Pure Wickedness October 15, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, religion.4 comments
P.Z. Myers posts this article from The Watchtower Magazine, the monthly magazine published by Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Notice bullet point #2.
My classroom is a den of iniquity.
More From the Know-Nothings October 13, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics, Science.Tags: Social science and natural science, Tom Coburn
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David Glenn’s 7 October article in The Chronicle reports that Senator Tom Coburn (Sen. OK) wants to halt federal funding for social science research. This is not a new effort. As Glenn points out, Sen. Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to kill most federal social science spending in 2006.
Coburn’s office justifies this by claiming “Federal research dollars should go to scientists who work on finding solutions for people with severe disabilities, or the next generation of biofuels, or engineering breakthroughs”; and further claimed that government funded social science projects “in reality have little, if anything to do with science.”
This is just more blather coming from the know-nothings in the Republican Party.
Political science is not a natural science in that it doesn’t produce predictions that will confirm general theories of political behavior. But it nevertheless produces socially useful results.
The natural sciences are not able to tell us whether a particular social policy is good or bad or come up with proposals for how democracy should function. These are questions that involve how we want to live and no science can answer these questions. But surely we need people who think about these questions. The motivations and institutional arrangements that explain how power is acquired and deployed in society are important to know about if we are to have a functioning democracy.
Social scientists investigate policies to determine if they are successful or not and model future policies based on that understanding. Their generalizations will hold only “for the most part” for a variety of reasons having to do with the inherent difficulties in studying human behavior. But generalizations that hold for the most part are vastly superior to wild guesses about policy.
Here is one example of what Coburn objects to:
The Human Rights Data Project: which concluded that the United States has been “increasingly willing to torture enemy combatants and imprison suspected terrorists,” leading to a worldwide increase in “human rights violations” as others followed-suit.
This is kind of important to know, an example of data-gathering and correlation that looks a lot like science, and is socially useful, unless you are a conservative trying to cover up war crimes.
Coburn goes on to say that “Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters, rather than being funded out of taxpayers’ wallets, especially when our nation has much more urgent needs and priorities.
With the exception of some historians, who in this bunch does hypothesis testing by gathering evidence? None of them are in the theory business. The idea that we can leave our knowledge of how politics works to TV pundits, political parties, and their candidates is frightening. Just think about it—Glenn Beck an expert on drug policy, Sarah Palin’s theory of conflict resolution!
And where do pollsters get their understanding of how to measure public opinion if not from political science?
It is clear what the motivation is here. Conservatives generally hate the social sciences because that research typically disproves their nonsense.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
So Are Women Really Unhappy? October 13, 2009
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Culture, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Philosophy of Gender.23 comments
I’ve been toying with a response to Dwight’s piece about women and happiness , but it got so long that I decided to make it into a post, mainly consisting of stray thoughts. There’s so much one could say about that issue—for one thing, that Dwight’s final point is exactly what Mary Wollstonecraft was getting at when she said that, contrary what Rousseau and others of the male persuasion claimed at the time, men are not happier having child-like wives; for both to be professionally fulfilled is a win-win situation. Next, I read the Huffington blog, because what I thought it boiled down to was that Arianna herself might be in a funk, but it turned out to be something else, a plug for a future series of guest blogs by Marcus Buckingham on his media tour! So are women really unhappy, or is Buckingham trying to sell a book claiming that women are unhappy, in an attempt to get unhappy women to buy the book? Oh, I’m so cynical. But I’m generally skeptical of generalizations and blanket statements, especially about people’s amorphous feelings. Are Danes really happy? (That one keeps coming up, and I’m asked at least once a week about the true state of mind of the Danes! Enough, already!) Are women really unhappy? These tabloid-type questions are almost impossible to take seriously unless we do the metaethical groundwork and identify what we mean by happiness, exactly like Dwight suggests. It is in itself fascinating that up until recently philosophers were preoccupied with dread, anguish, Being-Unto-Death, Philosophy of Dying, and other grim but occasionally worthwhile subjects. And now we agonize over getting the right words to pin down the happiness factor. The Mystery of Joy! Which, too, is an occasionally worthwhile subject. And there could well be a connection between the analysis of the happiness of the Danes and the supposed unhappiness of American women: The lower the expectations, the more at ease you might be with less. The higher the expectations, the more frustration you’re likely to feel. That’s a bit simplistic, but it does contain a grain of truth. In addition to that, the “happiness gurus” have, in their enormous disregard for common sense, declared that having children is a sure path to unhappiness. So if women “want it all,” they set themselves (ourselves) up for certain disappointment if they select children as part of the “all.” But what kind of unhappiness is that? The kind where you have to defer gratification and give up on certain self-serving lifestyles, I suspect.
