Rethinking evolutionary theory

Kevin Laland, Tobias Uller, Marc Feldman, Kim Sterelny, Gerd B. Müller, Armin Moczek, Eva Jablonka, John Odling-Smee,  Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Nature, Vol 514, Issue 7521. 08 October 2014

The opening:

Charles Darwin conceived of evolution by natural selection without knowing that genes exist. Now mainstream evolutionary theory has come to focus almost exclusively on genetic inheritance and processes that change gene frequencies.

Yet new data pouring out of adjacent fields are starting to undermine this narrow stance. An alternative vision of evolution is beginning to crystallize, in which the processes by which organisms grow and develop are recognized as causes of evolution.

Some of us first met to discuss these advances six years ago. In the time since, as members of an interdisciplinary team, we have worked intensively to develop a broader framework, termed the extended evolutionary synthesis1 (EES), and to flesh out its structure, assumptions and predictions. In essence, this synthesis maintains that important drivers of evolution, ones that cannot be reduced to genes, must be woven into the very fabric of evolutionary theory.

The conclusion:

The above insights derive from different fields, but fit together with surprising coherence. They show that variation is not random, that there is more to inheritance than genes, and that there are multiple routes to the fit between organisms and environments. Importantly, they demonstrate that development is a direct cause of why and how adaptation and speciation occur, and of the rates and patterns of evolutionary change.

SET [standard evolutionary theory] consistently frames these phenomena in a way that undermines their significance. For instance, developmental bias is generally taken to impose ‘constraints’ on what selection can achieve — a hindrance that explains only the absence of adaptation. By contrast, the EES recognizes developmental processes as a creative element, demarcating which forms and features evolve, and hence accounting for why organisms possess the characters that they do.

Researchers in fields from physiology and ecology to anthropology are running up against the limiting assumptions of the standard evolutionary framework without realizing that others are doing the same. We believe that a plurality of perspectives in science encourages development of alternative hypotheses, and stimulates empirical work. No longer a protest movement, the EES is now a credible framework inspiring useful work by bringing diverse researchers under one theoretical roof to effect conceptual change in evolutionary biology.

Think Graffiti: The Academy of the Wall

Eric Felisbret. Graffiti New York. Harry Abrams 2009.

Signal: graffiti + theory + photography. Issue #zero. September 2011.

Signal: graffiti + theory + photography. Issue #one. April 2014.

So you want to read about graffiti – and by “graffiti” you mean the form of visual expression that arose in New York City and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970 and wrote across walls world-wide by 1990. What to read? Where do you start?

The first question is a tough one, to which I’ll return in a sec. The second one is easy: Start with Mailer and Naar, The Faith of Graffiti. It was the first book about graffiti and still, as far as I know, the best. Why the best, given that the art has changed considerably since Naar’s classic photographs?

First, those photographs ARE classic. Few graffiti photos since come up to Naar’s standard, and that’s important. For photos belong inside graffiti culture and are not merely a record of and commentary on it. Second, Mailer’s text took graffiti seriously and put it in its proper context, which is that of world-wide art since the beginning of time.

After that, though, what next? Lots of possibilities, but Eric Felisbret, Graffiti New York, is one possibility, and a good one. As the title suggests, it’s an informal history of graffiti in New York City from the beginning up until not too long ago. By “informal” I mean that the book is written for a general audience and is not a formal academic history with all the conceptual apparatus that implies. Which is fine. But someday formal academic histories of graffiti are going to have to be written.

As such, it presupposes little or no prior knowledge of graffiti, which is true for most of the coffee table graff books around. And, like most such books, it is skewed toward pieces, aka masterpieces, the large elaborate murals that, at their best, just look so damn! goooood.

But they aren’t all of graff, not even half, and Felisbret knows that. Graffiti New York comes with the standard features of such books, an explanation of graffiti’s major forms – tags, throwies, and pieces, a glossary (a good one, too), and quotations from the writers themselves. Since it’s about the New York scene the book has sections devoted to the five boroughs and a chapter on the gallery scene.

But perhaps its best feature is the chapter on the community, graffiti as a form of social organization. You can pick this up from the other books, but Graffiti New York gives it focal attention: the writers, crews, hubs, women, and even the cops, all are covered. This is where graffiti lives, and how it lives in the community. If you want to understand how graffiti grows and flows, and why it’s important, you need to understand the community.

