildly. After he bought the property, he arrived in the East Coast to much fanfare and met John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He also gave a three-hour speech to the three branches of government, telling them that he hoped to eradicate every social evil.

Obviously, Owen was completely unrealistic, but it would have been less apparent at the time, since human nature was not well understood then. While he objected to religion, he seems to have been unaware that religion serves a social function – it was religion that supplied the cohesion that allowed America's early settlers to survive collectively. As it was, he recruited a wide range of people to live in New Harmony without paying much attention to how compatible they would be. He seems to have attracted a few scientific people, along with more general intellectuals and artists, and a slew of farmers and tradespeople. They came from different backgrounds and geographic locations. From what I've read, it does not appear that Owen gave much thought to how they would be organized. With his faith in reason, he thought that they would follow a democratic process and figure it out on their own. They couldn't, and the community hemorrhaged money until Owen and his financial partner, William Maclure, abandoned the project in 1827. Some of the residents remained there and did productive work, but Owen's original plan completely failed. Unfortunately, I don't think that any social models much better than Owen's have emerged since then. A good start would be recognizing that people are not fundamentally rational.

Vermont, as I wrote earlier, was once a Congregational theocracy to some extent. That did provide cohesion originally, but has little to do with why I find the state appealing now. Because it never industrialized much and the population remained low, the groups that have lived here haven't been at each other's throats as much as in some other states. There are wealthy outsiders who have moved here and locals with reduced economic conditions that don't see eye to eye with them, but the wealth contrasts are less conspicuous here than elsewhere. And some of the liberals who moved here are similar to Bernie Sanders and emphasize equality as more than a talking point. Under these conditions, people tend to be more cooperative. The local newspapers also have a positive impact by covering all aspects involving the local population, which is more conducive to creating a cohesive environment than national news outlets or the internet in general. So, in my case, even though there are aspects of European culture that I prefer, which are absent here, I am resigned to remaining in Vermont, because I am better adapted to living here than anywhere else.

Diary

I've officially entered my summer doldrums and don't feel like reading much now. At this moment, I don't have many tasks to complete. The Carson McCullers Memorial Tomato Garden was attacked by deer but survived. This was quite unusual, because deer don't generally like tomato plants. I think that the culprit was an inexperienced fawn. The largest plant, which had germinated on time, was hardly damaged, and is still doing very well. Two of the remaining three were damaged but are growing back quickly. The fourth was badly damaged but is also recovering quickly. I should still end up with a high yield of tomatoes, since they will continue growing until October. As a precaution, I installed chicken wire around each plant.

The remnants of Hurricane Beryl struck Vermont, but the damage wasn't as bad as the storms of last July. There was a lot of rain and some flooding. This is expected to be a severe hurricane season, and theoretically there could be more that reach here this year. The worst damage usually occurs on the other side of the mountains in high terrain. So far, the state has been effective in strengthening the physical infrastructure, so, over time, each successive storm may produce less damage. But some locations are difficult to protect. My house is safe from flooding, because it is elevated well above the nearby rivers. The worst that could happen would be that the road or driveway could wash out, since they're gravel. So far, they've held up well. The road could also be blocked by trees if there were very high winds. Fortunately, by the time hurricanes reach here, they're not windy, just rainy.

I'm still not experiencing much heat here and haven't turned on any air conditioners. I think that the location of the house and the construction materials help. As I mentioned earlier, the woods don't build up heat and cool down quickly in the evening. The house looks like a log cabin, but, more accurately, it is a frame house with log siding. I think that the thermal properties of the logs are somewhat better than those of other sidings. It also helps that the roof has a low profile, hence less sun exposure than most houses. On a typical day, it's in the 60's outside in the morning and gradually heats up to the 80's during the day. By aerating the house by placing a floor fan in a window and opening doors and windows in the morning and evening, the house can generally be kept in the 70's all day by closing up when it gets hot. It gets a little hotter upstairs during the day, but can be cooled down quickly in the evening. I think that if it were 90º+ often, I might have to resort to air conditioning then. The basement is never warmer than 70º.

One of my last projects is keeping mice out of the shed. It is dilapidated and rotten in places, and is surrounded by mouse nests. Last winter they chewed off small pieces of paper towels in the shed, presumably to use in their nests. I think I've got them blocked out at the moment. The shed was very smelly until recently. I just removed the large stash of coyote urine that the former owner kept there, presumably to protect her garden. There are still lingering odors, but that seems to have taken care of most of it.

