IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Fellow Primates / 2

Bonobos, like chimps, show empathy, theory of mind, and targeted helping. Photo by Dan Caspersz / Bush Warriors.
Fellow primates / 2

Being related genetically to both chimps, who settle sexual issues through conflict, and bonobos, who settle conflict issues through sex, we have the capacity for both.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / August 28, 2012

Last time we talked about chimps, who can be pretty nasty. But we are genetically related to bonobos just as much as to chimps.

Among bonobos females dominate, not males; there is no deadly warfare; and they enjoy enormous amounts of sex. This may well have to do with their richer supply of food; there is far less need for competition for it. Bonobos have lots of sexual contact with each other, in all combinations of genders.

There is more of it in captivity, but frequent sexual activity has been observed in the wild as well. Females are sexually receptive for long periods of time, much longer than female chimpanzees. When different bands meet there is initial tension, but no vicious fighting; instead, individuals have sex with each other.(1)

Sex seems to be a way to defuse tension in advance of potential conflict, particularly over food. But anything, not just food, that arouses the interest of more than one bonobo at a time tends to result in sexual contact. After a flurry of sex, the apes settle down to eat or investigate whatever has piqued their interest. Bonobos are not “sex-crazed apes” as the popular press would have it. For bonobos, sex is just a natural and common part of life.

Bonobo bands are hierarchical, but the hierarchies are dominated by females, who enforce their status non-aggressively by cultivating alliances. High rank provides food for the females and their families, males included. Males derive status from their mothers. There is no competition among males for sex, as it is plentifully available.

Bonobos, like chimps, show empathy, theory of mind, and targeted helping. Once, when the two-meter moat in front of the bonobo enclosure in the San Diego zoo had been drained for cleaning, several youngsters climbed down into it. When the keepers went to turn on the valve to refill the moat with water, an old male, Kakowet, came to their window screaming and frantically waving his arms.

He knew the routine, and knew that the children were in danger (bonobos cannot swim). The keepers went to see what was wrong and rescued the youngsters.(2) Clearly, Kakowet had envisioned what was about to happen and cared enough to try to stop it. Fortunately, he succeeded.


Apart from the obvious superiority of human intellect, including language and culture, humans differ from both chimps and bonobos in reproductive strategy. Only the dominant chimp males get to reproduce, and the male sometimes enforces his own lineage through infanticide. Among bonobos all males reproduce, but there is no way to tell who is the father of any given child. Infanticide is unknown, probably for that very reason. Children are enjoyed and cared for by the whole tribe.

Humans have quite a different strategy for reproduction. We bond in pairs, creating a nuclear family that ensures resources for children, and the father is very much involved in child care: humans have high male parental investment. Sexual exclusivity ensures that every man has the potential to reproduce and that he knows which children are his.

This arrangement allows males to cooperate in groups away from the females without fear of being cuckolded. There is some plausible speculation that this arrangement is fairly recent, arising only when humans adopted the technology of agriculture.(3) Quite possibly our pre-agriculture hunter-gatherer ancestors were more like bonobos, having multiple sexual partners.


Bonobos were recognized as a separate species less than 100 years ago and began to be fully documented less than 50 years ago. Before that time, many ethologists and anthropologists believed that humans were innately violent and aggressive. Morality, it was thought, was a veneer of cooperative sociality on an underlying bestial nature.

Now that we know about bonobos, the range of human behavioral potential seems to have expanded. We recognize that we too have the capacity to live in peace and to defuse conflict proactively with pleasure. In addition, male dominance seemed a natural part of things until the discovery of bonobos; now we see that dominance by females may be equally natural.


Two things stand out from this comparison of species. First, our difference from chimps and bonobos is a matter of degree, not kind. There are few, if any, uniquely human traits that chimps or bonobos do not have to a lesser degree. We are embedded in nature and are not a species unique and special.

The one trait that seems most unique is the cultural, not biological, innovation of nuclear family pair bonding. If we think of concern for others as a fundamental building block of morality (another is a sense of fairness in reciprocity), it is clear that even morality is not a unique feature of our species but an outgrowth of capabilities that have far older evolutionary roots.

So when we observe our fellow humans jockeying and posing to gain status, or consoling each other when they are in trouble, or forgiving each other after a dispute, or throwing a party, or sharing food to build bonds and defuse tension, or being suspicious of those who are different, or vilifying an enemy, or generously giving aid to the unfortunate, or hundreds of other hominin behaviors, we should realize that these are not uniquely human practices but are instead embedded in a great chain of life that stretches back many millions of years.

