Tasteless Philosophy November 21, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy.Tags: aesthetics, Jonas, the sense hierarchy
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Despite being preoccupied with analyzing sensory experience, philosophers have ignored taste, smell, and touch, focusing instead on vision (and to a degree sound) as the most important sense.
Hans Jonas’s “The Nobility of Sight” is a representative example. Only vision, he argued, points us in the direction of the eternal, universal truths, which have been philosophy’s concern throughout most of its history. Vision puts us in mind of the eternal because time is not essential to its functioning. When we view a landscape we see the visual field displayed all at once, in no time; and an object can be visually identified immediately without a sequence of appearances over time, in contrast to sound, touch, or taste that need time to reveal the character of their objects. And visual objects have stability. We can view an object, look away, and then return to the very same object as if nothing has changed unlike the fleeting, ever-changing objects of taste, smell, and sound.
Furthermore, Jonas argues, with vision we can see things better if we maintain a distance from them. Touch, smell, and taste require that we be intimate with the object thus increasing the chances of personal bias might influence our understanding of it.
Despite their illustrious pedigree, these are very bad arguments. We learn nothing of the eternal through vision, or any other sensory mechanism, and vision without the opportunity for subsequent confirmation, in time, would be the source of constant error. Furthermore, our sense of the stability of objects is as dependent on the sense of touch as on vision. The stability of our visual field is dependant on the body’s orientation is space, which is maintained, in part, by our tactile contact with solid objects.
As to the alleged objectifying distance of vision, science shows that vision involves intimate contact with physical objects–swarms of photons. And we seem just as capable of misinterpreting those photons as we are the signals from taste buds. Recent psychological research is demonstrating the unreliability of eye-witness testimony. If anything introduces subjective bias into perceptual judgments it is the fact that objects are often seen at a distance or under conditions otherwise unsuitable for reliable identification. Apparently seeing is misbelieving.
At best, vision’s distance and the illusion of simultaneity allow us to spin metaphors about the eternal and universal. But misleading metaphors are bad metaphors.
There is an important contrast between vision and the other senses however. Through vision we do gain a sense of an horizon, an area beyond our present space. This is surely important for the development of our imagination.
By contrast, sound, touch, taste, and smell root us in the here and now. Objects must be spatially and temporally present for them to effect these sensory modalities. But why should experience rooted in the here and now be uninteresting to philosophy?
If taste is philosophically uninteresting, perhaps it is because philosophers lack taste.
The Synergy of Music and Wine (or how to waste time on the Internet) November 15, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: drinkify, food and wine aesthetics, music, synergy
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Synergy occurs when two or more things function together to produce a result that they cannot achieve independently.
Synergy is essential in the world of food and wine. Good food and wine pairings are an example of synergy. Adding salt or acidity to a dish often enhances other flavors—another example of synergy.
But what about synergy between music and drink? Are their natural affinities between music and particular consumables? A new website, called Drinkify, assumes so. Enter the name of an artist you want to listen to and a song by that artist starts playing and a drink recommendation pops up.
The idea was conjured at a recent meeting of Music Hack Day Boston, where tech geeks gather to meld software and music.
I usually ignore web-based gimmicks. But I couldn’t resist this. So I plugged in one of my favorite bands, Steely Dan, and received the recommendation to drink a bottle of red wine—topped with nutmeg? Now if you happen to like red wine and Steely Dan, I’m sure they will enhance each other, especially towards the bottom of the bottle. But is their some further connection here? The music of Steely Dan is sophisticated and complex, and some red wine is sophisticated and complex as well, but the last thing I’m going to do with a sophisticated, complex wine is sprinkle nutmeg on top! Nutmeg is a flavor note one often detects in pinot noir. I guess if all I had was a bottle of Two Buck Chuck, I could sprinkle a little nutmeg and pretend to be tasting Burgundy. But why bother?
I’m beginning to suspect this is nonsense.
But wait. Here’s another hypothesis. Steely Dan got their name from a William Burroughs reference to a dildo in Naked Lunch. And Burroughs killed his wife trying to shoot a wine glass off her head in a drunken game of William Tell. Ah. I guess that’s the connection.
