In his book "The Third Chimpanzee" Jared Diamond makes the case that human beings are not anything special. They do things just like other animals do, only slightly differently. Humans are animals, that have some special ability. Everyone knows what this ability is, it is the overblown brain of ours. It allows us to think, remember, organize thoughts, learn, communicate and teach. But what is special about that?
The specialness of this special ability is just that it gives us ability to think and talk about the ability itself. When we assume that we are special and superior to other animals, we do not talk about physical power, well there are lots of animals that will crush the best of us in hand to hand combats. We don't talk about our abilities to run, fly, swim... we are probably worse than the average in most of those. What allows us to be the kings of this planet is the ability to think.
But again, what is special about that? Take Giraffe for example. Giraffe is a unique animal if you only considered the length of the neck as the supreme feature to judge animals. Some horses, camels and ostriches have decent lengths. However, the giraffe stands shoulders above them all (literally!). If you measured necks of all animals, there will be a lot of them who will bunched at zero to inches neck, some more bunched at necks between 6 to 12 inches. But as you increase the neck length, fewer and fewer animals will occupy that interval. And as you reach the end, there will be many intervals that will be completely empty, and you reach the giraffe. The same thing will happen if you start dividing the animal kingdom on the length of their nose. The elephant will stand alone at the extreme, far superior from the other animals.
In this world, there are many evolutionary niches, where you can make livelihood by the characteristics you as a species possesses. Some make it using a good balance, some make it by reaching an extreme in something. Giraffes and elephants reach an extreme in one quality, whereas a sparrow does not have any extremes - just a combination of some good qualities in reasonable proportion.
One of these characteristics happens to be the brain size, or rather the brain capability. These two are of course different. The Neanderthal brain sizes were larger, but they certainly weren't smarter than the modern human beings. But as it happens, brain capability is just one of the many characteristics by which one can classify the whole animal kingdom. And of course we human beings stand in one extreme, farthest from the near zombies bunched together, and even further from the chimps and the dolphins who are a little bit more respectable.
But again what is special about it? It depends on what you are trying to understand by answering the question. If you are asking a simple matter of fact question of what advantage it gives in terms of evolutionary success, the answer is trememndous. We see it, since we have become the masters of this planet in simply few hundred thousand years. That is barely an eyeblink from the evolutionary standpoint.
If you are trying to find out if somehow we are "better" than other animals, then we need to pause and investigate objectively. "Better" is a highly charged word. There is no logic that says that ability to fly is "better" than the ability to swim. Why do we ask something is better or not? Are we asking, when push comes to shove, who should die out and who should survive? That is it okay to kill off all the non thinkers when there is an unavoidable natural calamity, to preserve the human beings? We don't always think in these terms, but this is the question that we have at the back of our mind when we try to think of ourselves as superior to say, cows. If we are trying to answer this question, we don't have any objective way to decide if intelligence is better than long neck, if humans should survive over giraffes.
Think of the species as points in the multidimensional space of characteristics. The axis could be as many as you want, provided you can attribute to everyone. Main ones I can think of are the sensitivities of the five senses, speed of moving, speed of flying, lengths of various parts, stregths - overall and individual body parts and so on. There may be tens of others. Various animals will be bunched together into small bins - animals that have similar properties. They obviously occupy the same niche. Humans will be close to small mice on speed. The whale will far outweigh everyone else. But the question we are trying to ask is "is there any criteria that tells us if any of these qualities are morally better?" The answer is not forthcoming. When you look at the species from the outside, the word morality itself starts losing its meaning. There is simply no way to decide. The only questions that we can attempt to answer is about usefulness for something.
The only way to decide this question is to go by "all species for themselves" attitude, and let the survival of the fittest begin. And there of course you know who is going to win, we got the gun and they aint got one!
But hasn't that been going on for the past few billions of years anyway?
Monday, June 16, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
Are viruses alive?