Second, humans have the capacity to amplify the characteristics found in our sibling species. Humans have greater brain size and intelligence, so we can do more effectively all the things our siblings can.

Our use of tools and technologies enables us to produce food in more variety and abundance. In fact, there is some plausible speculation that learning to cook was a turning point in our evolution, as cooked food provides more calories than raw, calories that could support the growth of larger brains.(4)

Our use of language enables us to communicate more effectively and to perpetuate what we learn through culture and art. Chimps and bonobos seem to be able to conceptualize that something not happening in the present will happen later, but humans have a greatly enhanced ability to visualize and anticipate the future.

Disputes among humans often take the form of wars and feuds, but we are capable of sophisticated negotiation and diplomacy as well. And we can avoid conflict through pro-active peacemaking and compassionate communication. We are better able to cooperate with others outside our own group than chimps or bonobos.

Says Frans de Waal, “[H]umans share intergroup behavior with both chimps and bonobos. When relations between human societies are bad, they are worse than between chimps, but when they are good, they are better than between bonobos.”(5)

We humans can be more aggressive but also more peaceful, more competitive but also more cooperative. We are more flexible and have more options than our fellow creatures. We have a great variety of possible behaviors, possible ways of being. And, through our ability to anticipate the future, we have a choice as to which of these we will actualize.

Being related genetically to both chimps, who settle sexual issues through conflict, and bonobos, who settle conflict issues through sex, we have the capacity for both. Being humans, with bigger brains, much richer culture and much wider repertoire of behavior, we get to choose our strategies.

(To be continued...)

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's '60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes
(1) de Waal, Our Inner Ape, pp. 139-141.
(2) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 71.
(3) Ryan and Jetha, Sex At Dawn, pp. 1-15.
(4) Wrangham, Catching Fire, pp. 14, 112-114.
(5) de Waal, Our Inner Ape, p. 141.

References
de Waal, Frans. Our Inner Ape. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
de Waal, Frans, and Lanting, Frans. Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Ryan, Christopher, and Jetha, Cacilda. Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. New York: Harper, 2010.
Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

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IDEAS / Bill Meacham : Fellow Primates / 1

Tanzanian chimp. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Fellow primates / 1

Chimps and humans are a lot alike, except that humans, being more intelligent, do what chimps do even better.

By Bill Meacham / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2012

Last time I made some remarks about chimps and bonobos. That’s because if you want to master your life, it helps to know your material. Think of yourself as an artist or a designer or a builder whose goal is to make of your life something both highly functional and aesthetically pleasing. You need to know what you have to work with.

A good place for us to start is by comparing ourselves with our fellow hominins, the great apes, specifically chimpanzees and bonobos. These two form a sort of caricature in which we see aspects of ourselves in sharp relief, aspects which in some cases may give us cause for fear and in others may give us cause for hope.

The biological order Primates is a rather large one, comprising lemurs, monkeys and apes as well as humans. Within it humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos are all members of the family Hominidae, subfamily Homininae. (The word means, somewhat unhelpfully, human-like.)

Hominins have 97% of their DNA in common. DNA research indicates that humans diverged from the line of primates to become a separate species about 5.5 million years ago. More recently, about 2.5 million years ago, chimps and bonobos diverged from each other; they are our closest genetic relatives.

Chimps are found in Central and West Africa, north of the Congo River, where the habitat is relatively dry and open. Bonobos are found only south of the Congo River, in dense, humid forests. Bonobo territory is much richer in food -- large, fruiting trees and high-quality herbs – than that of the chimps.(1)

Since neither can swim, the river seems to have served as a barrier that enabled the bonobo to evolve into a separate species. Or perhaps it is chimps and humans that evolved away from the ancient species from which all three are descended, and bonobos, having stayed in the ancestral habitat, are closest to that ancient precursor.

In any case, the bonobo habitat seems like a primeval paradise: a pleasant forest environment with lots of food in which the inhabitants find congenial sociality. The chimp habitat, by contrast, is outside the gates of Eden; those who live there have to work much harder for their sustenance.