I decided to go classical and plugged in Stravinsky. Their drink recommendation—Ogogoro, a Nigerian beverage distilled from the sap of palm trees. Well, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring featured primitive themes and syncopated rhythms inspired by African music. Not bad. A bit more precise than the Steely Dan reference.
How about some Coltrane? 4 oz of red wine with the instructions to serve neat and stir vigorously. Huh?
I’m beginning to suspect random associations.
Oh just one more. Elvis Costello. The recommendation–8 oz of fassionola, which is a red syrup used in bar drinks, 10 oz. water and 8 oz. of half-and-half.
That is just disgusting.
I can’t believe I just wasted 20 minutes on this.
x-posted at Edible Arts
Time to Rethink the Concept of Sexual Harassment? November 13, 2011
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Current Events, Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: sexual harassment, The Moral of the Story
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I came across an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times: “In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks,” by Katie Roiphe. The title alone made me do a double-take, especially since I’ve been having second thoughts about recently deleting a box on sexual harassment from the upcoming 7th edition of The Moral of the Story. The debate just seemed so “Nineties” to me, and here we are in the second decade of a new century; surely we’ve come a longer way than that, Baby? And then the Cain story unfolds, and all of a sudden sexual harassment is in the news again. Apparently I’m not the only one who experienced a temporary time warp: According to Roiphe,
After all these years, we are again debating the definition of unwanted sexual advances and parsing the question of whether a dirty joke in the office is a crime. Conservatives have mocked the seriousness of sexual harassment; liberal and mainstream pundits have largely reverted to the pieties of the early ’90s, with the addition of some bloggy irony about irrelevant old men just not getting it.
The truth is, our Puritan country loves the language of sexual harassment: it lets us be enlightened and sexually conservative, modern and judgmental, sensitive and disapproving, voyeuristic and correct all at the same time.
…The problem is, as it always was, the capaciousness of the concept, the umbrellalike nature of the charge: sexual harassment includes both demanding sex in exchange for a job or a comment about someone’s dress. The words used in workshops — “uncomfortable,” “inappropriate,” “hostile” — are vague, subjective, slippery. Feminists and liberal pundits say, with some indignation, that they are not talking about dirty jokes or misguided compliments when they talk about sexual harassment, but, in fact, they are: sexual harassment, as they’ve defined it, encompasses a wide and colorful spectrum of behaviors.
…
The creativity and resourcefulness of the definitions, the broadness and rigor of the rules and codes, have always betrayed their more Orwellian purpose: when I was at Princeton in the ’90s, the guidelines distributed to students about sexual harassment stated, “sexual harassment may result from a conscious or unconscious action, and can be subtle or blatant.” It is, of course, notoriously hard to control one’s unconscious, and one can behave quite hideously in one’s dreams, but that did not deter the determined scolds.
If this language was curiously retrograde in the early ’90s, if it harkened back to the protection of delicate feminine sensibilities in an era when that protection was patently absurd, it is even more outdated now when women are yet more powerful and ascendant in the workplace. In her brilliant and enduring critique of the women’s movement in 1972, Joan Didion wrote that certain strains of feminism were based on the idea of women as “creatures too ‘tender’ for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets… too ‘sensitive’ for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life.”
And, in fact, the majority of women in the workplace are not tender creatures and are largely adept at dealing with all varieties of uncomfortable or hostile situations. Show me a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by a verbal unwanted sexual advance or an inappropriate comment about her appearance, and I will show you a rare spotted owl.
Roiphe concludes by suggesting that we get back to living life dangerously with the risk of exposure to bawdy lingo. Regardless of the Herman Cain situation which is anything but clear at the moment, she brings up some interesting points: Perhaps women in the ’80s and ’90s needed protection from the Old Boys’ Network which was still intact and powerful, but can’t a woman simply speak up for herself today if she feels bothered by someone’s attention? We’re not being protected from rudeness in general, or office manipulation, so why this puritan focus on sexual harassment, which has ended up being a matter of perception rather than intention?