Ever since I was a kid I have wondered what living beings are. What exactly is the difference between a dog and a rock? Are they made out of different stuff? How did they come to be? For the longest time (till the age of 12) I believed that dogs and rocks are simply made of different stuff. Nobody taught me that. It just made kind of sense. Rocks are hard and stationary, whereas dogs are furry, they have muscles, and are full of energy. They are just different. When we learned things like "human body is 65% water" the confusion started creeping in.
When I got older, I started to understand that our bodies are made of the same stuff as all other inert material - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen etc. I heard statements like "scientists simulated early earth conditions, and amino acids (basic building blocks of life forms) were generated." I could not bridge the gap between molecules and life forms. How can presence of bricks mean buildings can be formed?
The more I knew, the more questions were formed. If plants are living, being then that means movement is not necessary for something to be alive. But how did living things come to be? When? Why?
All my questions were answered when I read the "The selfish gene" by Richard Dawkins. If you have not read it, please do. It paints a picture, a possible pathway of how molecules evolve into complex living organisms. (description of replicator to living beings journey).
Once you understand this the whole living versus non-living question is seen in completely different light. If you imagine your lineage far enough back, your ancestors will slowly start looking different and different. And at one point you will come across the original replicator molecule. You are certainly alive. And your hundred-million odd generation ago ancestor is a molecule. "He" is not alive. The question is, where do you draw the line? At what point in this lineage do you say this is where "alive" begins and "non-living" ends?
This problem is not trivial. It arises in the first place because like any other gray matter, this is a continuum. We discovered some obviously living beings, and some obviously non-living beings. We created the classes, the words, first and then started to populate those classes. Anything that we come across, now necessarily needs to go in either one of them.
Even the qualities that we associate with the living are not polarized quantities. Let me list some of the obvious ones.
Ability to move, to reproduce, to consume energy. But even these three are not without problems. Fire consumes energy. Fire certainly moves. And yes, it does reproduce itself. You can construct the same argument for water. I am not trying show that fire and water are living entities. What I am saying is that we do not have any specific objective test that tells us that something is alive.
Beyond these three the others start becoming little questionable. For example some definitions of life include
(Invitation to Life,: H. Curtis and N. Barnes, Worth Publishers, 1994)
1. They have the capacity to replicate themselves.
2. They have enzymes, and complex proteins essential for the chemical reactions needed for life.
3. Have a memebrane that separates the cell from the environment and gives it a distinct chemical identity.
The number 2 and 3 in this list smack of attempting to cleanly break the long chain of ancestors down into two classes. However the words "enzymes, proteins" imply a specific type of life. The need for a membrane and mention of cell is simply an attempt to draw a line in the sand. You and I don't have a "cell membrane", our cells do. We have skins. So according to this definition, you and I are alive, at the same time the billions of cells inside our bodies are life forms on their own. They do divide and replicate, you know.
The truth of the matter is that no matter how finely or broadly you try to draw lines, it is not possible. It may be useful to draw the lines somewhere. But we have to keep in mind that instead of making two buckets like living and non-living, we must accept that we what call "aliveness" is a continous variable. It is not a 1 - 0 property. Each entity has some properties of being alive. So you can probably assign a score that goes continuously from 0 to 1 and say that there is some degree of aliveness.
This sounds strange, but the strangeness is due to our predetermined conception of having two buckets - dead and alive. Yes or no. We don't entertain the huge range of phenomena that are "partly alive". And then wonder how come we have the gap. The belief in God or the supernatural comes entirely from this perceived gap. Only God (means no one except by miracle) can bridge this gap.
When I got older, I started to understand that our bodies are made of the same stuff as all other inert material - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen etc. I heard statements like "scientists simulated early earth conditions, and amino acids (basic building blocks of life forms) were generated." I could not bridge the gap between molecules and life forms. How can presence of bricks mean buildings can be formed?
The more I knew, the more questions were formed. If plants are living, being then that means movement is not necessary for something to be alive. But how did living things come to be? When? Why?
All my questions were answered when I read the "The selfish gene" by Richard Dawkins. If you have not read it, please do. It paints a picture, a possible pathway of how molecules evolve into complex living organisms. (description of replicator to living beings journey).