Chimps, bonobos, and humans exhibit many similarities. All are social and inquisitive; all use tools; all exhibit cooperation, empathy, and altruism (helping others at some cost to oneself) within their groups. There are many significant differences as well. The most obvious is that humans are far more intelligent and exhibit a much broader range of behavior than the others. The most notorious difference between chimps and bonobos is that chimps are patriarchal, violent, and aggressive, and bonobos are matriarchal, peaceful, and sexual.

Chimps have the reputation of being “killer apes.” Their society is extremely hierarchical, with much jockeying among males for the top position, and frequent scuffles, a few quite bloody, among them. Political machinations are incessant because high rank provides sexual mates and food for males; females forage for themselves but sometimes trade sex for food. The dominance hierarchy is male. Female chimps form networks of affiliative friendships.(2)

Conflicts among males are solved through violence and aggression. The hair of a male chimp stands on end at the slightest provocation. He will pick up a stick and challenge anyone perceived as weaker. Chimps in the wild are highly territorial. Chimp males patrol their borders and murder intruders from other bands. Bands of males engage in lethal aggression against their neighbors. Brutal violence is part of the chimp’s natural makeup.

Interestingly, shrewd skill at social manipulation is also part of the chimp’s natural makeup. Frans de Waal’s classic Chimpanzee Politics relates a tale worthy of a Machiavelli. Old Yeroen, the alpha male, is deposed over the course of several months by the younger Luit. Luit engages in battle with Yeroen several times and eventually wins, but his victory is due as much to his campaigning and currying favor among the rest of the tribe, particularly the females, as to his physical prowess.

Yeroen is defeated, but allies himself with Nikkie, another youngster on his way up. Eventually Nikkie, backed by Yeroen, deposes Luit, again not through physical combat alone but by gaining the support of others as well. Luit reigns supreme. But Yeroen gets more sex than either of the other two!(3) “It was almost impossible,” says de Waal, “not to think of Yeroen as the brain and Nikkie as the brawn of the coalition between them.”(4)

Chimps exhibit gentleness, play, and cooperation among the in-group, but in-group conflicts are resolved through domination. Sometimes a dominant male will step in and break up a fight, and sometimes a dominant female or group of females will; in all cases, it is a matter of threatening violence.

After a fight, however, the parties reconcile with each other, by hugging, kissing and grooming. Reconciliation is as important as conflict, because without it the group would disband. Like humans, chimps require group living for survival; and like most mammals, they are soothed by physical touch.

Sexual contact is sporadic among chimps, because it happens only when the female is in heat and her genitals swell visibly. Dominant males get to mate far more often than subordinates, and the male will sometimes kill infants which are clearly not his offspring, for instance when taking in a female from a different tribe. Once the infants are born, the male spends little time and energy nurturing them; chimps show low male parental investment.

We humans tend to think of ourselves as special, but chimps have some decidedly human-like capabilities: empathy and theory of mind. By “empathy” I mean the ability to be affected by the emotional state of another individual. “Theory of mind” refers to the ability to recognize the mental states of others. It means that one individual has an idea, a theory, about what another individual believes, perceives or intends to accomplish. In order to do that, of course, the individual has to have some sense of himself or herself as a separate entity.

Chimps have all these traits. They console others in distress; they know what others know and can take another’s viewpoint; they recognize themselves in a mirror; and they give aid tailored to another’s needs, a behavior called “targeted helping,” which requires a distinction between self and other, a recognition of the other’s need, and sympathy for the other’s distress.

Here is an example: In the Arnhem zoo the keepers had hosed out all the rubber tires in the enclosure and left them hanging on a horizontal pole. When the apes were released into the enclosure one of them, Krom, tried to get a tire that still had some water in it, but it was several tires back and was blocked by the ones hanging in front of it. She could not figure out how to get to it.

After Krom gave up, Jakie, an adolescent whom Krom had cared for as an infant, came up and pushed the tires off the pole one by one. When he reached the one with water in it, he carefully removed it so no water was spilled and carried it to his “auntie” and placed it upright in front of her so she could reach in and get the water. Clearly, he knew what she wanted and came to her aid.(5)

Chimps have a primitive sense of time. They are focused on the present, but can remember past grievances and favors and avenge the former and reward the latter. They are able to anticipate the future and make plans as well. For instance:

"An adult male may spend minutes searching for the heaviest stone on his side of the island, far away from the rest of the group... He then carries the stone he has selected to the island’s other side, where he begins --  with all his hair on end -- an intimidation display in front of his rival. Since stones serve as weapons (chimpanzees throw fairly accurately), we may assume that the male knew all along that he was going to challenge the other. This is the impression chimpanzees give in almost everything they do: they are thinking beings just as we are.”(6)

Given this picture, it seems that chimps and humans are a lot alike, except that humans, being more intelligent, do what chimps do even better. We can plan farther into the future and remember and document a greater range of the past. We have a much more ample capacity to understand what others are thinking and feeling and to understand ourselves. And, of course, we have much greater language abilities as well, giving us the ability to learn through history and culture. We have much better tools. And we can use them to kill each other much more effectively.