BUT I will concede that there might be a specific reason why some women in the west aren’t satisfied with having all the new possibilities and various forms of freedom. Not because having more freedom makes you more insecure and confused, etc. That’s just condescending. I don’t really believe that the simple life is a happy one, especially if one is aware of other options. And it is certainly true that women tend to judge themselves harshly, but I don’t think that’s anything new. If anything, I actually believe (contrary to Buckingham) that taking on too many obligations is what stresses us out and makes us feel inadequate (if that means we’re unhappy). The instant rewards and easy gratifications are unfortunately part of what many people today count as a happiness factor. But if we remember John Stuart Mill’s suggestion that “It’s better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” (and despite his leaning toward cultural elitism he certainly had a point there) then perhaps some “unhappiness” on the way to one’s higher aspirations is not a bad thing. But there’s another side to this: many, many women of Huffington’s generation (and mine, “2nd Wave feminists”) have assumed that men are generally happy because of the options and freedoms they have traditionally enjoyed. And now that we have those freedoms, too, and we’re no spring chickens any longer, what do we discover? That happiness isn’t automatically a byproduct of having freedom and options, but stress is. Not having options, yes, that can make you unhappy, but having options doesn’t automatically translate into happiness. So some women are disappointed, and feel cheated. “I want my gender neutral happiness like they promised me!” But some of us realize that if you want it all, then you also get to feel inadequate from time to time, and that men of the old patriarchy have known this all too well, in the professional field—dropping dead from stress-related heart disease in their 50s and 60s. It is an age-old assumption among the ones who are “down” that the ones who are ”up” live fat and happy lives. Well—some lives are of course less problematic than others’, especially if those others do much of the work for you. But unproblematic? Hardly. There’s a built-in tragedy lurking in assuming that happiness is what the other guys have…
Why Are There Few Women in Philosophy? October 12, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy of Gender, Philosophy Profession.Tags: gender discrimination and philosophy, women and philosophy
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Via the NY Times:
Writing in The Philosophers’ Magazine, Brooke Lewis says tallies of full-time faculty at top American and British colleges show women make up less than a fifth of philosophy departments in Britain and little more than that in the United States. This suggests “that gender representation is far less balanced in philosophy than it is in many other humanities subjects.”
What is the explanation for the relative lack of women in philosophy?
Helen Beebee, director of the British Philosophical Association, says one reason may be that women are turned off by a culture of aggressive argument particular to philosophy, which grows increasingly more pronounced at the postgraduate level. “I can remember being a Ph.D. student and giving seminar papers and just being absolutely terrified that I was going to wind up intellectually beaten to a pulp by the audience,” she says. “I can easily imagine someone thinking, ‘This is just ridiculous. Why would I want to pursue a career where I open myself up to having my work publicly trashed on a regular basis?’ ”
This doesn’t strike me as the right explanation. Philosopher’s engage in vigorous debate and I have on occasion heard excessively hostile remarks at symposia or in seminar but “intellectually beaten to a pulp by the audience” does not characterize any philosophical discussion that I have witnessed. To suggest that women can’t handle the ordinary give and take of critical discussion is demeaning to women.
Moreover, there are lots of other disciplines that involve argument—the law for instance—in which women are well represented.