I think most of us who feel capable of speaking up for ourselves feel that we could probably handle a return to the days when a compliment on a dress, even if equivocal, wasn’t reason for suspension. But a couple of things should be taken into consideration before we return to the dirty jokes and cute compliments: that, for one thing, the power structure where sexual harassment—the innuendos and sly glances, and “accidental” unwelcomed touches—was a matter of intimidation is still in effect in many workplaces. And a woman may not feel shy about speaking up to her peers in the workplace, but it is still another thing entirely to remonstrate with the boss. And then, when you add the fact (also quoted by Roiphe) that,
A study recently released by the American Association of University Women shows that nearly half of students in grades 7 through 12 have experienced sexual harassment. Their definition is “unwelcome sexual behavior that takes place in person or electronically.”
In other words, for young people who have not been through the Nineties with their sensitivity training and so forth, and without any instruction about what is appropriate and what is not, sexual harassment as intimidation runs rampant. So yes, we have come further than the Nineties, those of us who remember, and some of the concerns of the past may seem petty and overbearing now. But that doesn’t mean the discussion was for naught, or that it should be abandoned today. There is a new clueless generation on the way, with social networks, texting, and a plethora of new ways of being nasty to each other, but sex has always been available as a power tool. It should be possible, today, to distinguish between shy attempts at getting someone’s attention at work or at school, or simply friendly remarks, and manipulation using sexual harassment as a weapon. I think I’ll consider putting the section back into the 7th edition of The Moral of the Story…
Sound, Vision, Taste and the Fine Arts November 1, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Art and Music, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: fine arts, food and wine aesthetics, the sense hierarchy
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One traditional argument opposing the idea that the edible arts are genuine fine arts is that taste and smell are very limited sensory modalities. They are important only for pleasure and for their functional role in providing us with nutrition, but we get relatively little information or knowledge about the world via taste and smell, according to this argument.
Vision and hearing, by contrast, provide us with substantial world-directed information through which we establish a robust representation of reality. Vision and hearing give us an understanding of spatial location. Vision enables us to carve up the world into discreet objects that we can then view from multiple distances and many perspectives, thus enabling us to track movement and ascertain size and shape. It provides us with a simultaneous, comprehensive representation that need not unfold over time so we can size up a situation quickly. Via hearing, we process the spoken word and gain insight into emotional tone and resonance, key factors in our ability to navigate the social world.
This deluge of visual and auditory information is fodder for the artistic imagination which uses it to shape imaginative worlds that expand our perspectives and give us new ways of seeing and hearing reality.
There is no doubt that vision and hearing are the sense modalities that process the greatest volume of information. But that alone tells us little about what qualifies as a fine art. The quintessential fine arts—painting and instrumental music—are in fact rather limited in their capacity to represent anything via sensory experience itself, despite the fact they rely on information-rich sense modalities.
Painting can represent the look of whatever fits within its static, narrow frame. But to the extent painting tells us much about a complex, dynamic world, it piggybacks on the even more information-rich activity of narrative. But paintings tell stories not only in virtue of their visual information but because the visual information is embedded in the temporal and conceptual flow of memory and anticipation, with events linked via causation. Without narrative, paintings represent only the surface appearance of things. Paintings that do not rely on narrative—some abstract works for instance—seem not to be aiming at representations of the world at all. They are about their own surfaces, their materials, or other works of art. In other words, without narrative they are much like the flavors and textures we experience in the edible arts, if tastes and smells were implausibly considered to be merely sources of pleasure without narrative structure.
Music, shorn of the narratives expressed by lyrics or implied by vocalization, is even less representational than paintings. Although music sometimes expresses emotion, it seldom represents precise, particular emotions. Furthermore, much music seems to have little to do with emotion. Music, the most abstract of the arts, is often quite distant from anything we experience in the natural world. Yet that lack of representational content does not disqualify it from being a fine art.
Thus, works of fine art either lack world-directed informational richness or they get much of their informational richness from narrative. In any case, their seems little reason to privilege vision and sound as the only sensory modalities worthy of anchoring the fine arts.
This creates some conceptual room for the edible arts if it can be shown that the edible arts have world-directed informational richness. But that is a task for another day.
Picasso’s Puffery October 25, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Art and Music, Dwight Furrow's Posts.Tags: Guernica, Picasso, representational art
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Picasso is alleged to have said “Painting is not done to decorate apartments, it is an instrument of war against brutality and darkness.” I suspect that he was referring to his own painting, Guernica, which depicts the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
I often come across such claims about art—that it has something profound to say about the human condition. But I find them puzzling. What is the point of the commentary of which paintings are capable? How is Guernica an instrument of opposition?