Some say that we are fundamentally aggressive and warlike, just like chimps, and the reason we have not killed each other off is that we have somehow managed to acquire a veneer of morality that holds these primitive urges in check.(7) That would seem plausible if all we knew about our genetic relatives were the chimps. But chimps are not the whole story. We are genetically related to bonobos as well.

(To be continued...)

[Bill Meacham is an independent scholar in philosophy. A former staffer at Austin's '60s underground paper, The Rag, Bill received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. Meacham spent many years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst, and project manager. He posts at Philosophy for Real Life, where this article also appears. Read more articles by Bill Meacham on The Rag Blog.]

Notes

(1) Hare, p. 92.
(2) de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, p. 51.
(3) de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 164. de Waal backs his conclusions with an impressive amount of observational data. He and his team recorded every instance of each type of interaction -- submissive greeting, dominance display, fighting, reconciling, grooming, entreating, copulating, and more -- among more than 20 apes over five years, and then correlated the data on computers. He graphs the relative percentage of submissive greetings, of mating activity, and of group support among the various males and the data clearly show that during the first year of Luit’s reign, Yeroen got as much sex as the other two combined.
(4) de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, p. 141.
(5) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, p. 33.
(6) de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, pp 38-39.
(7) de Waal, Primates and Philosophers, pp. 7-12.

References

de Waal, Frans. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, 25th Anniversary Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
de Waal, Frans. Peacemaking Among Primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
de Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Hare, Brian. “What is the effect of affect on bonobo and chimpanzee problem solving?” In A. Berthoz & Y. Christen, ed., The Neurobiology of the Umwelt: how living beings perceive the world. New York: Springer Press, 2009 pp. 89-102. Also available as an on-line publication, Hare, B_ 2009_ What is the effect of affect on bonobo and chimpanzee problem solving_.pdf as of 3 October 2011. Available from http://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/research/3chimps/publications as of 3 October 2011.
Wikipedia. Primate. Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate as of 23 July 2012.

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Leonardo Boff : In Praise of the 'Siesta'

Did monks introduce the siesta to the West? Photo by DJW / Minnesota Renaissance Festival.
In praise of the siesta

"If you want to kill a friar, take away his siesta and make him eat late." -- old Spanish saying

By Leonardo Boff / The Rag Blog / July 11, 2010

RIO DE JANEIRO -- After journalist and friend Zuenir Ventura, in a major newspaper in Rio, dared to exalt the benefits of the siesta, calling it good for one's health and, even more, contending that it is a biological need that makes people more intelligent, I decided to praise the siesta.

It is an old goal that I have nourished for years, during which I have even done research on the matter. I hope to justify the fact that I am an inveterate siestero. So inveterate I am that I condition attendance at some conferences on the possibility off having a short siesta after lunch, even if it has to take place on a couch or in a chair.

In Freiburg, Germany, they took my wish so much to heart that they put a portable bed in a room so that I could take my blessed siesta. But I could not, because some Germans had the poor taste to organize a gathering during the lunch hour, with a group that even wanted to talk about metaphysical questions. The result is that the lunch hour is waste. Perhaps one ends up not eating anything or, what is worse still, there is no time to take my indispensable little siesta.

Personally, I am always reluctant to go to bed. I do not like to go to sleep and delay as long I can the hour of going to bed. There are few better things, among the pleasant satisfactions the Creator gave to the "degraded" sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, than a good siesta.

It is not necessary that it be long. Some 20 minutes are enough. Except on Saturdays and Sundays, when, as a person of good Italian descent, I have two glasses of wine. Not so much for the wine itself, but because of the belief that it fosters a deeper and longer sleep. Then I sleep without a care, "a pierna suelta," as the Spaniards say, well translated by our people of Minas Gerais: “durmo de pé espalhado."