Still and all, Graffiti New York fits the standard mold, and that’s a scheme that treats graffiti as, well, you know, as art, capital “A” Art. On the one hand that’s a good thing, a progressive move. It’s a move Mailer took in his text, The Faith of Graffiti, but Mailer was writing in the previous century, indeed, the previous millennium. It’s time to move on.

Unity of Being and Literary Criticism

Unity of being is emerging as a key, if somewhat mysterious, concept in my thinking. Whatever it is that literature is about, it is about unity of being. That is, the purpose of literature is to engender a sense of unity of being. A work is judged successful to the extent that it allows/leads readers to achieve unity of being.

Unity of being is subjective in the sense that it exists (only) in the experience of subjects. It is a function of the overall ‘flow’ (in Csikszentmihalyi’s sense?) of one’s experience of the work. And one’s experience of the work, presumably, is a matter for the entire mind. It is thus at the center of the ethical critic’s concern: Does this work engender unity of being? Why or why not?

But it is also central to the naturalist critic, who wants to know how works under investigation allowed their readers to achieve unity of being. Literary form is a set of devices for achieving unity of being. Ultimately, we want to see unity of being as a function of the whole nervous system. Unity of being is thus related to pleasure as I discussed it in Chapter 4 of Beethoven’s Anvil (“Musical Consciousness and Pleasure”).

It is reasonable for the naturalist critic to seek objective knowledge about how existing texts achieve unity of being. This requires, of course, the judgment of human readers. If the text is, or has in the past been, judged to be excellent, then we can seek to understand what properties it has that other texts do not. However, I would not expect the naturalist critic to have any particular insight into new texts.

For those texts, the naturalist critic is just another reader and his judgment is just that of one reader among others. But then, that is the case with the ethical critic as well. My point is simply that objective knowledge about unity of being in past texts cannot be generalized to new texts of a (significantly) different kind.

Early this morning, night of the blood moon

Culture as a Force in History: the United States of the Blues

I have long thought of cultural evolution as a driving force in human history, perhaps even as THE most important driving force, but making an argument on the issue is difficult do in an intellectual environment where cultural evolution is hardly even recognized as an important historical process. At least one problem has to do with our conception of historical actors. There is, of course, the Great Man or Great Woman – gender makes no different though the historical record is biased toward men – who discovers things, leads armies and states, and so forth. We’ve got city-states, nation states, and empires, large commercial concerns, and social classes, all historical actors we know how to conceptualize. But culture? Other than the Great Culture Makers, male and female, where are the actors and what do they do?

The actors in cultural evolution are, of course, people, all of us. And what we do is that we try to live as good a life as possible. Collectively, we constitute the culture, and our actions, in the large and over the long term, constitute cultural evolution.

American Popular Music in the 20th Century

Back in the previous millennium, near the end, I did make one explicit argument about culture as a historical force. The argument was not a general one but rather was about a specific set of cultural formations, American popular music in the 20th century. And I didn’t frame it as an argument about cultural evolution, but simply as an argument about music: Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues (in Leading Issues in Afro-American Studies, Nikongo Ba'Nikongo, ed., Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, pp. 189-233, 1997).

I‘m not going to try to summarize the whole argument, but I’d like to look at enough to give a sense of the terms of the argument. Here’s the abstract:

European-American racism has used African America as a screen on which to project repressed emotion, particularly sex and aggression. One aspect of this projection is that whites are attracted to black music as a means of expressing aspects of themselves they cannot adequately express through music from European roots. Thus twentieth century expressive culture in the United States has been dominated by an evolving socio-cultural system in which blacks create musical forms and whites imitate them. It happened first with jazz, and then with rock and roll. The sexual revolution and the recent florescence of blacks in television and movies suggests that white America has had some success in using black American expressive forms to cure its affective ills. The emergence of rap, from African America, and minimalism, from European America, indicates that this system is at a point where it is ready to leave Western expressive culture behind as history moves to the next millennium.