Rather, as with any complex social phenomena, I suspect there are multiple explanations that converge to create a pattern of under-represented women.
There is far less overt discrimination than there used to be as well as conscious attempts by many departments to be more inclusive. But unconscious stereotypes or other biases may influence hiring and publication decisions. (Here is an interesting discussion of empirical studies on this issue. In reading the comments, it appears the empirical data is equivocal)
It takes a long time for an “old boys network” to unravel despite deliberate attempts to eliminate bias. Until there are more women in the field who function as role models and advisors, and more women in the canon, women are likely to feel they don’t quite fit, even in the absence of explicit bias.
Also, it takes decades for senior positions in philosophy to reflect the make up of the pool of students who are going into philosophy. It would be interesting to have data regarding the gender make-up of undergraduate philosophy majors today compared to 30 years ago.
Finally, the peculiarities of philosophy may contribute as well. Some areas of philosophy lack a practical dimension, and philosophy is a discipline that involves some degree of isolation. Perhaps some significant portion of smart women self-select for disciplines that involve more collaboration or “real world” impact.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Why Obama Deserved the Nobel Prize October 11, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Political Philosophy, politics.4 comments
Throughout much of the 20th Century, America was a world power that would on occasion do the right thing. We often made horrible mistakes and failed to live up to our ideals. But we seemed to grasp the fact that our welfare depended on supporting the welfare of others. Thus, the U.S. took some interest in human rights and used some of its power and wealth to promote human development in other parts of the world. There was moral purpose behind our actions even when the purpose was derailed by stupidity. The same could not be said of other world powers—Nazi Germany, U.S.S.R, or China—so in comparison, the U.S. was on balance a force for good.
All of that changed with the conduct of foreign policy under the Bush Administration. Under that singularly malicious regime, we engaged in an enormously destructive, unprovoked war in Iraq, suspended moral norms regarding humane treatment of prisoners, and refused to cooperate on a host of important issues from climate change to nuclear non-proliferation, all the while relishing our willingness to thumb our nose at the rest of the world when it raised objections to our policies. The fact that the regime ended by precipitating global economic freefall put an exclamation point on the nearly universal judgment that the U.S was no longer a force for good.
The clear intent of the Bush Administration was to set a new direction in world affairs, one in which the U.S government and its corporate backers would continue to amass power by any means necessary while refusing to take the interests of anyone else into consideration.
The rest of the world was rightly horrified at the prospect of a global order ruled by a cynical hegemon that had given up on moral purpose. Because of our size, wealth, strength, and influence, the welfare of the world depends on the actions of the U.S. Putting that much power in the hands of a conservative political ideology that refuses to be constrained by moral purpose was recognized by much of the rest of the world as a recipe for disaster.
It is that prospect that has greatly diminished under Obama. He has made clear in both word and deed that he will be guided by moral purpose. That is no small change. With moral purpose, trust is available. And with trust many things are possible, especially prospects for a relatively peaceful future and cooperation on challenges that confront the globe.
In the aftermath of Friday’s surprising announcement by the Nobel committee, commentators across the political spectrum have argued that Obama hasn’t done anything to warrant such a prize.
I disagree. The decision to be guided by moral purpose is a fateful and monumental act, because it determines whether we approach each day with hope or fear, emotions that regulate our sense of what is possible and what is not. Obama’s rhetoric of hope is not empty and not a mere aspiration. That hope conquers fear is a necessary condition for stable cooperation—even the cynical monarchist Thomas Hobbes recognized this when he deemed the decision to abide by the social contract the very first political act. That contemporary conservatives have forgotten this fundamental fact of political life is testimony to how far they have fallen.
In contrast to the carping coming from the American media this past weekend, the rest of the world has largely praised the award. People who are not blinded by ideology can see a clear difference between an America guided by moral purpose and an America run by people like Bush and Cheney. Yet, it is not merely a thank-God-you’re-not-Bush award. It is a positive affirmation of the role that morality plays in our common life.
