Taking a day off from political posts, for posts about reality. Or at least, the exploration of reality.
- Mathematicians solve a 125-year-old problem, perhaps;
- OnlySky’s Dale McGowan about the evolutionary mismatch between the world we evolved in, and the modern world (a key theme of this blog);
- Dalton Conley on a new scientific field that he claims resolved the nature vs nurture divide;
- How movies depict looking through binoculars;
- Dale McGowan again about how there are never normal times;
- Long interview with Ed Yong;
- Musical coda: Pettersson’s 9th.
To begin, I spent over an hour this morning installing “more” tags on my posts since early February, so that a viewer of this site would see only previews of each post, and not the entire posts. Making it much easier to browse through the site and see the subjects of each post. My plan is to do that every day for *yesterday’s* post, and leave the current one fully visible. Let’s see if I can keep up.
Via Facebook.
New Scientist, 14 Mar 2025: Mathematicians solve 125-year-old problem to unite key laws of physics
Subtitled: “Can one single mathematical framework describe the motion of a fluid and the individual particles within it? This question, first asked in 1900, now has a solution that could help us understand the complex behaviour of the atmosphere and oceans.”
I don’t have a New Scientist subscription, so I can’t read the full article. Interesting if true; if true, I’ll hear about it elsewhere.
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A key premise of this blog, concluded from numerous books in recent years (from Wilson to Pinker to Greene to Haidt…), that explains much of modern society, including politics.
OnlySky, Dale McGowan, 13 Mar 2025: The winds of an evolutionary mismatch, subtitled “This is not the world we were meant for. That fact hurts some more than others.”
It’s common knowledge that we were evolved for a very different world. The deal we signed with our genes upon conception was admission to small, nomadic community with strong kinship bonds, sustained by the constant search for sustenance in a marginal environment.
The Terms of Service included a high likelihood of death in your first weeks, and a short difficult life regardless, but who reads the ToS. At least our genes were aligned with and shaped by our situation, however inadequately. An intelligent designer could have done better, but at least we didn’t carry a burden of specifically counterproductive adaptations of our own creation.
(He should have avoided the term “meant,” which is teleological. There are no goals or direction in evolution. It just happens.)
My take: The gist, again, is that humanity existed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years in a far different environment that the modern one, and our minds evolved for optimal survival in that environment.
The world you and I were born into profoundly violates our genetic agreement. Instead of small, uniform bands of mostly related people in a natural environment to which we were shaped, we find ourselves packed together with millions of diverse strangers in artificial environments, moving around at high speeds, assaulted with information (including knowledge of disasters around the planet), shaken by clickbait headlines, exposed to virtual social networks far beyond our ability to process, seduced by unlimited highly processed high-calorie high-sugar foods, stripped of community. These are neither good nor bad in isolation: Knowledge, calories, diversity, mobility, social connection, and a little alone time can be beneficial. But taken to extremes and piled together, they create an unbearable mismatch with the world reflected in our genes.
My take: These tendencies remain in every one of us, even as some of us are able to understand the modern, interconnected world, including long-term threats, while others cling to tribalistic tendencies that demonize outsiders and prefer tribal lore to considered study of the real world, and dismiss long-term threats.
The writer goes on to contrast biological evolution with cultural evolution. Then looks for a fix.
An evolutionary perspective, one that recognizes the challenge presented by our wiring and our situation, could lead to better-informed public policy. Whether humanity thrives or plummets in the years to come depends in part on how we manage the widening gap in access to these protective technologies.
Socialism of various types and degrees can be seen as an attempt to shrink the gap, providing more equal access to the technologies that mitigate the effects of our evolutionary mismatch. Socialized medicine and public services, social safety nets for the elderly, unhoused, poor, and infirm, and attempts to close the income gap (such as Universal Basic Income) are meant to diminish vulnerability and improve equitable access to the things that make life more bearable for everyone standing in this wind.
If statistics like mental health, peace, safety, and overall happiness are to be believed — all signs of a better fit between ourselves and our situation — they might be on to something.
Of course, anything smacking of socialism is anathema to the tribalists, to the traditionalists. The links at the end lead to the kind of data they dismiss.
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This writer has a new book out called The Social Genome. Do I need to read this book? I’ll think about it.
NY Times, guest essay by Dalton Conley, 13 Mar 2025: A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are and How We Got That Way
Since Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences.
Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter the world as blank slates, formed only by what we encounter in our homes and beyond? What started as an intellectual debate quickly expanded to whatever anyone wanted it to mean, invoked in arguments about everything from free will to race to inequality to whether public policy can, or should, level the playing field.
Today, however, a new realm of science is poised to upend the debate — not by declaring victory for one side or the other, nor even by calling a tie, but rather by revealing they were never in opposition in the first place. Through this new vantage, nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don’t operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other.
The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics that I have been closely involved with for over a decade. Though the field is still in its infancy, its philosophical implications are staggering. It has the potential to rewrite a great deal of what we think we know about who we are and how we got that way. For all the talk of someday engineering our chromosomes and the science-fiction fantasy of designer babies flooding our preschools, this is the real paradigm shift, and it’s already underway.
I wonder to what extent he will challenge or extend the conclusions of Steven Pinker’s THE BLANK SLATE (my summary/review ends here).
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The idea that the human mind evolved in a primitive environment and was optimized for survival explains a host of psychological biases and optical illusions.
Boing Boing, Allan Rose Hill, 12 Mar 2025: Curious collection of movie clips that misrepresent looking through binoculars
I haven’t watched the video, but the image here makes the point. We’ve all seen it. And if we’ve looked through binoculars ourselves, we know it’s a cinematic convention that isn’t actually real.
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Another piece from Dale McGowan.
OnlySky, Dale McGowan, 11 Mar 2025: There is no normal, subtitled “These are not normal times. Then again, they never are.”
Pivoting off Douglas Adams. I won’t summarize, just sample.
I try to keep my kids (who entered the world through my wife and are part me and part she) awake as much as possible. When my youngest was in kindergarten, she and I (two pieces of the universe that became aware) would step outside to the school bus stop, and there would always be something cool in the sky. Like you know, THE SKY. We would “talk” about it by using our throats and mouths to make the air wiggle, which in turn made little bones and hairs in our ears wiggle, which our brains understood. Because that’s somehow normal.
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Long interview with the formidable Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes and An Immense World. (And who apparently lives in Oakland.) His next book will be The Infinite Extent.
NY Times Magazine, David Marchese, 22 Feb 2025: The Interview: Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World
Concluding:
I’d like to wrench the conversation away from heavier topics. Tell me a cool scientific fact that you learned while you were researching your next book. Something that gave you delight.
You know, I’m writing a section of the book that is about hummingbirds. The fact that hummingbirds have iridescent colors that are especially vivid at certain angles. The Anna’s hummingbird is a great example of that. In some angles it looks like this vivid capital-“M” magenta jewel. Then it might turn its head and look black and dark. Those colors are not inherent to the feathers themselves. They occur because the feathers have rows of tiny disc-shaped structures that are arranged perfectly at the nanoscale. The light they reflect interferes with and amplifies each other specifically in red wavelengths, and specifically at certain angles. I think about all that I’ve learned through scientific papers and talking with scientists, but I also know the things I’ve learned from watching hummingbirds as a birder. They are small bundles of sass and fury, and I love them for that. This is sort of what I meant when I said that my world now is this mix of the academic and the experiential. It’s all these sides of nature colliding in every single experience — and it’s wonderful.
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Musical coda.
Pettersson’s longest, I think, and in a sense anticipating minimalism, with many passages of repeated scale themes. The final five minutes are an extended build-up to an “amen.”