Once you understand this the whole living versus non-living question is seen in completely different light. If you imagine your lineage far enough back, your ancestors will slowly start looking different and different. And at one point you will come across the original replicator molecule. You are certainly alive. And your hundred-million odd generation ago ancestor is a molecule. "He" is not alive. The question is, where do you draw the line? At what point in this lineage do you say this is where "alive" begins and "non-living" ends?
This problem is not trivial. It arises in the first place because like any other gray matter, this is a continuum. We discovered some obviously living beings, and some obviously non-living beings. We created the classes, the words, first and then started to populate those classes. Anything that we come across, now necessarily needs to go in either one of them.
Even the qualities that we associate with the living are not polarized quantities. Let me list some of the obvious ones.
Ability to move, to reproduce, to consume energy. But even these three are not without problems. Fire consumes energy. Fire certainly moves. And yes, it does reproduce itself. You can construct the same argument for water. I am not trying show that fire and water are living entities. What I am saying is that we do not have any specific objective test that tells us that something is alive.
Beyond these three the others start becoming little questionable. For example some definitions of life include
(Invitation to Life,: H. Curtis and N. Barnes, Worth Publishers, 1994)
1. They have the capacity to replicate themselves.
2. They have enzymes, and complex proteins essential for the chemical reactions needed for life.
3. Have a memebrane that separates the cell from the environment and gives it a distinct chemical identity.
The number 2 and 3 in this list smack of attempting to cleanly break the long chain of ancestors down into two classes. However the words "enzymes, proteins" imply a specific type of life. The need for a membrane and mention of cell is simply an attempt to draw a line in the sand. You and I don't have a "cell membrane", our cells do. We have skins. So according to this definition, you and I are alive, at the same time the billions of cells inside our bodies are life forms on their own. They do divide and replicate, you know.
The truth of the matter is that no matter how finely or broadly you try to draw lines, it is not possible. It may be useful to draw the lines somewhere. But we have to keep in mind that instead of making two buckets like living and non-living, we must accept that we what call "aliveness" is a continous variable. It is not a 1 - 0 property. Each entity has some properties of being alive. So you can probably assign a score that goes continuously from 0 to 1 and say that there is some degree of aliveness.
This sounds strange, but the strangeness is due to our predetermined conception of having two buckets - dead and alive. Yes or no. We don't entertain the huge range of phenomena that are "partly alive". And then wonder how come we have the gap. The belief in God or the supernatural comes entirely from this perceived gap. Only God (means no one except by miracle) can bridge this gap.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
There is no such thing as Indian food
I am an Indian, living in the US. So I get asked a lot of questions about Indian Food. "Do you always cook Indian food at home?" "How did your mom cook naan, did you have tandoor at home?" And countless others.
I try to answer as politely as possible. No, we don't cook Indian food at home all the time, in fact my wife loves to cook different cuisines every day. No, we did not have tandoor, and my mom did not make naan even once. Rarely do I tell the real truth about Indian food. There is no such thing as Indian food.
This sounds a little crazy, after all when you go to a typical Indian restaurant in the US, there are those staples of tandoorie chicken, butter chicken, chicken masala and naan. Those certainly are Indian food, aren't they?
Yes they are.
So am I talking about the fact that they originated around Persia and were brought to India by Muslim rulers?
No I am not. If a food item is consumed in a sizable part of India, for last few hundred years, I don't give a damn about where it originated, and who brought it. It is Indian food.
Now I just gave definition of what Indian food is. How can I then say there is no such thing as Indian food?
Well, let me clarify. What I mean is that a typical foreigner has a specific idea of what Indian food is - mostly based on their experience from rastaurants. That includes some specific dishes, made with a set of ingredients and spices. The problem is that a huge majority of the Indians hardly ever eat that food. This is because of plethora of reasons - the typical North Indian dishes mentioned earlier are not part of the traditional diet of Southerners, and the Westerns and the Easterns. The other reasons are that many of them contain meat, which a lot of people don't eat because they are vegitarians or because they can't afford it. I for one, came from a family that had a traditional food from my state, and it did not include almost any dish from those available in a typical "Indian" restaurant.