The origin of the siesta is mysterious, but because of its intrinsic goodness it must be linked to the anthropogenic process; that is, it must have existed ever since the human being appeared. If even animals take siestas, why would not humans, the more complex brothers and sisters of the animals, do so as well?

Some believe that in the Occident it was officially introduced by monks and friars. There is a delightful Spanish saying that goes: "if you want to kill a friar, take away his siesta and make him eat late." In Spain the siesta is so sacred that most commerce shuts down during those hours. In the monasteries I could see that some friars would even wear pajamas for their siesta, especially after having a few glasses of wine followed by an excellent cognac.

It is said that Newton and Churchill had their best ideas after their siestas. Victor Hugo spoke of the siesta when mentioning the lion in a poem titled, "La meridienne du lion" ("The Siesta of the Lion"). Baudelaire, in "La belle Dorothée," explains well why he took siestas: "the siesta is a sort of tasty death, in which the one who naps, half asleep, samples the pleasure of its disappearance."

Rene Louis, in his Mémoires d\'un Siesteu (Memoirs of a Siesta Taker) says it well: "siesta allows me to observe sleeping; it is the moment when time stops and is quiet." F. Audouard, in his Pensées, says it beautifully "daybreak occurs twice in Provence: in the morning and after the siesta."

To me, the benefit of the siesta is this: it gives us a second night and the day breaks twice. Siesta lets us have, in the same day, a second day. Waking up from the siesta, everything starts over with renewed vigor, as if the day were beginning again.

If they take away my siesta, my body retaliates, especially if I am listening to a talk: I snooze, and blink, and it is not unusual for me to doze off. I cannot imagine a whole day of mental activity, paying attention to so many things and having to put I do not know how many ideas in order, without a restorative siesta.

Siesta is a wise invention of life. It relaxes the head, makes one forget annoyances and gives us the rare virtual experience of dying sweetly (sleep is a beautiful metaphor for death) and of being resurrected again.

Original in Portuguese; translated into Spanish by Servicios Koinonia; translated into English by Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.

[A Brazilian theologian, philosopher, educator, and author of more than 60 books, Leonardo Bofff lives in Jardim Araras, an ecological wilderness area in the municipality of Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. Boff is Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Ecology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. A former Franciscan priest with a doctorate from the University of Munich, Boff was an early advocate of liberation theology. In 1991, after a series of clashes with the Vatican, Boff renounced his activities as a priest and "promoted himself to the state of laity."]

(TD: Posted after arising from my Sunday nap) / The Rag Blog

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Scientists : Dolphins are 'Non-Human Persons'

Bottlenose dolphin Delphin and her baby Dolly at a zoo in Duisburg, western Germany. Photo by AP.
Behavior studies:
Dolphins are second smartest animal

'The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions.' -- Lori Marino, zoologist

By Jonathan Leake / January 10, 2010

Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons."

Studies into dolphin behavior have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,” she added.

Dolphins have long been recognized as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioral studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.

It has also become clear that they are “cultural” animals, meaning that new types of behaviour can quickly be picked up by one dolphin from another.

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognize themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.

After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learned it from the former captive.

There are many similar examples, such as the way dolphins living off Western Australia learnt to hold sponges over their snouts to protect themselves when searching for spiny fish on the ocean floor.

Such observations, along with others showing, for example, how dolphins could co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat, have prompted questions about the brain structures that must underlie them.

Size is only one factor. Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dolphin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by contrast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.

When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.

What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.

Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.

Marino and Reiss will present their findings at a conference in San Diego, California, next month, concluding that the new evidence about dolphin intelligence makes it morally repugnant to mistreat them.

Thomas White, professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, who has written a series of academic studies suggesting dolphins should have rights, will speak at the same conference.

“The scientific research . . . suggests that dolphins are ‘non-human persons’ who qualify for moral standing as individuals,” he said.

[This article was first published in The Sunday Times of London, on January 3, 2110. Additional reporting by Helen Brooks.]

Source / Times Online

Thanks to Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog

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Capable of Learning Nothing from Almost Any Experience

Graceful Reprieve - art by William O'Connor.
Happy Days: Reprieve
By Tim Kreider / June 2, 2009

Fourteen years ago I was stabbed in the throat. This is kind of a long story and it’s not the point of this essay. The point is that after my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.