In a sense, of course, this is faint praise. In essence, the Nobel Prize Committee has given a prestigious award to someone for choosing moral purpose over moral catastrophe—a choice most human beings make routinely. Why place Obama in the company of the other recipients of the award—such as Aung San Suu Kyi, Desmond Tutu, or Martin Luther King Jr.—who made uncommon, heroic sacrifices to inch humanity toward peace?
All peacemakers have one thing in common—they are willing to take the first step toward peace, which is always a gratuitous act of faith with no assurance it will be reciprocated. Obama has announced to the world that the U.S. is willing to take that step. As with the other recipients of the prize, he confronts destructive forces with an act of generosity. Unlike most of the other recipients, he does so from a position of power. The powerful renouncing power is an event sufficiently rare to warrant celebration despite lacking personal sacrifice.
It remains to be seen how much Obama will accomplish as President. Wars must be unraveled in a way that does not increase violence—a difficult task at which he may fail. There is a real danger that his sense of moral purpose will founder when it runs up against the military/industrial complex and the avatars of corporate greed who still run this country. It may be that the seeds of moral corruption are so deeply embedded in American life that recovery in the short run is impossible.
But Obama receives this award because he has re-certified the moral purpose of American conduct. If there is to be a new beginning, it will be because of that act.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Rand On the Ropes October 7, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Political Philosophy.Tags: Ayn Rand, free-markets and information deficits
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Via Brian Leiter, here is another take down of Ayn Rand:
The year 2009, however, has shown us that this is hardly the time for such faith. The privatising and non-regulatory urges pervading the US Government since the beginning of the century (and particularly since the 1980s) have brought many of us to the very end of our patience and to a finale for our faith in the capitalist system, or in the wealthy, or in those captains of industry – and especially of finance – in whose hands we are supposed to place our lives and hopes […]
This is more than a question of timing or bad luck, however; for there is an even bigger snag, a bigger poison in the pudding, which destroys any so-called philosophy invented by Rand. An article in a 1986 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, although it remains too often ignored, leaves no hope whatever for the many defenders and apologists for the allegedly “free” market. The co-authors of this contribution assert and prove that there is no such thing as a “free-enterprise system”, simply because all the bargains taking place in a market system are characterised by an information deficit on one side or the other. This gap reflects an information advantage that one side invariably holds over the other in any deal so that there are, in fact, no truly equitable financial agreements to be had. And it is because of this absence of equity that free enterprise can achieve only what can be regarded as a mythic status. This not only applies to the free-enterprise myth itself, however; it applies to all its constituent elements, such as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, which was perennially held to be a kind of guarantor of self-interest that allegedly made the whole system work. But there is no invisible hand, just as there is no free enterprise.
This is one aspect of the case against Rand, to go along with her utter failure to recognize the importance of moral conscience in our lives.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Women and Happiness October 6, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: Feminism, Marcus Buckingham, the nature of happiness
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Women are less happy than they used to be according to recent research that received a lot of attention from commentators last week. Maureen Dowd in the NY Times reported:
According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.
Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.
As Arianna Huffington points out in a blog post headlined “The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling”: “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”
Marcus Buckingham, a former Gallup researcher and author of “Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently” describes the data:
“Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy,” Buckingham writes in his new blog on The Huffington Post, pointing out that this darker view covers feelings about marriage, money and material goods. “Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older.”
Buckingham argues that the unhappiness of women is explained not by the burdens of the second shift—housework in addition to remunerative labor—but by the increased choices that women have today:
When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.
“Choice is inherently stressful,” Buckingham said in an interview. “And women are being driven to distraction.”
And these higher standards are exacerbated by female biology:
Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Women are much harder on themselves than men.
They tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work and pop far more antidepressants
These data tell us something about how women think their lives are going, but they measure only one aspect of happiness, and we should be careful about drawing conclusions from this impoverished understanding of happiness.
