Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Ward Trotter
Trad climber
|
|
The central claim of this paper is that there is an additional layer of evidence in favor of self-domestication in anatomically
modern humans that can be constructed from findings from (paleo-)genomics. We now have detailed information concerning
the genomes of several domesticated species and their wild counterparts25, as well as high-quality data from archaic human
genomes26. This information offers the opportunity to test for the existence of overlapping regions of putative signatures of
selection associated with (self-)domestication. If found to exist, such overlaps would complement the anatomical data briefly
reviewed above and suggest that the self-domestication hypothesis is a strong contender to account for key aspects of modern
human cognition
I've been aware of the Domestication Syndrome (DS) for quite some time and it frequently led me, when comparing Neanderthals with modern humans, to regard , almost fancifully, the inescapable notion that modern humans represented a sort of domesticated Neanderthal. A refined barnyard version of the archetypal caveman, if you will. Now researchers could be arriving at some substantial genomic evidence that just such a fancy could actually be the case.
Moreover, the neural crest hypothesis is a strong advance in the direction of providing a fundamental genetic/epigenetic/morphological causal explanation for the DS.
Arriving at: account for key aspects of modern
human cognition is way downstream however. But now such an arrival point could be looming on the horizon.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
Wizard: WOT => Brain freeze => Diminished awareness => Reduced consciousness
From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Stephen Cave, a Berlin-based philosopher and writer who has called Aping Mankind "an important work," points out that most philosophers and scientists do in fact believe "that mind is just the product of certain brain activity, even if we do not currently know quite how." Tallis "does both the reader and these thinkers an injustice" by declaring that view "obviously" wrong, Cave wrote in a Financial Times review. Geraint Rees, director of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, complains that reading Tallis is "a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall." He "rubbishes every current theory of the relationship between mind and brain, whether philosophical or neuroscientific," while offering "little or no alternative," Rees says in an e-mail.
Perhaps the harshest reaction comes from Dennett, an influential U.S. philosopher whose books square human life with science. He sympathizes with Tallis's concerns. But what every philosopher should know is that any philosopher—Plato, Hume, Kant, take your pick—"can be made to look like a flaming idiot if you oversimplify and caricature them," Dennett tells me.
"Tallis indulges in refutation by caricature," says Dennett, a professor of philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. "He's not taking his opponents seriously. He's sneering instead of arguing. He's ignoring the complexities of the arguments. So he's not really doing philosophy. He's doing propaganda."
|
|
healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
|
|
Too busy for substantial posts at the moment, but there's so much wrong with all that I'll have to make time in the near future. Largo just keeps repeating the same "it's friggin' impossible" dogma while leaving us positively agog and agape at the non-existent magical details of an awareness simply lassoed from the aether at birth.
...while offering "little or no alternative...
That being the exact and enduring problem with all the magically-inclined naysayers who can't stand the thought of our common, non-magical meat producing something as magnificent as our 'good', moral and infinitely aesthetic minds.
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
The article that jgill referenced in the Chronicle of Higher Education was both entertaining and revealing.
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Raymond-Tallis-Takes-Out-the/129279
Tallis is taking pot shots at something that might be called scientism. He's certainly not criticizing science, per-se. Scientism could be characterized as a fashionable, somewhat pompous cultural trend in institutional academics and it's filled with rather silly, fairly meaningless statements too often passed off as deep scientific truths. For example, when Dennett claims that consciousness is "the activities of a virtual machine which is running on the parallel hardware of the brain" or "the self is like a software program that organizes the activities of the brain". It's this kind of hot air that offends Tallis. And he has a point when he says that ""Love is not like a response to a single stimulus, such as a picture." All I have to do is think back to my complex, 22 year-long relationship to my wife, or my 15 year-long relationship to my daughter, or my 60 year-long relationship to my sister to recognize that.
In the end, it seems like Tallis is quite aware of his own limitations. The article concludes:
he does concede that one of his critics is right. That would be Rees, the neuroscientist who slapped him for junking everybody else's mind-brain theories without proposing his own.