Winston Churchill’s quote about the exhilaration of being shot at without result is verifiably true. I was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story, “The Lost City of Mars,” in which a man finds a miraculous machine that enables him to experience his own violent death over and over again, as many times as he likes — in locomotive collisions, race car crashes, exploding rockets — until he emerges flayed of all his free-floating guilt and unconscious longing for death, forgiven and free, finally alive.

I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print.

I’m not claiming I was continuously euphoric the whole time; it’s just that, during that grace period, nothing much could bother me or get me down. The sort of horrible thing that I’d always dreaded was going to happen to me had finally happened. I figured I was off the hook for a while. In a parallel universe only two millimeters away from this one (the distance between the stiletto and my carotid), I had been flown home in the cargo hold instead of in coach. Everything in this one, as far as I was concerned, was gravy.

My friends immediately mocked me out of my self-consciousness about the nerve damage that had left me with a lopsided smile. I started brewing my own dandelion wine in a big Amish crock. I listened to old pop songs too stupid to name in print. And I developed a strange new laugh that’s stayed with me to this day — a loud, raucous, barking thing that comes from deep in the diaphragm and makes people in bars or restaurants look over at me for a second to make sure I’m not about to open up on the crowd with a weapon.

I wish I could recommend this experience to everyone. It’s a cliché that this is why people enjoy thrill-seeking pastimes ranging from harmless adrenaline fixes like roller coasters to suicide attempts with safety nets, like bungee jumping. The catch is that to get the full effect you have to be genuinely uncertain that you’re going to survive. The best approximation would be to hire an incompetent hit man to assassinate you.

It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, sort of the same way some of us only appreciate our girlfriends after they’re exes. I saw the same thing happen, in a more profound and lasting way, to my father when he was terminally ill, and then to my mother after he died; an almost literal lightening, a flippant indifference to the silly, quotidian nonsense that preoccupies most of us and ruins so much of our lives. A neighbor was suing my father for some reason or other during his illness, but if you tried to talk to him about such “serious” matters he’d just sing you old songs like “A Bird In a Gilded Cage” in a high, quavering old-man falsetto. When my mother, who’s now a leader in her church, sees people squabbling over minutiae or personal politics, she reminds them, diplomatically I’m sure, to focus on the larger context.

It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than a sort of hysterical high. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace.

It didn’t last, of course. You can’t feel grateful to be alive your whole life any more than you can stay passionately in love forever — or grieve forever, for that matter. Time forces us all to betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living in the world. Before a year had gone by the same dumb everyday anxieties and frustrations began creeping back. I’d be disgusted to catch myself yelling in traffic, pounding on my computer, lying awake at night wondering what was going to become of me.

Once a year on my stabbiversary I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a free round. But now that I’m back down in the messy, tedious slog of everyday emotional life, I have to struggle to keep things in what I still insist is their true perspective. I know intellectually that all the urgent, pressing items on our mental lists — taxes, car repairs, our careers, the headlines — are so much idiot noise, and that what matters is spending time with people you love. It’s just hard to bear in mind when the hard drive crashes.

I was not cheered, a few years ago, to read about psychological studies suggesting that most people inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows. You’d like to think that nearly getting killed would be a major, permanently life-altering experience, but in truth it was less painful, and occasioned less serious reflection, than certain breakups I’ve gone through. If anything, it only reinforced the illusion that in the story of my life only supporting characters would die, while I, its protagonist and first-person narrator, would survive. I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience.

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

[Tim Kreider’s articles have appeared in Film Quarterly and The New York Times and his cartoon “The Pain — When Will It End?” has appeared in the Baltimore City Paper since 1997. His Web site is thepaincomics.com.]

Source / New York Times

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Invasive Procedures : Privacy, and Online Behaviorial Targeting

Privacy advocates meet with Obama's people concerning online advertising and the use of behavioral research.
by Wendy Davis / December 17, 2008

Privacy advocates met Tuesday with members of President-elect Barack Obama's Federal Trade Commission transition team to urge that the government more aggressively regulate the online advertising industry.

"The overall message was that the Bush FTC gets an 'F' on privacy," said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "We're expecting the Obama team to take a better approach."

Chester, who two years ago filed a complaint with the FTC about online behavioral targeting, is pressing for new laws that would require marketers to seek Web users' permission before tracking them for ad purposes.