I doubt that anyone learns about the horrors of war from a painting. If you did not already know of the horrors of war you would be unlikely to read the painting as commenting on them. Furthermore, if a gain in knowledge is the point, people who are already acquainted with brutal warfare would receive little benefit from viewing the painting, which seems implausible. And can’t we more effectively learn about historical events from history books or documentaries? Is there some dimension of warfare that is best depicted in paintings? I doubt it.
Perhaps the point is not that we gain knowledge from painting but that paintings are particularly good at provoking an emotional response from the viewer. Perhaps, then, paintings deepen our sensitivity to the horrors of war via their depictions or inspire us to pursue peace. But I doubt that a cool, abstract depiction elicits a more powerful response than actual war footage, filmic representations, live interviews with victims, or reports on the ground by intrepid journalists, all of which seem to pack an emotional punch that paintings rarely if ever achieve. Paintings, because they are fixed entities, lend themselves to contemplation more readily than film. But museums, especially large one’s in major cities visited by hordes of tourists are not conducive to contemplation. (Guernica is housed in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum)
Perhaps the viewing of paintings is a reminder that we should care about warfare’s destruction. We clearly need such reminders. But the occasions when such reminders are essential do not correlate well with visits to a museum.
Paintings are valuable, in part, because they give us new ways of organizing and conceptualizing visual space. But that can be accomplished regardless of the content of the painting—such an aim would seem to have little to do with warfare. Paintings—the great ones at any rate—are unique representations of what they depict. But if this is the value of Guernica, it is the uniqueness of its depiction not some fact about the horrors of war that matters most. It is a stretch go call such an aim an instrument in a war against brutality.
So wise and discerning readers. Tell me. What do paintings uniquely say about the human condition? Is Picasso just puffing up his accomplishments.
Culture–It’s Not Just for Humans Anymore October 24, 2011
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Animal Intelligence, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Science.Tags: culture; apes; chimpanzees; orangutans; David Hume; Jane Goodall
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What a difference a couple of decades make. Back in the Twentieth Century they used to tell us that humans were the only beings who had culture, and whatever traditions nonhuman animals displayed in their groups could be explained as instinct. That concept began to erode already with Jane Goodall’s research, although we still encounter holdout animal behaviorists who maintain that whatever it is that chimpanzees do when they share and transmit inventions and traditions, it isn’t culture (which brings to mind long-range visionary David Hume who not only thought that emotions have primacy over rationality, but also that if nonhuman animals display emotional and intellectual behavior similar to humans, it should be given similar labels). So what would an example of a chimp culture be like? From a Scientific American blog, “Cultural Transmission in Chimpanzees”:
While nonhuman primates don’t have obvious cultural traditions the same way humans do, such as variation in their clothing or adding extra spice to their food, primatologists have nonetheless identified behavioral practices that vary between communities and which are transmitted through social learning. For a behavior to be considered a cultural practice in nonhuman primates it must meet certain conditions: the behavior must be practiced by multiple members of the community, it must vary between societies, and the potential for that same behavior must exist in other societies.
A good example of such a cultural trait was just discovered last year and published in the journal Current Biology (review here). Kibale Forest chimpanzees were found to use sticks to get at the honey in a fallen log, whereas Budongo Forest chimpanzees used chewed leaves as sponges to collect the same thing. Both societies had the same tools at their disposal, but they each chose a different approach. A single individual first used one of these techniques and other members of the group adopted it through imitation and social learning. This is merely the latest example of cultural traditions in different chimpanzee societies.
So let’s assume that we are convinced that chimps invent and transmit culture; the question now becomes how? In a Swedish study quoted by the Scientific American blog a new idea has been proposed: that culture is being transmitted by female chimps. Chimp societies are patrilocal (the males stay put, the females move between groups), so whatever traditions the females have learned from growing up within a group they will bring with them to their new home, and teach them to their kids:
Because females express and transmit more culture than males, and because females transfer between communities bringing with them their cultural knowledge, the number of cultural traits present in any given chimpanzee community should depend on the number of females in that community. Thus, we hypothesize that the number of cultural traits in chimpanzee communities should correlate with the average number of females in chimpanzee communities, but not with the average number of males.