The General Social Survey relies on self-reports of subjective well-being—how a person feels about her life as measured by the survey question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”
But feelings of pleasure, contentment or satisfaction are only one measure of how life is going. Part of happiness is exercising one’s capabilities to their fullest—realizing our full potential. The struggle to do so may not produce attitudes of pleasant contentment. Think of the lives of most athletes or artists. Their lives may consist of much frustration and pain—a hard slog on most days. But I doubt they invariably think of themselves as unhappy despite their struggle. They might gain contentment or have more fun by giving up their pursuit of achievement but would not think they had increased their happiness.
In other words we seek to live meaningful lives as well as contented and satisfied lives and these goals are not always working in tandem. Yet both are part of human happiness.
Evaluation of our lives can diverge significantly from mere reports of how one feels and surveys that ask only about subjective feelings miss this dimension of happiness. Impoverished definitions, as employed in these surveys, can lead to bad policies if, by relying on them, women reassess their commitment to full participation in society.
Women have rejected the idea that their human capabilities are limited, and they have made their full exercise the standard by which happiness is measured. They will not be satisfied with a return to the days when college was for finding a husband and achievement narrated on the pages of Good Housekeeping, regardless of how much peace and contentment such a retreat might promise. Of course, women should seek balance in their lives, which is the focus of Buckingham’s book, but not at the expense of their aspirations.
The problem is not that women aim too high. The problem is that a fully human life will be thick with clashing desires.
As to the improvement in subjective assessments of men’s happiness, I suspect women’s liberation has benefited men. We now have partners who can think independently, communicate, earn, and share all dimensions of life.
It is hard to imagine anything that would do more to enhance the happiness of men.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
California Fail October 5, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: California budget crisis
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I have lived in California for much of the past 40 years and I never thought I would read an article entitled Will California Become America’s First Failed State.
The article does a decent job of describing our current predicament but provides very little historical context to help understand why we are in dire straits. For that context, we have to go to Robert Cruickshank at Calitics:
The dream is that anyone can come to California, enjoy its natural beauty, and reinvent/find/embrace themselves here, all enabled by the availability of basic economic security and prosperity. […]
It died because of the specific way we went about implementing that dream. In the second half of the 20th century, the California Dream was enfolded within a specific set of land use policies that ultimately undermined the progressive aspects of that dream. Whereas California of the 1960s provided free schools, a generous welfare state, and invested in infrastructure, all of which enabled people to come here and actualize their self-potential, California of the 2000s traps most of its residents in a spiral of downward mobility that endangers not only their ability to be who they want to be, but their ability to be healthy, to be fed, to survive.
This has happened because those that benefited from the earlier iteration of the California Dream, which was predicated on suburban sprawl, have decided to pull up the drawbridge behind them, to blow up the public services that made the Dream possible, and to hoard the remaining benefits and wealth for themselves at the expense of everybody else. The California Dream was about providing a good and secure life to everyone. Now, it is about denying that Dream to everyone who wasn’t able to buy a home before 2000, who wasn’t able to attend college before 1992, who doesn’t make enough money to afford their own health care.
California’s problems are not just short-term losses that can be recouped after the recession is over. Via the LA Times:
As thousands of laid off California teachers sit out the school year, educators are worried about the long-term effect of losing so many teachers. Some instructors are considering leaving the state or even the profession, and if history is any indication, fewer young people will pursue careers in teaching. […]
The state is facing a looming teacher shortage as baby boomers reach retirement age and fewer young people are expected to enter the field. Nearly 55,000 teachers could retire over the next seven years, according to WestEd, a San Francisco-based nonprofit research and education agency.
In addition, the layoffs are having a ripple effect on the next generation of teachers: Past economic downturns in California have produced fewer teachers. In the years after the dot-com bust, the number of students enrolled in teacher preparation programs declined 13% and the number of new teaching credentials dropped 17%, according to the Santa Cruz teachers center.
The problem of course is made worse by the drastic cutbacks in higher education that will prevent thousands of teachers from being trained.
California is in a downward spiral which cannot be reversed until we rethink the nature of the social contract and build institutions that can acknowledge our mutual responsibilities.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Multitasking Fail October 4, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Education, Science.Tags: Stanford study on multitasking
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The dangers of multitasking while driving are obvious, and many states are outlawing the most egregious forms of it, such as texting.