The fundamental dynamic is thus psycho-social We’re dealing with psychology at the individual level–for that’s where psychology takes place, in individuals–but where certain characteristics are typical of whole groups. In a section on the cultural psychodynamics of racism I sketch that out in some detail:

Freud argued that, in general, much behavior is driven by unconscious desires. Moving beyond the individual psyche, he argued, perhaps most explicitly in Civilization and Its Discontents (1962), that Western civilization is built on a foundation of emotional repression. Racism is a society-wide manifestation of that repression. The basic point is simple: many of the characteristics racists have attributed to blacks are simply the repressed contents of their own hearts and minds which they have projected onto African Americans (Baldwin, 1963, p. 95 ff.; Gay, 1993. pp. 69 ff.; Morrison, 1992, pp. 37 ff., 51-52; Young-Bruehl 1996). In particular, the heightened sexual desire and potency, and the greater emotionality, which whites have insisted on seeing in blacks has more to do with unconscious white desire than it does with black behavior.

In an essay originally published in 1947, Talcott Parsons (1964, pp. 298-322) explored the dynamics of aggression, arguing that Western society is so structured that aggressive impulses are often generated in situations where they cannot be directly expressed, creating a need for ethnic and national "Others" who can be scapegoated. Calvin Hernton explored the sexual dynamics of racism in a study originally published in 1965 (and reprinted in 1988). Erik Erikson made a general theoretical statement in the final chapter of his Identity: Youth and Crisis (1968, pp. 295-320). He argued that no culture has been able to adapt the full biological range of human desire and feeling to its patterns. Each culture cultivates some characteristics at the expense of others. The neglected characteristics may then coalesce into a negative identity which members of a given society will often project or displace onto members of some other society or culture. Joel Kovel (1984) has undertaken an investigation of American racism in which he argues for different psychological processes in the North and the South. Most recently, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1996) has undertaken a psycho-social analysis of prejudice–including anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia in addition to racism–in which she identifies various kinds of racism and attempts to identify the historical conditions which give rise to them...

However, if the lynching is the prototypical scene of racist violence, there is a contrasting prototypical scene of racism, one which is not dominated by physical violence. Consider those nightclubs, such as the Cotton Club, where the performers were black but the clientele was exclusively white. Why did all those white people seek black entertainment? No doubt most of them came for the erotic floorshow, but some of them were interested in the music. Why? The question is not a new one, and the answer is obvious--in the same way that the applicability of Freud to racism is so obvious that it has been little discussed. European Americans have liked African-American music because it has expressive powers which are lacking in European and European-American music (Crouch, 1990b, p 83; Keil, 1966, p. 49; Small, 1987, p. 154; Williams, 1983, p. 254). In particular, as we've seen above, African-American music is comfortable with sexuality, while European music is not. People may have come to the Cotton Club to see black bodies enact jungle pseudo-rituals on stage; but they left with the expressive sound of African American music boring into their brains….

Unfortunately the psychodynamics of racism doesn't end here. The need for projective psychological relief is an equal opportunity affirmative action agent of social destruction. Black Americans have demonized whites even as they have been demonized. The Black Muslims provide the most obvious example, with Elijah Muhammad's story of the evil Mr. Yacub who created a race of “blond, pale-skinned, cold-blue-eyed devils--savages, nude and shameless; hairy, like animals, they walked on all fours and they lived in trees.” These white devils then turned a black “heaven on earth into a hell torn by quarreling and fighting” (Haley, 1965, p. 167; for different examples, see e.g. Crouch, 1990c, pp. 200-202, 231-244; Early, 1989, pp. 199-207; Young-Bruehl, 1996, 481 ff.). Considering that African Americans have legitimate grievances against European Americans, the problem of sorting out the justified anger from the projective demonization seems hopeless. From that hopeless confusion Dr. Martin Luther King, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz–aka Malcolm X, Detroit Red, Malcolm Little–struggled to discriminate right from wrong and thereby exercised moral and political leadership which gave hope to millions.

Given that as a fundamental psycho-cultural dynamic of American culture and society, the logic of the cultural argument becomes obvious. But listening to and then imitating black music, with its obvious sensuality, white America becomes more comfortable with its sexuality and therefor has less need of projection as a mechanism of psychic relief. The largest part of the article then traces out the back and forth dynamic in which popular music gave expression to sexuality and then, with hip-hop, anger.

