Flying Cars, Flying Debris, and Flying Pigeons with Eyebeams

Amid all the current talk of infrastructure and road-building, you don’t hear many people making a case for promoting flying cars instead. As my friend Michael Mendelsohn (who also happens to be the husband of playwright Lynn Rosen, mentioned in yesterday’s entry) likes to point out, though, you have to wonder whether the creation of the Federal Highway System six decades ago may have had the unintended side effect of undermining and retarding the market for personal flying craft, which might otherwise have existed (he also notes that he pities the researcher who worked on that linked article who had to confirm the obscure factoid that Alaska is the only state in which taking off from a public road is legal).

I think it best to avoid treating questions such as whether we’ve been robbed of flying cars in a good/bad, should/should not way. The question isn’t simply whether we ought to have flying cars (though if Samuel L. Jackson continues to portray Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., in Avengers movies, I certainly hope we’ll see Fury’s flying car). Rather, process is the point: In econ, science, tradition, and biology alike, we should keep in mind that when we inhibit or encourage growth in one area, there tends to be corresponding spread or contraction in others (and in the economic arena, the market, not subsidies and regulations, tends to find the most efficient mix and the most reasonable pathways).

Systems often evolve around the impediments placed in their way, but they may be wasting energy in doing so, in ways that we do not even perceive. Stop immigrants from entering Arizona and you may just cause lots of people to waste their time rerouting to California, for instance. (And in the specific case of the Federal Highway System, there are arguments to be made that it fostered militarism, shattered ecosystems and migration patterns, and undermined local communities to boot, but we don’t have time to get into all that.)

•••

Speaking of “routing around damage” (as the computer people say), I was saddened to hear about the almost heavy-handedly symbolic collision of a Russian satellite and an Iridium satellite (Iridium having at one time been the great hope for a completely private satellite communications network, later sold for a song and now heavily dependent on defense contracts) — but on a happier note, the suddenly-heightened problem of space debris circling the Earth reminds me of the odd old sci-fi sitcom Quark, starring Richard Benjamin as a space garbage collector. At least, I’m pretty confident I didn’t just hallucinate the series.

And speaking of hallucinations and high technology, I have only just learned that overrated and half-mad inventor Nikola Tesla believed that a friendly magical pigeon with shining eyebeams was the source of his inspiration.

But if you prefer fantasy to scientific reality anyway, I’ll leave you with these links to interviews by my friend Joel Keller, of Joss Whedon, Bob Newhart, and Eddie Izzard.

Book Selection(s): Ray Bradbury and the Romance of Old Times/New Times

ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (February 14, 2009)

The “stimulus” bill should have been horror enough for one week — spending an amount about equal to a twelfth of the entire GDP, which is a bit like just announcing that every dime in the country will simply be moved three inches to the left (except worse because that shift will move many of those dimes into the pockets of government and its inefficient, failure-prone buddies).

However, this week also saw a children’s book holocaust, since ludicrously stringent anti-lead regulations, if anyone cares, have just made it illegal to sell or even loan to children any item produced before 1985 unless it goes through expensive lead testing. The result is that huge numbers of old children’s books and toys were simply discarded this week by devastated secondhand book and toy stores (but then, books before 1985 do not have Leader Obama in them, so they can’t be very good — more on that next week at Lolita Bar, though).

The crazy regulations (which my co-workers have been warning people about for months) are like something out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 — so now’s a good time to look at Bradbury and some other items that touch on the tension between building a future and too-hastily discarding the past — a dozen such texts altogether, in fact:

•The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays is a collection of three smart, fanciful plays by Bradbury, reminding me a bit of the smart-but-fanciful (albeit less mid-century and more postmodern) short plays of Lynn Rosen (or the surreal verse plays Richard Ryan likes to produce). In the title entry, we get a simple, Treasure of the Sierra Madre-like look at the solidarity and divisions that can be produced by poverty, as six men decide to purchase and time-share a fabulous-looking suit with the potential to change their lives (an idea rooted in Bradbury’s real experiences of youthful poverty, lest anyone think he’s merely slumming).