There is also evidence that more benign forms of multitasking such as studying and watching TV make us less efficient and less able to focus—our brains are just not capable of simultaneously performing two tasks that require attention. However, I have always thought it plausible that multitasking is something that we might become better at with more practice.
But here is evidence to the contrary from Stanford University via Mark Bauerlein at Brainstorms:
The primary finding was that “People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time.” When people spend months and years trying to multitask, their mental habits follow. Most important, their capacity to filter out distractions and irrelevant items deteriorates. As one of the researchers put it, “They’re suckers for irrelevancy.” The researchers set up experiments that isolated the ability to ignore things that didn’t help subjects complete a problem, and low-multitaskers did well, high-multitaskers poorly.
They also did some memory tests. Result: “The low multitaskers did great,” [researcher] Ophir said. “The high multitaskers were doing worse and worse the further they went along because they kept seeing more letters and had difficulty keeping them sorted in their brains.”
Finally, they did a test of concentration and the pattern held.
“Again, the heavy multitaskers underperformed the light multitaskers. ‘They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing,’ Ophir said. ‘The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.’”
So all those fans of multitasking who claimed that the interactive, multiplicitous Web was altering people’s brains may have been right. Altering them, though, for the worse.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Human Condition? Here’s Ardi! October 2, 2009
Posted by Nina Rosenstand in Current Events, Nina Rosenstand's Posts, Science.Tags: Ardi, Ardipithecus ramidus, Bonobos, chimpanzees, Darwin, evolutionary psychology, Gen Suwa, hominim, Merleau-Ponty, Owen Lovejoy, Tim White, Yohannes Haile-Selassie
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This is a good day for those of us who like to hear, and tell, stories of Human Origins: The current story in the scientific world has been told for a while now, ever since Don Johanson found Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis, in Hadar, East Africa in 1974: We are the children of small-brained, upright-walking primates who lived some 3 million years ago—primates with insignificant canine teeth, and almost-human hands with opposable thumbs. A creature living on the savannah, enforcing the perception that it was the loss of woodlands that made our early ancestors get up on two legs and look around.
But now we have a brand new chapter in our Story of Origin. Ardi is being introduced to the world, in today’s issue of Science Magazine and all over the newsmedia: Ardipithecus ramidus, a new ancestor (perhaps), at least another traveler on the road that lead to Homo sapiens. The painstaking assembly and interpretation of Ardi’s fractured bones (skull, teeth, pelvis, hands, feet) took 17 years, but now the researchers, including Gen Suwa, Tim White, Yohannes Haile-Selassie, C. Owen Lovejoy and others, have made their findings public. Ardi’s species predates Lucy by more than a million years, and it lived not far from that very same region. You can explore the details yourself if you are so inclined; personally, I am so excited that I can barely contain myself—this is the story I have been waiting for ever since the news of Lucy broke. What came before Lucy? Since 1974 we have known that the previous picture of early hominids as knuckle-walking, big-brained apes was wrong. We didn’t first develop the big brain, and then get up and walk. It was the other way around. But how far back in time did we diverge from the apes, and when did our hands leave the ground for good? We know that there were medium-sized monkey-type creatures dating back some 8 million years, and even dating back to the first early mammals, 60 million years ago, there were little mouse-sized mammals with some primate characteristics. But where the question gets interesting for most of us who are not paleontologists is, when did we start out on the road to becoming “Human”?