India is a place where diversity rules. We have hundreds of languages, with thousands of different dialects. If you asked, what is the Indian language, there is no single answer. The same goes with the food. There are different flavors, spices, ingredients used in different regions. The quisines change by the region, by the religion, by the cast and the subcast. In that sense all those foods are Indian foods, yet there is no single set of dishes that we can call Indian food! True, we can accumulate all the dishes that are consumed in India in a sizable quantity for large enough number of years and call them Indian Food. And that will be different from a similarly gathered Italian food. But the two populations will be enoromously complex compared to the simple foreign-restaurant-Indian/Italian-Food. The restaurant food is just one edge of a tip of an iceberg. It is just one facet of the whole jewel that is Indian food, not unrelated to the rest of the structure, but simply does not do justice to the entire picture.
To explain this phenomenon in mathematical terms, imagine a space of recipes. Some of the axes will be ingredients, cooking times etc. This is very hard to do, but nevertheless, it can be done. In this space a particular dish can be represented by a point. The same dish with everything exactly the same, but extra salt will be another point right next to it, shifted by the amount of salt on the salt axis. So if you make the same dish multiple times, it will look like a tight bunch in the space, no two dishes are exactly same even though made by the same person. If you look at the same dish prepared by thousands of different people, it will appear as a much loser bunch in this space. Now, if you look at all the dishes that have been made in India for the past 500 years, say, you will a complex structure. Closest anology I can give is that of a tree. The branches of this tree may correspond to different regional cuisines. The leaves represent individual recipes. The real picture will be complicated based on which angle you look at it. For example bread and naan will have similar location along the ingredient axis. However, if you look at the cooking method axis they will be farther away. Kind of like looking at our tree from top down or from sideways. Two particular leaves will appear at the same location if you look from above. However, if they are at different height, you will see the difference when you look at it from the side.
Indian food is just an example of other larger more potent simplification problems. Grouping some things into one group is certainly not wrong. But forgetting that there are other things out there that belong in the group is definitely a problem. We use the words like jews, muslims, blacks in a single breath and make statements about them. (need some examples). What we know of that category, comes from a collective experience. This experience may not necessarily represent the whole population. But we nevertheless make those statements about the tip, about that one facet. It is like looking at one bunch of leaves and talking about the shape, size and expanse of the tree.
I try to answer as politely as possible. No, we don't cook Indian food at home all the time, in fact my wife loves to cook different cuisines every day. No, we did not have tandoor, and my mom did not make naan even once. Rarely do I tell the real truth about Indian food. There is no such thing as Indian food.
This sounds a little crazy, after all when you go to a typical Indian restaurant in the US, there are those staples of tandoorie chicken, butter chicken, chicken masala and naan. Those certainly are Indian food, aren't they?
Yes they are.
So am I talking about the fact that they originated around Persia and were brought to India by Muslim rulers?
No I am not. If a food item is consumed in a sizable part of India, for last few hundred years, I don't give a damn about where it originated, and who brought it. It is Indian food.
Now I just gave definition of what Indian food is. How can I then say there is no such thing as Indian food?
Well, let me clarify. What I mean is that a typical foreigner has a specific idea of what Indian food is - mostly based on their experience from rastaurants. That includes some specific dishes, made with a set of ingredients and spices. The problem is that a huge majority of the Indians hardly ever eat that food. This is because of plethora of reasons - the typical North Indian dishes mentioned earlier are not part of the traditional diet of Southerners, and the Westerns and the Easterns. The other reasons are that many of them contain meat, which a lot of people don't eat because they are vegitarians or because they can't afford it. I for one, came from a family that had a traditional food from my state, and it did not include almost any dish from those available in a typical "Indian" restaurant.