"Absolutely," says Tallis. "I have the Socratic wisdom of knowing that I don't know. Which is a start."
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
Maternal and Offspring Pools of Osteocalcin Influence Brain Development and Functions
SUMMARY
The powerful regulation of bone mass exerted by the brain suggests the existence of bone-derived signals modulating this regulation or other functions of the brain. We show here that the osteoblast-derived hormone osteocalcin crosses the blood-brain barrier, binds to neurons of the brainstem, midbrain, and hippocampus, enhances the synthesis of monoamine neurotransmitters, inhibits GABA synthesis, prevents anxiety and depression, and favors learning and memory independently of its metabolic functions. In addition to these postnatal functions, maternal osteocalcin crosses the placenta during pregnancy and prevents neuronal apoptosis before embryos synthesize this hormone. As a result, the severity of the neuroanatomical defects and learning and memory deficits of Osteocalcin-/- mice is determined by the maternal genotype, and delivering osteocalcin to pregnant Osteocalcin-/- mothers rescues these abnormalities in their Osteocalcin-/- progeny. This study reveals that the skeleton via osteocalcin influences cognition and contributes to the maternal influence on fetal brain development.
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
I've been thinking about terms in this subject space again lately, mainly from Bob's question up-thread. The idea has come up from time to time in this thread. Reading and internalizing Yuri Harari's Homo Deus, has been instrumental in making me see, in a slightly different way, how some things fit together.
First of all, I would say that the word 'mind' should be understood to be synonymous with human consciousness. There are other kinds of consciousness -- cat consciousness and dolphin consciousness and bat consciousness to name a few. They are produced by the brains of cats, dolphins, and bats, respectively.
Consciousness is something akin to experience. It is practically bounded by the evolution of the organism doing the experiencing. Imagine the consciousness of a bat. It must be very different from human consciousness. It must be highly dependent on interpreting the different return times of echoes based on their constant "chirping". This is how they find and zero-in on their food source, flying insects, among other things.
Like I said previously, I would say that intelligence is an attribute of mind, although I am on shakier ground here. Intelligence, as a few posters have suggested, seems to be somehow related to complexity. A very successful species may or may not have needed to develop intelligence to be successful.
|
|
Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
|
|
Great post Greg... all the posts from Largo, you, me and others came from one place...our minds/brains.
Not from our hearts or souls...the brain/mind...period. :-)
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
But maybe, just maybe, from the pancreas :>.
|
|
jstan
climber
|
|
The Greeks probably did not have the benefit of Darwin's observation that we are as we are as a result of millions of years of evolution. The evolutionary product for each organism can be at least temporarily assumed to be different because each organism's challenges are different. So the Greeks ended up with no option but to ruminate endlessly on ill defined top level words. We, however, have benefits not available to the Greeks and so should not approach the topic from the top down. We can use our knowledge to work from the bottom up, as one does in developing any model.
An individual affects future generations provided only they reach reproductive age. Since a juvenile individual starts out small, during youth they face a larger population of predators than they do later in life. Maximum pressure puts a premium upon gaining experience early. We should not be surprised, then, to hear that the development of neural connections is a maximum during that period of life. Based upon the bottom up approach to behavior I will attempt a hypothesis for a survival tool I will, for now, call "cons."
An individual evidences possession of "cons" when it physically responds to its environment so as to maximize its chance of survival. Now do not assume this is a simple property. Significant experience based processing is required. In order to obtain an adequate chance of survival the skink has to estimate how much distance to keep between himself and a possible predator.( I assume you all have noticed some skinks have no tail.) Human's have the rather nasty habit of assuming our ability to make such calculations using the normal distribution puts us on a "god-like" level. At it's base this habit is just self-promotion made necessary by inadequate self confidence. Some avoid this by repeatedly tempting a rattle snake to strike as practice. (Not generally advisable, particularly if the snake has not been thoroughly milked prior to the exercise.)
(Pardon my running on.)
At nearly all stages of life a human is at the bottom of the food chain. We can't out run anything and without canine teeth we can't fight back upon being caught. So what has been our strategy?