…
This implies that females are critical in chimpanzees for transmitting cultural traits and maintaining cultural diversity. The reported pattern may be explained by the fact that females transfer between communities, bringing with them novel cultural traits and consequently increasing the cultural diversity of the community as a whole.
And that’s not all: from a group of Swiss anthropologists we now hear that orangutans also have culture–particularly interesting, because orangutans aren’t perceived (by most of us laypeople) as being as social as chimps:
Researchers from the University of Zurich have now studied whether the geographic variation of behavioral patterns in nine orangutan populations in Sumatra and Borneo can be explained by cultural transmission. They have concluded that it can.
The team analyzed more than 100,000 hours of behavioral data and created genetic profiles of more than 150 wild orangutans. They measured the ecological differences between the habitats of the different populations using satellite imagery and remote sensing techniques.
Co-author of the study, published in Current Biology, Carel van Schaik said: “The novelty of our study is that, thanks to the unprecedented size of our dataset, we were the first to gauge the influence genetics and environmental factors have on the different behavioral patterns among the orangutan populations.”
It seems that the days when researchers would claim that only humans have culture will be over fairly soon. No word on whether orangutan females play the same role as chimp females.
Coming Down Off the Perfect Meal October 18, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: Carolyn Korsmeyer, Jay Rayner, Philosophy of food and wine
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Food and Wine have not been taken seriously as forms of art in part because of the belief that vision and hearing are the only senses that lend themselves to the intellectual explorations we associate with art. This ideology, called the “sense hierarchy”, and masterfully traced by Carolyn Korsmeyer in Making Sense of Taste, treats taste and smell as thoroughly functional sources of brute pleasure, too primitive and instinctual to be worthy of genuine aesthetic discrimination.
This ideology is ancient. 2500 years ago, Plato argued that vision and sound give us information about the world that engages the intellect, while tastes and smells only encourage the appetite which he likened to a ravenous beast that overcomes our rational faculties. (I suppose Plato can be forgiven for not knowing about the porn industry or trivial pop melodies that suck you in each time you hear them.)
…the gods made what is called the lower belly, to be a receptacle for the superfluous meat and drink and formed the convolution of the bowels, so that the food might be prevented from passing quickly through and compelling the body to require more food, thus producing insatiable gluttony and making the whole race an enemy to philosophy and culture, and rebellious against the divinest element within us.
One wonders what was in Plato’s kitchen that threatened to sap his self-control. But Plato’s assertion rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how appetite works. Appetite has its own internal control mechanisms.
This point was brought home to me as I read Jay Rayner’s book The Man Who Ate the World. Rayner, a British food critic, often on the judges’ panel for Top Chef, set out on a worldwide quest to discover the perfect meal. With perfection being an impossible standard, his quest involves more disappointments than successes. But the penultimate failures could be attributed to the fact that his ambling about the world was avoiding the one place where such perfection is alleged to be routine—Paris, where he endeavors to eat 7 meals in 7 days at the finest restaurants.
The regrets begin on Day Two, and by Day Six:
Oh, god, I don’t know. Another Parisian three-star. Doormen in peaked caps.Claw-foot chairs. Side tables for the ladies to put their handbags on. The food was standard three-star stuff: langoustines on sticks wrapped in sea-water foam, beetroot meringues, yeast ice cream decorated with silver leaf. You know the score by now.
Rayner’s weary lamentation shows that appetite is not quite a ravenous, insatiable beast. It’s not that the food wasn’t good. Most of it met his expectations. But the adage “too much of a good thing” applies even to the finest cuisine. In the absence of compulsive disorders, pleasures aim at their own extinction. (There is probably an evolutionary explanation for this. Organisms that are never satisfied will ignore everything else to their obvious detriment)
Many philosophers have noticed this tendency of pleasures to be satiated but argue that the desire for pleasure always returns in a never ending cycle of debilitating craving. But, again, Rayner’s experience shows that this is not necessarily the case.
But the wonderful thing about perfection is that it is, of course,unobtainable. That didn’t stop me searching for it. That hasn’t stopped me wondering about it. All I need is the appetite. There is only one problem. I’m no longer sure I have one.