India is a place where diversity rules. We have hundreds of languages, with thousands of different dialects. If you asked, what is the Indian language, there is no single answer. The same goes with the food. There are different flavors, spices, ingredients used in different regions. The quisines change by the region, by the religion, by the cast and the subcast. In that sense all those foods are Indian foods, yet there is no single set of dishes that we can call Indian food! True, we can accumulate all the dishes that are consumed in India in a sizable quantity for large enough number of years and call them Indian Food. And that will be different from a similarly gathered Italian food. But the two populations will be enoromously complex compared to the simple foreign-restaurant-Indian/Italian-Food. The restaurant food is just one edge of a tip of an iceberg. It is just one facet of the whole jewel that is Indian food, not unrelated to the rest of the structure, but simply does not do justice to the entire picture.
To explain this phenomenon in mathematical terms, imagine a space of recipes. Some of the axes will be ingredients, cooking times etc. This is very hard to do, but nevertheless, it can be done. In this space a particular dish can be represented by a point. The same dish with everything exactly the same, but extra salt will be another point right next to it, shifted by the amount of salt on the salt axis. So if you make the same dish multiple times, it will look like a tight bunch in the space, no two dishes are exactly same even though made by the same person. If you look at the same dish prepared by thousands of different people, it will appear as a much loser bunch in this space. Now, if you look at all the dishes that have been made in India for the past 500 years, say, you will a complex structure. Closest anology I can give is that of a tree. The branches of this tree may correspond to different regional cuisines. The leaves represent individual recipes. The real picture will be complicated based on which angle you look at it. For example bread and naan will have similar location along the ingredient axis. However, if you look at the cooking method axis they will be farther away. Kind of like looking at our tree from top down or from sideways. Two particular leaves will appear at the same location if you look from above. However, if they are at different height, you will see the difference when you look at it from the side.
Indian food is just an example of other larger more potent simplification problems. Grouping some things into one group is certainly not wrong. But forgetting that there are other things out there that belong in the group is definitely a problem. We use the words like jews, muslims, blacks in a single breath and make statements about them. (need some examples). What we know of that category, comes from a collective experience. This experience may not necessarily represent the whole population. But we nevertheless make those statements about the tip, about that one facet. It is like looking at one bunch of leaves and talking about the shape, size and expanse of the tree.
Monday, April 21, 2008
2000 US election
Everyone remembers the 2000 presedential elections. The Florida confusion, the hanging chads, blurry eyes deciding if the vote was in or out, and the final result where a candidate who won the popular vote ended up losing the election.
The situation was ideal for media - the high stake, clash of ideologies, a very close race, and a controversy to end it all. The much touted y2k had fizzled out without any problems, disappointing the media moguls, but the presedential race delivered. The result was touted as indicative of a "polarized population" and a "failure of the system", because if every vote counted, how come the someone win more votes, and yet lose?
Polarization is a word that media loves. It brings out images of two hard lined grouped in an evenly matched tug of war. A wonderful contest, exciting fight, blow for blow and all the sport related verbiage which often gets used for describing elections.
Yet, how valid is the conclusion? Just because something split 50-50, does not mean there is polarization. In fact completely disinterested population who did not care who won will give exactly the same result. A blind toss of coin will give you those odds. Where does polarization come from? Sure there were some hard core Bush supporters and some who swore by Gore. There always are for all presedential elections. But the fact remains that an election is a social experiment. And just like any other experiment, it has its limitations. One of them is that it is simply counting votes, and not the severity of the voters feelings. So just because the numbers were evenly matched does not tell us anything about how much the voters care.
The other limitation is that of the minimum error margin. Every experiment has it. Scientists try to minimize theirs, but are never able to eliminate it. In social experiment like an election, the margin is fairly large - of the order of 1 to 2 percent maybe. It involves (in decreasing order of importance) who exactly is able to turn up on the election day, how many votes are invalid, how many votes are counted correctly. If a scientist found this result with the error margins involved, she would be forced to conclude that the two candidates are equal within the error margins. If the election commission announced something like this, there would be a huge uproar. It will be unacceptable. We want to think that every citizen's view counts, and hence every vote should be counted. That the citizens don't make the effort for voting to be close to 100% doesn't matter - it's a matter of principles. When someone talks about matters of principles, you should smell a black and white thinker. This is a classic example. For a population of 250 million, if two candidates differ by a few hundred votes, it does not really mean he is preferred. It means he won on that day. Those difference votes can be interpretted as convenient tiebreakers - nothing more.