To start we became a pack animal. (Nuclear weapons came later. Much later.) To attack a pack animal the predator has to concentrate all its attention on a single individual thereby leaving itself with no defense against others in the pack. But mind you the others in the pack by attacking in return, have to accept altruistic risk to benefit its fellows. (Talk to a member of the US Marine Corps to see how powerful this imperative is.) This development places us squarely into the domain of evolutionary psychology, a rather new branch of science. As our population density increases this science will become an ever more useful approach to understanding human behavior. (I am intentionally avoiding politics here.)
Following this bottom up approach that tracks the timeline for our development seems a natural way to model understanding of why we are as we are.
Given understanding the words will no longer matter.
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
Clearly, bottom up has to be the default hypothesis. And I'm thinking that we should think of mind as a manifestation of an experiencing nervous system rather than an experiencing brain. A nervous system includes the biochemical inputs into the brain, which would include emotions -- pain, for instance.
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
Excuse me jstan, but I know you were (are) a physicist. I recall from my early physics days that a body falling near the surface of the earth will accelerate at about 9.8 m/s^2. This can be deduced, by approximating to an ideal state, from the law of gravity and a calculation based on the mass and the radius of the earth. With this value and some simple calculus (these calculations, in so far as they use classical mathematics, do in fact, involve the concept of "infinity") we can estimate the time of impact of a body released at a certain height. Of course air friction plays a role, but I recall from high school physics, in a demonstration made in class, that a feather and a stone fall at the same speed in a vacuum. These are old results, although still empirically verifiable. We have known this for about 350 years.
As an aside note, after I finished my degree in philosophy, I actually liked physics (especially cosmology) more than mathematics, but there was money available to do graduate work in mathematics. The buzz in academics was that mathematics would be "needed". It was 1984 and Reagan was pumping big money into "Star Wars". Apparently a degree in mathematics was considered relevant.
Getting back to theme at hand. I wonder: what are the equivalent empirically verifiable results offered by the science of evolutionary psychology? Could there ever be any? What is the value of this "bottom up" approach? If my daughter is depressed, obsessive, or has difficulties adapting to public schools, what can evolutionary psychology offer to help her? I also wonder: if altruism is "explained" by evolutionary psychology, then how did this gene survive? I mean, it seems that 18-year-old males have just about the right age to express that altruism (isn't that why we send them off to war?). Then again, what about "selfish" behavior? Wouldn't it be an advantage to the individual to feign altruism and embody selfishness? So many more genes passed on that way. It would seem to me that the selfish, altruistic faking genes would soon replace the actual altruistic genes in a population. Or maybe there should be some kind of equilibrium, so the group could survive? A sort of selfishness, altruistic equilibrium quotient (although I'm not sure how that fits with the concept of "natural selection"). Can we ever make any precise, empirically verifiable predictions about any of this? Then I wonder about the Cassius Clays of the world (later to become Muhammad Alis). These don't go to war because they are "conscientious objectors". Is that altruism, or selfishness, or neither? How does evolutionary psychology "explain" and predict the occurrence of the conscientious objectors in some kind of empirically verifiable way? Then we have, what we might call the Forrest Gumps of the world, who go off to war because they are expected to and become heros because they care about their friends (I'm not just kidding about this: there can be truth in fiction). Then I wonder: if instead of inventing a whole new science, which seems to make many dubious, unverifiable claims, maybe we would be better off just talking to people and asking them to explain why they do what they do. There are people who are good at that and good at getting others to "open up". This is a real skill. Valuable, even. Unfortunately, I suck at that. But then I think: maybe I'm being "top down" instead of "bottom up"?
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
Without the soul there would zero posts here.
You would not exist period.
Nothing can exist without soul.
Without the soul you would be dead and rotting in the ground .....
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
Even if the Cinderella effect is real, how should we take that? There will always be biological parents who are awful and adoptive ones who are terrific. It may be healthy to recognize the (possible) psychological effects of our evolutionary past, but I don't believe in fatalism.
|
|
jstan
climber
|
|
Yanqui:
All your questions are reasonable and at the same time, not readily answerable. Such is the attribute of exciting times. I have not proposed an answer. I am proposing an approach. As our numbers become ever larger cultural interactions and experiences will become increasingly existential. You need only read a newspaper to see this taking place right now. Our patterns of behavior will be further refined. Establishing cause and effect will always remain just as difficult as it is now.