“The Veldt,” a better-known play, comes closer to hitting on the conservative message Bradbury intended to convey in 451 — not simply that censorship is wrong, Bradbury says, but that we are in danger of losing our culture if we forget the works of the past in favor of shallower entertainments and shallower emotional relationships. “The Veldt” depicts children who are largely ignored by their well-meaning but lazy and high-tech parents — and so take revenge by using their highly-realistic video screen playroom to depict their parents’ repeated killing by lions.

Most philosophically satisfying from my perspective, though, is the Postman-like play that completes the Bradbury collection: “To the Chicago Abyss,” in which an old man in the future is the only person still crazy and rebellious enough to speak of the things the impoverished society has lost. As Bradbury notes in his introduction, the play deliberately does not merely celebrate aristocratic high culture or the hopes of the downtrodden proletariat but simple, everyday, bourgeois, American pop-culture/trash pleasures that we have every right to enjoy and take pride in, such as candy bars and portable radios and canned foods — all things prior centuries would have envied, though we are often guilt-tripped into forgetting that by the hateful intellectuals and cultural gatekeepers of both right and left (and are forgetful about it because of our own ingratitude).

As the old man rants: “Let one man want wine, another lounge chairs, a third a batwing glider to soar the March winds on and so you build even greater electropterodactyls.”

I am reminded of a movie project Pat Dinizio told me he was thinking about, in which nostalgia-loving hipsters would have to become the rebuilders of society. As I’ve said before, we need both memory and imagination, and neither is very interesting alone.

•Even things that are completely imaginary have history to them, by the way, which makes it interesting to read Skeptical Inquirer’s Jan./Feb. 2009 UFO retrospective issue. If it weren’t obvious enough (from the lack of hard evidence) that the UFO phenomenon is likely all in our heads, this issue’s article on the different, faddish phases of the phenomenon (for sixty-two years now) helps make it obvious that the things people see in the sky, lurking in ambiguous shadows at their windows, or abducting them in their dreams pretty obviously follow the aesthetics of the time: enemy saucers in the 1940s, creeping infiltrator-beings in the 1950s, messianic messages in the 1960s, then abductions, New Age spiritual missions, and government conspiracies.

And I recall noting in the Brown Daily Herald way back circa 1990 that there were also unmistakably gendered elements to UFO and supernatural stories, with men enjoying stories of dangerous invaders or government cover-ups and women liking tales of spiritual uplift — a point confirmed by the Skeptical Inquirer article and parodied in an insightful scene on X-Files a decade ago, when paranoid Mulder was chastised by Scully’s New Age sister for (rather hypocritically) looking down at New Age claims, telling him, “Just because it’s happy doesn’t mean it’s stupid.” Of course, in the real world, people who make the sorts of claims they do might both be considered stupid.

But then, maybe I’m wrong about both spirituality and UFOs. We’ll get a chance to debate these things at Lolita Bar, too, since after our Feb. 19 debate on the state of conservatism and our March 4 debate on sci-fi, we’ll move on to an April 1 debate on religion and, if all goes according to plan (after a May 6 debate on animals), a June 3 debate on, yes, UFOs — during which I promise to be a polite and neutral host, skeptic though I am (incidentally, the religion-defender on April 1, Rabbi Simcha Weinstein, like the Ray Bradbury book described above, was sent to me by Dawn Eden, so my thanks once again to her).