Having experienced the best cuisine in the world, the post-quest prospect of the many failed meals that await the restaurant critic no longer appeals to him. Once one develops aesthetic standards and acquires an ability to discriminate, fewer pleasures seem attractive. Critical awareness enhances self-control. The motivation to seek pleasure can be tamed by the very intellect that Plato thought would be overwhelmed.
There is no reason to think there is something peculiarly “brute” or instinctual about taste—it can be refined and disciplined just like any other sensation.
Philosophy at the Table October 4, 2011
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Food and Drink, Philosophy, Uncategorized.Tags: aesthetics, food and wine, Philosophy of food and wine
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Food and wine are among the consummate pleasures of everyday life. But philosophy throughout its history has largely ignored these pervasive satisfactions. Preoccupied with the life of the mind, the activities of the body were presumed to be quite separate from and inferior to thought. After all, we are biologically predisposed to enjoy salt, sugar, and fat and it takes only a little effort and no cognitive skill to reap their rewards. Since, food and drink are tied to our primitive, animal instinct to survive and socialize, philosophy’s conceit has been to remain chastely untouched by passions that stir likewise in pigs at a trough.
Furthermore, our tastes seem to be so irredeemably idiosyncratic, subjective, and immune to standards that philosophers have typically decided food and wine could not be systematically studied.
I think all of this is quite misguided. The study of food and wine is cognitively interesting and enhances our enjoyment. Although subjective up to a point, the appreciation of food and wine is no more subjective than the appreciation of painting or music, all of which are profitably understood as subject to standards of evaluation.
And so I have decided to plunge back into the blogosphere, after an extended hiatus, with Edible Arts, a blog and newsletter devoted to unpacking these dimensions of food and wine that please the palette, the intellect, and the heart. I will cross-post here when the post is related to philosophy and aesthetics, or visit me there for regular posts on the world of food and wine.
And we should not be so disparaging to pigs. There is no part of a pig I dislike—although I must confess never to have tried a pressed sow’s ear. There may be a line to draw here some place.
Cross-posted at Edible Arts.
September 11 September 11, 2011
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Current Events, Ethics, Nina Rosenstand's Posts.Tags: 10th anniversary, 9/11, altruism, September 11
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On this 10th anniversary of 9/11 we are reminded of how we felt on that day of horror. Appropriately, we are asked to remember those lives that were lost—Americans and foreigners, businessmen and -women, tourists, maintenance workers, vendors, police officers, firefighters, and military personnel. And the passengers on the four hijacked planes, including the now legendary Flight 93 where resolute people saved our nation from utter chaos by fighting back, resulting in the plane crashing into a field in Pennsylvania, and not into the White House or the Capitol. So is it now time to “Move On”? That depends on what we mean. Time to forgive? That is not an option open to most of us. Forgiveness can only come from those directly affected—the victims and their relatives. Time to forget? For the survivors that is not possible. And for the rest of us? Whether it fits into our world view or not, time will now make 9/11 recede into history, and what we are left with ought to be a memory of the pain, of the unity we felt as a people that day, and an understanding of the enormity of the event, untrivialized. Individually, we can choose our own interpretation of why it happened, from our chosen perspective—as long as it doesn’t differ from the accumulated evidence. Whatever our personal version and our political leanings, there is something we should indeed not forget: that while close to 3000 people lost their lives, more than an estimated 20,000 people were rescued that day by fellow human beings who risked their lives to save others, in many cases at the cost of their own. The passengers of Flight 93 will be remembered, but in the Towers, on the ground, and at the Pentagon there were also people who selflessly put their own lives at risk to help others—civilians as well as police, firefighters and military men and women. When we think back at the losses, we should also think of the lives saved, and the heroic decisions made by ordinary people facing an inconceivably horrible and chaotic situation…
So Did or Did We Not Interbreed with Neandertals? August 26, 2011
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Human Nature, Science.Tags: Ian Tattersall, immunity, Neandertals, Neanderthals, philosophical anthropology, Svante Paabo
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Back on the perch, folks–time for a new season of occasional insights or at least sharing of interesting stories from the web!