Ghetto Fabulous, the Soul of Black Folk, and the New Politics that, alas, Wasn't, Not Yet

In 1965 the Watts Riot in Los Angeles left 34 dead and gave rise to the Watts Summer Festival. In 1973 Wattstax premiered in LA and all the cool cats, hip pols, beautiful people and general purpose jivsters came out to strut their stuff at the birth of a new era. Ha!

Wattstax had many points of origin, multiple genealogies. One might, not unfairly, trace it back to the Molotov cocktails hurled by black Angelenos in the streets of Watts in mid-August 1965. Like other projects ranging from the Watts Writers Group and the Inner City Cultural Center to the Compton Communicative Arts Academy and Watts Towers Arts Center, Wattstax emerged "out of the ashes" of the 1965 Watts riot, which left 34 dead and revealed the frustration black Angelenos felt at the unfulfilled promises of the "affluent society" and, especially, the anger they harbored toward the LAPD. (The riot's spark was a routine arrest for drunk driving.) In response to the riot, the federal government, LA's municipal government and private foundations launched what historian Daniel Widener has called a "cultural war on poverty," sponsoring projects that appeared to equip individuals with the tools to escape a life of hardship. Some of these projects were surprisingly concrete — at one point the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare contracted with a Watts foundation to rewrite anti-poverty pamphlets in terms "people in ghetto communities can understand" — but most of them followed from a more abstract set of propositions: that cultural expression was a basic human need; that art might have a healing and educative power, allowing social conflicts to be mediated onstage or on the page rather than on the streets; and that (more particular to this mid-'60s moment) disadvantaged communities like Watts needed to nurture creative talent through their own institutions, ones with the autonomy to represent themselves in terms, to repeat a phrase, that "people in ghetto communities can understand."

Stax, of course, is Stax Records, out of Memphsis, Tennessee, home of Otis Redding, Booker T. and the M. G.'s, and Isaac Hayes.

David Rothenberg Jams with Whales

The NYTimes:

In case you are doubtful about all this I can assure you: whales do really sing, but not always the way you might imagine. There’s much more than high, plaintive cries — there are grunts, squeaks, beats, cool noises that can sound more electronic than melodic, a full range of the kinds of crazy sounds that humans can call music today. Although we think we are always pushing the boundaries of what counts as music, humpback whales have been doing it for millions of years.

Most times when I drop my microphone and speaker underwater to play with the whales, I feel awfully lonely. There I am, making a strange sound and sending it out underwater, just hoping a whale might connect what he sings to what I’m playing. Often they just ignore me, but in the best of moments, and such a moment is just as rare as playing along with human musicians, some real contact may happen. Here’s an example of one of my favorite such moments, from my CD “Whale Music” and my book “Thousand Mile Song”:

You'll have to go to the Times to listen. (BTW, Rothenberg plays clarinet.)

Mall Culture: Sexy Tomato Wet

Newport Mall in Jersey City, late Sunday morning, when few people are around. Though it's not the people I'm interested in so much as it is the mall itself. What I'm wondering is just how, imagewise, as it were, this is different from an open house at Mana Contemporary? Oh, sure, lots of

obvious differences. And you can see real art at Mana like nothing you see at the mall. 

Robots R Us: Hawks and Octopii

Robo-hawk:

With his Robirds, Nijenhuis had to figure out which parts of flapping-wing flight he could actually simulate. The big concept ended up being flexibility. Instead of just flapping from one joint like a rigid two-by-four, bird wings deform across their entire length as they move through the air.

For the Robirds, Nijenhuis complemented the basic hinging motion with a pitching motion on the wing tips–the further outward you go, the more the heavy-duty foam wings deform upwards and downwards. The result, when paired with some on-board sensors and sophisticated stabilization software, is a fairly convincing approximation of bird flight.

Krazy Lights

Where's the World Headed & the Rise of Cities, a Quickie

Scotland recently came close to pulling out of Great Britain. What’s that about? As the day of the vote drew near I’d see stories on the theme: If Scotland goes, what next? Catalonia? Quebec? Vermont? Is the world falling apart?

Maybe?

Is that good or bad?

Interesting question. Perhaps large nation states like the USA, China, India are too be to succeed and too big to fail. At the Federal Level America is approaching a stalemate. If the nation is ungovernable, what happens to national politics? Does is devolve to mere divide and plunder? Is the nation state obsolete? If so, what’s next?