To me the results simply said that the overall American population did not care whether Bush was elected or Gore got the job. But these kind of statements will not sell newspapers.
The situation was ideal for media - the high stake, clash of ideologies, a very close race, and a controversy to end it all. The much touted y2k had fizzled out without any problems, disappointing the media moguls, but the presedential race delivered. The result was touted as indicative of a "polarized population" and a "failure of the system", because if every vote counted, how come the someone win more votes, and yet lose?
Polarization is a word that media loves. It brings out images of two hard lined grouped in an evenly matched tug of war. A wonderful contest, exciting fight, blow for blow and all the sport related verbiage which often gets used for describing elections.
Yet, how valid is the conclusion? Just because something split 50-50, does not mean there is polarization. In fact completely disinterested population who did not care who won will give exactly the same result. A blind toss of coin will give you those odds. Where does polarization come from? Sure there were some hard core Bush supporters and some who swore by Gore. There always are for all presedential elections. But the fact remains that an election is a social experiment. And just like any other experiment, it has its limitations. One of them is that it is simply counting votes, and not the severity of the voters feelings. So just because the numbers were evenly matched does not tell us anything about how much the voters care.
The other limitation is that of the minimum error margin. Every experiment has it. Scientists try to minimize theirs, but are never able to eliminate it. In social experiment like an election, the margin is fairly large - of the order of 1 to 2 percent maybe. It involves (in decreasing order of importance) who exactly is able to turn up on the election day, how many votes are invalid, how many votes are counted correctly. If a scientist found this result with the error margins involved, she would be forced to conclude that the two candidates are equal within the error margins. If the election commission announced something like this, there would be a huge uproar. It will be unacceptable. We want to think that every citizen's view counts, and hence every vote should be counted. That the citizens don't make the effort for voting to be close to 100% doesn't matter - it's a matter of principles. When someone talks about matters of principles, you should smell a black and white thinker. This is a classic example. For a population of 250 million, if two candidates differ by a few hundred votes, it does not really mean he is preferred. It means he won on that day. Those difference votes can be interpretted as convenient tiebreakers - nothing more.
To me the results simply said that the overall American population did not care whether Bush was elected or Gore got the job. But these kind of statements will not sell newspapers.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Tall pencils, short pencils
Some events, ideas, occasions stick in your mind, because of the sheer magnitude of change they cause in your mind, yet being so simple. Like a magician saying "now you don't see it, and now you do" they force us to see things in different light. The world changes ever so slightly. Or sometimes something you knew to be true, is confirmed with such clarity that it is wonderful to just to be there. It is like a poem for the intellect. I have experienced many a moments like this. One of them was this.
On a PBS show about the difficulty of classifying species a scientist gave a neat demonstration. It lasted only 30 seconds, but the effect is etched into my memory forever. He took about 20 pencils, all various sizes, and said we want to separate these into groups. So he picked one at random, and started putting them into three piles of short, medium and tall. He did a very good job. But the reality struck like lightening when he put them all together again, this time in the order of increasing height. Lo and behold, they were simply increasing continuously. Each pencil was taller than the next one by about quarter inch.
The reality is rarely black and white. Pencils usually come in all sizes depending on how much they have been used. Yet we are lured into grouping them into different size buckets? Why?
Part of the reason is the process of discovery. We discover objects or phenomena one at a time. Just like the professor who picked pencils one by one. We look at the first one and say - this is a long one. The second might be short one. These two form seeds of the group. The next one needs to associated with either of them. And there the grouping starts. The pencils that formed a continuous spectrum of lengths going from short to long, become polerized into three groups of short, medium and long.
The other answer could be the language we use to capture this discovery and communicate it. Words are digital in nature. Yet they try to describe an analog world. This adds to the efficiency of the language. We have words like tall, short, long. To acoomodate the shades in between, we say things like midsize, longish, smallish. This increases the categories, but still does not change the digital nature of the meaning. It is like going from very low resolution to higher resolution, or smaller pixel images. Infinite resolution is never possible. For most part the short, shortish, longish, long kind of division is good enough. After all, pencils are not very important things. The important things in human psyche are things that cause danger. There too we divide the analog to digital gap by simply talking more about the event or object.