Other groups at the one-hour meeting Tuesday with FTC transition team heads Susan Ness and Phil Weiser included the ACLU, Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and World Privacy Forum.

Online ad executives and the Interactive Advertising Bureau have argued that the FTC should not restrict behavioral targeting because the practice does not harm consumers. Ad companies also say that behavioral targeting is often anonymous because they don't collect names, addresses or other so-called personally identifiable information. Instead, companies track users anonymously via cookies as they go from site to site, compile profiles, and then serve ads to users based on their presumed interests.

But privacy advocates have questioned just how anonymous this type of targeting really is. They say that in some circumstances, it might be possible to identify specific individuals from detailed profile information.

In addition, some consumer advocates say behavioral targeting is inherently problematic.

"Behavioral tracking and targeting is actually deceptive on its face because consumers' information is being collected by entities with whom they have no relationship, to whom they didn't give their information, and for purposes of which they're unaware," said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America.

Grant added that her organization was concerned that some consumers could face tangible consequences due to behavioral targeting. For instance, she said, companies could potentially use information gleaned from tracking people online to make different offers to different people.

Some of the advocates also criticized the Network Advertising Initiative's new privacy guidelines to the transition team. Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, said those standards don't adequately protect the privacy of people's medical information.

"To say they're non-starters is an understatement," Dixon said.

The new NAI guidelines call for ad companies to refrain from collecting data about sensitive medical information or serving ads related to such information, unless consumers expressly consent. The prior guidelines said marketers should never collect such data if it was personally identifiable, but allowed them to do so if the information was anonymous and people could opt out.

Source / MediaPost

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There's Peak Oil and then there's (FREAK!!) Oil...

I think this might Imply that we can either try to devise techno-fixes aimed as business as usual or we can move to a more survivalist post-corporate mode of social organization dealing with an abrupt reduction in the average living standard, as implied by peak oil. There is going to have to be a right and left wing of the peak oil believers, probably represented by a political movement of sorts,

Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

A leading 'peak oil' theorist
ponders movement's direction
By Nathanial Gronewold / June 16, 2008

NEW YORK -- Record oil prices, which have more than doubled in a year and have already jumped nearly 40 percent in the last six months, have some "peak oil" theorists gloating a bit.

But Nathan Hagens, a prominent peak oil scholar, isn't in the mood to celebrate. He is worrying that the community of economists and analysts who say global oil consumption will outstrip daily production is headed for a schism.

"We're going to start to decouple in the peak oil community," said Hagens, a student of energy and ecology and co-editor of "The Oil Drum" blog.

Once dismissed as alarmists and doomsayers, proponents of peak oil are now enjoying the spotlight at center stage of a global energy debate. More mainstream energy analysts, including Platts' senior oil economist and even some heads of major oil companies, are increasingly giving credence to their arguments. The International Energy Agency is also concerned that the world might soon reach maximum output, spurring a major reassessment of the agency's supply forecasts.

But there is growing disagreement about what peak oil means. Some factor tar sands, oil shale and other unconventional sources into the equation, suggesting production can continue to increase for quite some time. Others count only free-flowing crude and say the world has already reached peak output, pointing to the popularity of unconventional extraction as a sign of a desperate society exerting more and more energy for less and less oil.

Nevertheless, there is broad consensus within the peak-oil community over the fundamental thesis. But Hagens says the increased attention they are getting and the heightened public anxiety over high fuel prices is splitting the community "between people focusing on supply-side answers, technology ... and others that say the problem is much, much bigger than that and we need to change the whole economic system that underpins society."

Hagens places himself in the more pessimistic camp, arguing that a 1,300 percent increase in oil prices over the past decade will accelerate in coming years, with devastating consequences for the poor and middle class.

And if his central argument is correct -- that market economics are inherently irrational and that mankind was driven to this point by forces of human nature that most are incapable of resisting -- then it may be too late to reverse the world's long-standing complacency over energy security and effectively address the problem.

"I think we've peaked in net energy production already," he said.

"There's an energy-to-profit ratio on coal, and nuclear, on hydro, on oil, on natural gas, and they're all declining."

'Depletion is beating technology'

Hagens was not born a skeptic of market forces. In an interview, he described the path he took from managing investment portfolios of wealthy clients at Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers to running his own hedge fund, then to quitting Wall Street altogether in 2003 to sound the alarm over peak oil.