An interesting discussion on changes in our dentition:
http://www.manticmoo.com/articles/jeff/scholarly/an-evolving-human-dentition.php
I think its paramount point is that change in the challenges presented us is always present and that both our physical attributes and our modes of behavior/psychologies will change accordingly. Mind you, the existence of normal variation will ever make uncertain our obtaining “understanding” of causes and effects for a specific individual. I can’t guess the challenges presented your daughter. I do think it is essential each child feels, when the time is right, they have the duty to make the important decisions in their life.
Edit:
And yes you are right. If you assume the earth is a point mass there will be a singularity. Being an experimentalist I would merely cut off the integration at the last nanometer. I'll leave the full calculation to persons like yourself. Though in the limit of small r the argument m/r^2 should be bounded.
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2017 - 04:08am PT
|
If you assume the earth is a point mass there will be a singularity. Though in the limit of small r the argument m/r^2 should be bounded
I haven't done any physics calculations since the late 70s/early 80s but I recall that my general physics exams were open book and were really hard. The only thing that saved my ass was the other students tended to do worse than I did.
I'm not sure I understand your deduction of a singularity, but if you could drill a hole through the earth and watch the stone continue to fall inside the surface of the earth, than the mass effecting the stone decreases as a mutiple of r^3. Thus the acceleration is given linearly, as a multiple of r and goes to zero as the stone reaches the center. I believe Isaac Newton first proved this using calculus. His use of mathematics requires that bounded intervals of numbers be uncountably infinite (the existence of Lebesgue measure or the Riemann integral for integrating implies this).
I wonder if anyone has tried to verify this experimentally (the linear dependence on r) by dropping a stone down a deep hole?
Edit to add: of course black holes do seem to produce the kind of singularity you are talking about, where a great deal of mass is, in fact, nearly concentrated at a point. Maybe this is what you meant?
Second edit to add: I was assuming a uniform distribution of mass for the calculation. I'm not sure if that ideal state is a very good approximation of the actual distribution!
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2017 - 09:03am PT
|
Yanqui, there's a relatively famous book that specifically addresses altruism in evolutionary psychology called, The Selfish Gene, (1976, I believe) by Richard Dawkins. It anticipates all of your questions.
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2017 - 09:20am PT
|
Thanks for the heads up eeyonkee. And I must commend Richard Dawkins for anticipating all my questions. That's much better than I can do!
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2017 - 10:27am PT
|
He's smart as a whip:>
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2017 - 04:51pm PT
|
Always pleased when singularities are mentioned. Here is an image of the fundamental essential singularity in complex variables: exp(1/z) @ z=0.
Notice that the bad behavior occurs to the right of the (vertical) imaginary axis. To the left, there are a number of zeros close to z=0 and the behavior is quite subdued.
----------------------------------------------------
When your nervous system malfunctions you can be in big trouble. Pain certainly puts you right out there in the physical world.
;>(
VVV
|
|
eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
|
|
|
Jul 10, 2017 - 04:53pm PT
|
Hey so, I would like to build on my post about it being about the nervous system rather than the brain. I think that the nervous system is a better representation of the organism than the brain. I'm actually kind of excited about this insight. I mean, I've been thinking and reading about this stuff for a very long time. I'm almost embarrassed to admit it. I should be smarter about the subject, really.
The insight is that by including the entire nervous system, which is a superset of brain, you include all of the "apparatus" required to be a human organism experiencing the world out there, almost by definition. I can't believe that I didn't hit on this earlier. The way I see it, the brain itself, can reasonably be thought of as the CPU. The non-brain nervous system enables inputs into the CPU -- DUH!. This part of the system includes all of the biochemical algorithms related to neurons residing outside of the brain, including emotions (they almost certainly have connections to brain neurons, as well).
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!