I've also been making extra trips to Middlebury to determine whether William, the cat, has been sighted. The back porch at the house was badly damaged by the storm last winter, and some of the wooden framing for the screens was destroyed. The storm door at the back of the house was also badly damaged. Since there have been no repairs made yet, a gray cat had been going onto the back porch to sleep in a chair. I went to see it myself, and it wasn't William. However, William looks exactly like the photo that I posted earlier, and I believe that he may be in the vicinity. To expedite matters, I put up "Missing Cat" signs in the neighborhood. I don't know whether anything will come of it, but if it was William and he is still alive, he will probably return to the house again. The current owner will contact me if she sees him.

The wildlife here is quieting down for the season, and the songbirds seem to have finished their mating for the year. Yesterday, at dusk, I saw a large black bear ambling up the road past my house.

Politics

Though politics is not one of my favorite topics, because most political discussion is frivolous and this is a serious blog, I do feel obliged to write about it occasionally. To some extent, I have used political thinking as an example of human cognitive limitations, with evidence practically slapping us in the face on a daily basis. In my view, you have to allow that it might be possible for well-informed, rational voters to make viable political decisions, but you hardly have to observe the actual political process to see that rationality plays almost no role in the decisions of most voters. There have been two recent trends in news coverage that make politics especially frustrating. On the one hand, there are news outlets that are purely commercial and take no journalistic responsibility for their news content, and, on the other hand, there are unbiased news outlets that take their neutrality to such extremes that they never report on the strengths and weaknesses of individual political candidates; they prefer to limit their political discussions to poll results. I might add that the "neutral" news outlets usually have corporate and other sponsors, and can therefore hardly be considered completely neutral. With the backdrop of uncontrolled misinformation and intentional disinformation campaigns on the internet, false information has been given a significant advantage and now has a disproportional effect on election outcomes. 

I'll comment on Donald Trump first, because this is probably the best example in American political history of the news media dropping the ball. There was some basis for Trump's presidential victory in 2016. He appeared to be a successful businessman and had the showmanship of a television personality, though, if you had dug a little deeper, even then there was plenty of evidence of his various deficiencies.

He benefited from the weaknesses of Hillary Clinton as a candidate: she was uncharismatic, and her political background connected her to decades of ineffective Democrats who had essentially ignored the growing economic pressures on the middle class. Furthermore, she had lived in such a rarefied, wealthy liberal environment that she did not anticipate the effect of her "basket of deplorables" phrase, which permanently alienated many voters. By 2016, class consciousness was firming up, and she was tone-deaf. Also, this is still a sexist country, and that worked against her. Even so, I think that Clinton could easily have won if the news media had provided appropriate reportage on Trump. In 2016, it was already well known that Trump was politically ignorant, probably didn't even care about politics, was generally a business failure, habitually abused women, and had conspicuous psychiatric disorders related to narcissism. There were many signs of his habitual dishonesty by 2016.

While the 2016 presidential election result may have been a fluke, there is no excuse for those in the news media today who shy away from critiquing Trump or discussing what might be expected if he is reelected. Since Trump isn't really very smart, has little interest in political ideology, and is probably already very tired of politics, he might not do much damage. On the other hand, he has a strong incentive to pardon himself of any potential criminal charges, though the Supreme Court has just relieved him of some of that responsibility. At the moment, the greatest threat of a second Trump presidency could be the empowerment of his wealthy backers, who, through the Heritage Foundation, are supporting the conversion of the U.S. government to a conservative autocracy. This one is really crazy, because a vote for Trump could be a vote for a Russian-style voting system, not to mention the end of free speech. Was this part of our American heritage?

The other major presidential candidate now, Joe Biden, is also problematic, but his weaknesses are fairly obvious, even though the liberal news media, which is now openly anti-Trump, has been somewhat protective of Biden. My view is that Biden was already showing signs of senility during the 2020 presidential primary. I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary, but was forced to vote for Biden in the election, with Trump as the alternative. Biden does have a lot going for him, and I think that his extensive political experience has been a benefit to the country. I think that future historians may rank him fairly highly compared to most recent presidents. But he has also been a bit lucky, following the worst president in American history. Furthermore, just from watching him speak, it is obvious that he lacks the mental flexibility to properly address the varied and complex issues currently facing the country. He should be thinking at least twice as fast as he now does in public. My impression is that he tries to speak quickly in public in order to seem sharp, but that this backfires because his brain can't keep up with his mouth. In my view, the Democratic Party has been mismanaged for years, and it should have been developing a replacement four years ago. We are now looking at another Ruth Bader Ginsburg age-denial event that could result in an unnecessary step backwards for the country. Biden may still win if he remains a candidate, but the risks are so great that I don't think that the decision should be left to a senile old man.

There are still several months left until the presidential election, and more positive events could occur by then. I was pleased by the sudden ouster of the Conservatives in the U.K., following the ouster of Boris Johnson. With the design of the American political system, the same could not occur here, but there are ways in which the Democratic Party could increase its appeal.