In most cases, the efficiency advantage that we get far outweigh the inaccuracies it produces. However there are some very charged words that force the categorization on the concepts themselves. Living and Nonliving are two such categories. We discovered that most things are either living or nonliving. Humans, tigers, dogs are living and rocks, water, soil are nonliving. These are very useful categories, because they posed different sorts of dangers, and advantages.
However, people start discovering objects in between, they need to belong either here or there. If living things are the ones that move, what about trees? And is river alive? Trees were firmly put on the living side and river on the nonliving side.
But onces these words are entrenched, and most known objects are classified in two groups, that's when the concepts start getting clobbered too. Everyone holds on to this polarization, because it is so useful. Then the question arises - how did life originate? Another such question is that of the missing link. The posing of the very question smacks of grouping. If you put humans and monkies into two poles, then you start asking where is the middle animal? It is like putting the pile of pencils into two groups of long and short and asking where are the midsize ones?
This is not a trivial, pedantic discussion. Humans have spent huge resources because of the problems created by this type of polarization. Just the question of how life originated has given birth to large number of religions, philosophies, cosmologies. The concept of evolution was simply ruled out of contention by this polerization. If it remained simply theoretical difference, it wouldn't matter too much. But millions of people have died in wars and persecutions that started with these differences.
On a PBS show about the difficulty of classifying species a scientist gave a neat demonstration. It lasted only 30 seconds, but the effect is etched into my memory forever. He took about 20 pencils, all various sizes, and said we want to separate these into groups. So he picked one at random, and started putting them into three piles of short, medium and tall. He did a very good job. But the reality struck like lightening when he put them all together again, this time in the order of increasing height. Lo and behold, they were simply increasing continuously. Each pencil was taller than the next one by about quarter inch.
The reality is rarely black and white. Pencils usually come in all sizes depending on how much they have been used. Yet we are lured into grouping them into different size buckets? Why?
Part of the reason is the process of discovery. We discover objects or phenomena one at a time. Just like the professor who picked pencils one by one. We look at the first one and say - this is a long one. The second might be short one. These two form seeds of the group. The next one needs to associated with either of them. And there the grouping starts. The pencils that formed a continuous spectrum of lengths going from short to long, become polerized into three groups of short, medium and long.
The other answer could be the language we use to capture this discovery and communicate it. Words are digital in nature. Yet they try to describe an analog world. This adds to the efficiency of the language. We have words like tall, short, long. To acoomodate the shades in between, we say things like midsize, longish, smallish. This increases the categories, but still does not change the digital nature of the meaning. It is like going from very low resolution to higher resolution, or smaller pixel images. Infinite resolution is never possible. For most part the short, shortish, longish, long kind of division is good enough. After all, pencils are not very important things. The important things in human psyche are things that cause danger. There too we divide the analog to digital gap by simply talking more about the event or object.
In most cases, the efficiency advantage that we get far outweigh the inaccuracies it produces. However there are some very charged words that force the categorization on the concepts themselves. Living and Nonliving are two such categories. We discovered that most things are either living or nonliving. Humans, tigers, dogs are living and rocks, water, soil are nonliving. These are very useful categories, because they posed different sorts of dangers, and advantages.
However, people start discovering objects in between, they need to belong either here or there. If living things are the ones that move, what about trees? And is river alive? Trees were firmly put on the living side and river on the nonliving side.
But onces these words are entrenched, and most known objects are classified in two groups, that's when the concepts start getting clobbered too. Everyone holds on to this polarization, because it is so useful. Then the question arises - how did life originate? Another such question is that of the missing link. The posing of the very question smacks of grouping. If you put humans and monkies into two poles, then you start asking where is the middle animal? It is like putting the pile of pencils into two groups of long and short and asking where are the midsize ones?