Only last week I watched another show in a long line of mocumentaries/supposedly nonfictional shows with a good deal of play-acting about Neandertals and early humans, the Cro-Magnons. I’m a sucker for those. I love to see human actors in some kind of crude make-up depicting the latest ideas of what our closest relatives ever on this planet may have looked and acted like. I also love to see the scientists act in front of the camera, in fairly minimal make-up. But I was surprised to see that the scientists interviewed came down massively against the idea that there might be Neandertal DNA in the human gene pool—after all, in 2010, after the Neandertal genome was decoded, researcher at the Max Planck Institite Svante Paabo was quoted as saying that 1-4 percent of genetic material in the human population that left African around 60,000 years ago came from sexual encounters with Neandertals. So why the categorical denial? Of course it could have been a dated show, but my impression was that it was recent. The fact that the show was centered around renowned paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall could have had something to do with it—he has, for years, argued that (1) there is in all likelihood no genetic connection between living humans and Neandertals, and (2) Neandertals probably couldn’t speak or even think rationally because they lacked symbolic thinking. (The fact that crude jewelry has been found among Neandertal remains apparently hasn’t been enough to change his mind, although philosophically I’d have to say that deliberately adorning oneself with body art/ornaments shows some kind of symbolic thought, and their brain and throat structures do not exclude the power of speech.) Otherwise the show had interesting moments, such as floating the theory that perhaps Cro-Magnons didn’t actually exterminate the Neandertals by force, but by transferring diseases to them to which they had no immunity, much like it happened to the American Indian population in the 19th century.
And then we have the news, now quoted and tweeted all over cyberspace, that it seems that we—at least the descendants of those who migrated out of Africa—have Neandertal DNA in our genes after all! And it may have helped us become the extraordinarily successful species that we are (at least in the short term–who knows how long we’ll last?) by adding an immunity boost to our constitution. That, and possible interbreeding with that mysterious new-found Siberian hominin species the Denisovans may have secured our survival:
Indeed, DNA inherited from Neanderthals and newly discovered hominids dubbed the Denisovans has contributed to key types of immune genes still present among populations in Europe, Asia and Oceania. And scientists speculate that these gene variants must have been highly beneficial to modern humans, helping them thrive as they migrated throughout the world.
This DNA has had “a very profound functional impact in the immune systems of modern humans,” said study first author Laurent Abi-Rached, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of senior author Peter Parham of the Stanford University School of Medicine.
…
From the analysis, the scientists estimated, for example, that more than half of the genetic variants in one HLA gene in Europeans could be traced to Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA. For Asians, that proportion was more than 70%; in people from Papua New Guinea, it was as much as 95%.
“We expected we’d see some, but the extent that these contributed to the modern [genomes] is stunning,” Abi-Rached said of the findings, released Thursday by the journal Science.
Though the researchers haven’t proved it, the vast reach of these gene variants in people today suggests that they probably gave some early modern humans an advantage over others, he said.
Our ancestors’ HLA systems may have been perfectly tailored for Africa but naive to bacteria, viruses and parasites that existed in Europe or Asia, rendering them susceptible to disease.
Mating and mixing their genomes with those of their Neanderthal and Denisovan relatives could have been a speedy way to set up their immune systems to combat new, unencountered threats.
What is philosophically interesting from the point of view of speculations about human nature (philosophical anthropology) is not so much whether we slept with Neandertals or not. My own hunch is that we did interbreed and created viable offspring, but like I posted in an earlier blog entry, it was probably because of hunters raping women of the other species rather than nice, romantic interspecies marriages. What is philosophically interesting is our reaction to these theories: Why is it so important for some people to see it verified that we didn’t interbreed? And what makes it so vital for others that we did? I’m not saying that the scientists work out theories that fit their preferred view, but many laypeople (such as myself) who follow these stories have usually taken sides. Can this be boiled down to on the one hand a wish to keep human nature separate and special, and on the other hand a wish to see us closely related to all life on this planet? Competing visions of exclusivity vs. inclusivity? And where will such visions take us? Just remember Kennewick Man and the battle over his origins: Was he an early European, an American Indian ancestor, or perhaps a visitor from Asia? Each explanation carries its own political slant. Ask yourself, in your heart, would you rather that humans who migrated out of Africa were distantly related to Neandertals, or would you rather they/we weren’t? And then ask yourself, Why?