Of course this is one of the primary reasons why Darwin’s theory (The Descent of Man, 1871) met with such massive resistance which can still be felt whenever the debate swings in the direction of Creationism and Intelligent Design: Did we descend from chimpanzees? The Darwinist answer has, usually, been No, not exactly: We and the apes we know today descended from a common ape-like ancestor—we just had to look around for a “missing link” that could show us the intermediary version. Since then, the entire concept of a “missing link” has been discredited: Evolution doesn’t work that way—we don’t have links in a straight chain, but rather a multitude of branches that arise and die out, with some branches ending up being more successful than others. And besides, so few fossils are ever found that it would be astonishing to find an exact Happy-Medium form in-between two distinct species. Well, perhaps that’s what we have now. While Ardi is not a “missing link” (because we should stop using that terminology), she is so old that she represents a hominid (or hominim which is the new and more exact term) who is not even as “human” as Lucy who was truly not very human except for her manner of walking, and her hands. So is she more like an ape? And this is where the surprise comes in: Not really, even if her feet look like ape feet. If ever we humans were ape-like, it must be even further back in time, because Ardi seems to have (1) been upright, judging from the position of her head and pelvis, and (2) had smaller canine teeth than apes. Furthermore, this is the end of the fantasy that we evolved bipedalism on the savannah: Ardi lived in and among the trees, judging from other fossil finds in the area! But even so, she was already upright and bipedal at least some of the time. So was she Lucy’s ancestor? They don’t know yet for certain, but there’s a good chance that her species gave rise to Lucy’s species. And if that is the case, then she is also our ancestor. And she was not typically ape-like. Now that has got to please those who have a problem with the notion that we are “descendants of apes,” but that would be a premature celebration—it doesn’t mean we are not related to primates, it just means that some typical ape-like features were lost in the human line much earlier that we thought, and perhaps the human line never had them, such as chimp-style knuckle-walking. And the chimps and the Bonobos are still our closest living cousins on the planet. That hasn’t changed.
Now all this is factual as well as interpretative science. Why am I so excited? For one thing, I’ve always been fascinated by paleoanthropology. But more importantly for a philosopher, I have also for many years thought that our human origin is at least to some degree a determinant for our “human condition.” That’s what today is known as evolutionary psychology, but in more philosophical terms it means that our physical interface with the world (to borrow an expression from Merleau-Ponty) is an integral part of who we are, and how we interact with the world. Our Lebenswelt includes our physical being, and our physical being has an evolutionary history. If there’s anything that unites us as human beings, aside from our DNA, across the lines of politics, religion, race, gender, and so forth, it is this common history, the physical triggers that become the emotional and cognitive triggers. This is not to say that I discount the existence of “free will,” whatever that is—but our immense array of mental choices and possibilities is grounded in our physical abilities, limitations, and history.
So what can Ardi tell us, if the scientists are right? (1) We were upright, in the trees, long before we had the brains to make plans what to do with our freed-up hands, and comfortable being face-to-face with each other, close and personal, as well as probably capable of identifying each other at a distance; (2) we did not have massive canine teeth, meaning that the males probably didn’t fight over the females, meaning that we are perhaps looking at pair bonding and a semblance of gender cooperation (if not downright gender equality) dating back 4 million years—much more like the Bonobos than the Chimps, by the way. Does this mean that we were non-aggressive creatures, food for the predators rather than predators ourselves? Some of us would probably like to think so, but we can’t make that assumption. Look at Ardi’s eyes: Perfect stereoscopic vision, looking forward. Those are the eyes of a hunter, at least potentially, perhaps part-time if not full-time—opportunistic, like chimps. Besides, Ardi was omnivorous, like we are—she was not a vegetarian. The “killer ape” theory probably shouldn’t be declared totally dead yet.
In addition, National Geographic Magazine comes out with this spin: Why did we start walking upright? What can you do with free hands? Some of us would immediately say, You can hunt. But others would add, And you can gather. And bring what you have gathered to—your mate. Or the one you want to become your mate. Jamie Shreeve suggests just that scenario: We began embarking on the road to humanity by realizing that there was a sexual advantage to being able to bring food to one’s potential partner, in our freed-up grasping hands. And the upright female has another advantage: When she’s in estrus (heat) it doesn’t show. Which, according to Shreeve, would mean that she could string along the food-bringing male, even when she wasn’t ovulating, and even play around if she was so inclined. Now that opens up new vistas for the pair-bonding theory…