I’ve been seeing books about cities, most prominently Benjamin Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. Has anyone read it? Here’s the blurb:

In the face of the most perilous challenges of our time—climate change, terrorism, poverty, and trafficking of drugs, guns, and people—the nations of the world seem paralyzed. The problems are too big, too interdependent, too divisive for the nation-state. Is the nation-state, once democracy's best hope, today democratically dysfunctional? Obsolete? The answer, says Benjamin Barber in this highly provocative and original book, is yes. Cities and the mayors who run them can do and are doing a better job.

Barber cites the unique qualities cities worldwide share: pragmatism, civic trust, participation, indifference to borders and sovereignty, and a democratic penchant for networking, creativity, innovation, and cooperation. He demonstrates how city mayors, singly and jointly, are responding to transnational problems more effectively than nation-states mired in ideological infighting and sovereign rivalries. Featuring profiles of a dozen mayors around the world—courageous, eccentric, or both at once—If Mayors Ruled the World presents a compelling new vision of governance for the coming century. Barber makes a persuasive case that the city is democracy’s best hope in a globalizing world, and great mayors are already proving that this is so.

Sounds good, but is it valid?

Meanwhile I’ve been reading Christopher Goto-Jones, Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction (2009). Though I know a bit about manga and anime, I’m certainly no expert about Japan; so I can’t judge the book against current scholarly literature. But, taking the book at face value, it tells a fascinating story (I’ve only read 2+ of 5 chapters). I’ve just been through the second chapter, “Imperial revolution: embracing modernity,” which is about the Meiji Restoration. What’s interesting, and compelling, is how drastically Japan was able to remake itself within a generation or two.

When Admiral Perry landed in 1853 the country was ruled by the samurai class. By 1880 the samurai class had dissolved, though The Samurai and its bushidô (way of the warrior) creed had become enshrined as a national myth.To be sure, this was no popular democratic uprising, nothing like it, but still, the change was dramatic. And it was not imposed from the outside (that wouldn’t happen until the late 1940s).

Could something that drastic happen in the United States? Inquiring minds want to know.

Adulthood in Flux

I just wanted to point out that yesterday’s post, The Next Level: Universal Children and a New Humanity, is the “other side” of my post, Solitaire (in Retirement). That post was specifically about my father, but treated him as an example of people who’d worked hard all their lives but, upon retirement, didn’t know how to spend their time. Now, it seems, if you’re high enough on the income totem pole you can hire a retirement coach to help you with the transition.

Well, if that’s what adulthood is, then there’s something deeply wrong with adulthood as it has developed in the industrialized West in the last century. And that, of course, was the point of yesterday’s post, which included a section on A. O. Scott’s NYTimes piece, “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.” It seems that a lot of people have decided that adulthood isn’t what it was cracked up to be.

But it’s one thing to reject adulthood as the culture has defined it. It’s another thing to come up with a new way of being adult. I haven’t the foggiest idea where that project is, but it’s worth serious thought, though not now. I note only that the so-called counter-culture of the 60’ and 70’ took a run at the problem, but wasn’t able to quite pull it off. Meanwhile, what do we make of a culture, Japan, that took expressive forms relegated to children in America–comics and cartoons–and developed them into adult forms–manga and anime?

Friday Fotos: Let's Go Exploring!

Taalim Tablas: Hoboken Arts & Music, 2014

Tabla players from the Taalim School of Indian Music, performing at the Hoboken Arts and Music Festival, Sept. 28, 2014.

Emily Allison Turonis, Hoboken Arts & Music, 2014

I've got more shots of her below, but I want you to look at that one for a few seconds before moving on. There's a quiet dignity and determination: 

Good old humankind, just surviving and moving along. 

Since the mic's not up to her face, she probably wasn't even singing at the moment. Maybe it was a pause between phrases, or maybe she was laying out so one of the other musicians could take it for a minute. Who knows? 

I mean, I don't really know. I was there. I took the shot. But I was concentrating on getting the shot, not on listening to the music, though I heard enough of it to know that it was very good.

But enough of this vamping in prose. Here's some more flix of Ms. Turonis, in full cry.