This is not a trivial, pedantic discussion. Humans have spent huge resources because of the problems created by this type of polarization. Just the question of how life originated has given birth to large number of religions, philosophies, cosmologies. The concept of evolution was simply ruled out of contention by this polerization. If it remained simply theoretical difference, it wouldn't matter too much. But millions of people have died in wars and persecutions that started with these differences.
Monday, April 14, 2008
What are gray matters?
I don't know why, but the world is obsessed with classification. There is almost a perverse, anal need for people to keep things (and ideas) in neat compartments. Whether there is an evolutionary reason that helped the well organized caveman to become the sophisticated human that he (or she) is now, or whether it comes from the parental bombardment of "keep your room clean" "keep things in their place" one will never know. [And one may spend billions of dollars of reasearch budget in trying to put the cause sqaurely in the bucket of nature or nurture!]
Given the complexity of the world, compartmentalization is inevitable. I guess it does have its advantages. We owe our existense and our level of civilization to those millions of unsung heros who spent a lifetime separating harmful things from beneficiary things.
But a good thing can be taken too far. It is this broad, naive separation that allows our leaders to talk in terms of "good versus evil" "us versus them" "black versus white" "tall versus short"... Well I made up the last one, but really, when you dig a little deep there is hardly any difference between an average Joe from "us" and a similar average Salim from "them" that a quick, mild makeover can't fix.
Gray matters are those concepts, ideas, people on the boundary. When I say boundary, it seems like a line - and that is a victory of those classification people right there. It is usually not a line, but a huge region that accounts for majority sometimes. You see these matters in every scientific endeavors. In biology you have to draw arbitrary lines between species, genra that are far from obvious. Even the "clear" demarkation amongst living and non living is no so clear when you examin the viral world. In economics we have the celebrated classes that are supposedly in struggle with each other. In politics there is nothing but classification - demographics, caste, religion, parties... The media that reports on all these further "simplify" matters by drawing polarizing conclusions from a neutral data. They give the beautiful science of Statistics, which alone has the idea of the complxity and continuity of all distributions; a bad name. I have not seen a more ironical irony - and believe me I have seen many!
It would not matter too much if all this simply led to minor differences of opinions, some quirks of human thinking, and polarization of people who watched "Lost" vs people who sweared by "Nips and Tucks"... We will simply dismiss it as a collective intellectual zit on a humanity that is still yet to mateur. However, these compartmental thinking traits cause wars, hatreds, and miseries. And that is why the gray areas matter.
Given the complexity of the world, compartmentalization is inevitable. I guess it does have its advantages. We owe our existense and our level of civilization to those millions of unsung heros who spent a lifetime separating harmful things from beneficiary things.
But a good thing can be taken too far. It is this broad, naive separation that allows our leaders to talk in terms of "good versus evil" "us versus them" "black versus white" "tall versus short"... Well I made up the last one, but really, when you dig a little deep there is hardly any difference between an average Joe from "us" and a similar average Salim from "them" that a quick, mild makeover can't fix.
Gray matters are those concepts, ideas, people on the boundary. When I say boundary, it seems like a line - and that is a victory of those classification people right there. It is usually not a line, but a huge region that accounts for majority sometimes. You see these matters in every scientific endeavors. In biology you have to draw arbitrary lines between species, genra that are far from obvious. Even the "clear" demarkation amongst living and non living is no so clear when you examin the viral world. In economics we have the celebrated classes that are supposedly in struggle with each other. In politics there is nothing but classification - demographics, caste, religion, parties... The media that reports on all these further "simplify" matters by drawing polarizing conclusions from a neutral data. They give the beautiful science of Statistics, which alone has the idea of the complxity and continuity of all distributions; a bad name. I have not seen a more ironical irony - and believe me I have seen many!
It would not matter too much if all this simply led to minor differences of opinions, some quirks of human thinking, and polarization of people who watched "Lost" vs people who sweared by "Nips and Tucks"... We will simply dismiss it as a collective intellectual zit on a humanity that is still yet to mateur. However, these compartmental thinking traits cause wars, hatreds, and miseries. And that is why the gray areas matter.
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