"I decided to go back and get my Ph.D. and study the environment," Hagens said. "The impetus for that was I saw that the market was not including negative externalities, and that we were kind of running out of resources, of the high-quality, low-cost resources."

Hagens currently pursues the problem at the University of Vermont. His unique approach to the topic -- which mixes economics, psychology and evolutionary biology -- has won praise from and notoriety among his peers and has helped solidify peak-oil theory.

Hagens now divides his time between his research, giving lectures at energy conferences, and explaining his findings and concerns to lawmakers and industry insiders who seek him out.

"Global warming and everything else had me upset that people were just focused on making money," he said, "but subsequently I learned about peak oil and the evolutionary side of our behavior, and I thought those two issues trumped global warming and the other environmental things."

Studying the peak-oil conundrum from the perspective of human evolution, the world Hagens describes is one where human society is driven to compete and grow. This growth, in the form of economic and population expansion, can only continue as long as we are able to extract much more energy than we exert trying to get it, an equation more popularly known as net energy return on energy invested.

The signs that we are reaching "peak oil" are not coming from the depletion of reserves -- most proponents of the theory accept that there is plenty of oil left in the world and will be for a long time. Rather, the run-up in oil prices, and indeed in the price of all energy, is a sign that we are fast approaching, or have already hit, a net energy peak. Whereas in the past it took perhaps the equivalent of one drum of oil's worth of energy to gain 100 drums of oil, Hagens argues that the world is fast approaching a 1-to-1 ratio.

"Depletion is beating technology, and in the end it always will," he said. "We've gone from 100-to-1, to 30-to-1, to 10-to-1, and at some point you could spend as much energy as you get out, and that would only make sense if you had an unlimited amount of lower-quality energy."

Hagens and others do not believe the world has an unlimited supply of oil shale, deep water reserves, coal to liquid and other schemes companies and governments everywhere are busily pursuing.

And Hagens said his research shows that the market forces most economists are relying on to save the day do a terrible job of pricing resources trapped underground, resulting in an over-reliance on gasoline, which, even at $4 a gallon, is still cheaper than Gatorade.

The marketplace is adjusting to higher prices. Consumers are driving less and turning to more fuel-efficient vehicles. Energy consumption as a whole is growing less or becoming more efficient in the face of higher prices. People are beginning to move their residences closer to their places of work, or working from home. Business travel is also way down.

But proponents of peak oil theory say that none of that will be enough to offset the loss in terms of energy gain that declining production will bring. Experts believe that it takes at least 17 years for the United States to roughly overturn its entire vehicle fleet -- and changing jobs and houses to shorten commutes is not something that is accomplished quickly, either.

"As our energy-to-profit ratio declines, we can't grow, we can't grow the economy unless that is offset by efficiency and conservation, but the magnitude of gain that we have right now can't possibly be offset by efficiency and conservation," Hagens said.

'Lifeblood of civilization'

In the end, those on the more pessimistic side of the peak-oil argument -- those who see a global economic crash coming -- say we risk becoming victims of our own nature.

Hagens, for one, says numerous studies of evolutionary behavior and the workings of the mind show that humans value the present far more than the future, and that we are driven by a powerful assumption that what is true today will continue to be true tomorrow.

This fundamental aspect of how the mind operates, he said, explains why the peak oil argument has been dismissed by mainstream society for so long. It also explains why even the brightest minds in the industry, notably expert analysts at the consulting firm Cambridge Energy Research Associates routinely fail to accurately predict future oil prices. Today, the cost of a barrel of crude oil is hovering at around $135, not the $85 level that many experts assumed it would beat.

"The root causes are at the psychological side of human behavior," said Hagens. "Individuals being rational is the exception, not the rule."

The point is to not only become more energy efficient, diversify energy supplies or develop ever greater technological fixes, he said, but to change human behavior so success will be measured in consuming less instead of more. That, he added, is a tall order.

And the peak-oil crowd itself, now increasingly divided between those who fear the worst and those who believe in market forces and are even exploring ways to profit from the fallout, needs to find a consensus on how serious the problem is and on ways to influence economic and political changes, Hagens said.

"What people don't understand," he said, "is that this is the lifeblood of civilization, and once people realize that it's scarce, you're going to see individual behaviors revert to 'I'm looking out for number one,' and things can flip pretty quickly."

Source. / Greenwire (limited access)

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