•A starkly fantasy-free look at the past can be gleaned from the fascinating book The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible! by Otto Bettmann, best known as the founder of the Bettmann archives, from whom so many people like me in writing or journalism have rented archival photos over the years. Tired of seeing people rent and talk about the most glowy and lovely aspects of the Gilded Era in particular, Bettmann decided to write essays built around marvelous photos and cartoons of the real century-ago world Americans lived in, from the crowded tenements to New York City streets full of horse dung and wandering pigs, the inefficiency and waste exacerbated by machine politics and rampant hucksterism. Thank goodness I am not living in — or smelling — the New York City that once was. No summer heap of garbage bags today can rival the foul rendering plants and soot of just a few generations past. And one can’t help, like Bettmann, taking on a bit of a Mr. Burns/Herman T. Zweibel tone in discussing it all.

•I should confess to not having read How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, though he (a) is cited heavily in the Bettmann book, (b) is easily read online, and (c) was praised to me by a nice older woman named Rose Marie — who apparently lives in my building, eats and drinks occasionally at Dresner’s across York Avenue, and tells me (seconded by building super Albert, who was also at Dresner’s that night) that our building is quite historic. Our block, just north of virtually-unknown Cherokee Place on the Upper East Side and south of diminutive East Side Drive, was built a century ago precisely to be improved housing for workers, a high-minded and progressive retort to the tenements of the Lower East Side, down near Lolita Bar. I’ve said before that the Upper East Side and the Lower East Side are two of my favorite places, representing an important yuppie/punk dichotomy in my character, and now I know that my building is almost literally the Anti-Lower East Side.

•But if you want new reasons to fear the Lower East Side, consider checking out comedienne/performance artist Rev. Jen’s new ReallyCoolNeighborhood.com site, advertising her periodic performances based on the DIY “art star” scene down there, and giving you just a tiny, somewhat sanitized glimpse of why I really worry about a lot of Rev. Jen’s friends and hope they don’t all end up in asylums or with serious dope habits, except in onstage sketches, of course.

•Ensuring that we will not long have to suffer deprivation and poverty even with the government doing nigh-apocalyptic stupid things like the bailout/stimulus bill, the inventors celebrated at Popular Mechanics‘ annual Breakthrough Awards are a great injection of hope for tomorrow in a world full of pessimism. With a little guidance from helpful co-host Seth Porges, attending last year’s Breakthrough Awards was enough to remind me that no matter how many things go wrong, humanity is still capable of experimenting and dreaming its way toward inexpensive hand-operated machines and mini-mills for use by people living in the Third World (to take the most-honored project, by MIT’s Amy Smith, as an example), microchips capable of circulating through the body detecting tumors (chips created by Harvard’s Mehmet Toner), the Pur water-purifier additive so effective you can drop it in water with fecal matter in it and turn it clear and drinkable, or the Pulse Smartpen that records audio while you take notes and correlates the resulting scrawls to the audio recording for later playback. The world will be OK, I suspect, no matter how low our stocks drop in the next few years.

•After all, people still managed to have fun even circa 1940, which is around the time the bizarre Fun Encyclopedia that girlfriend Helen gave me for Christmas was created (and I hope she likes what I gave her for Valentine’s Day today — we cannot live solely on a philosophical love of past or future). The Fun Encyclopedia is a poignant and often unintentionally self-parodic reminder of just how little there was to do back then: a thousand pages of frankly lame, somewhat desperate, and often almost offensive party-game suggestions such as throwing a Hardluck Hobo Party (at which not everyone is given an apple), a Slum Party (at which two performers speak in mock-Irish accents and are then symbolically victimized by crime through the use of cap-pistols), a strangely dry description of inviting someone to try and hit a target with his finger while blindfolded but arranging to have someone bite his finger, boulder-throwing, brain-teasing “conundrums,” and a “Jim Crow Is No Mo’” party guaranteed to bring laughter unless “your friends are hopeless,” plus a brief essay on the pro’s and con’s of “nonsense,” which modern experts apparently say is OK in small doses.

•I showed the bizarre encyclopedia to both professional puzzle-maker Francis Heaney and Todd Zuniga, editor of the literary journal Opium, the latter of whom, as I predicted, liked it so much he was tempted to reprint sections in Opium. This should make perfect sense to anyone who has read that journal, since there is an unmistakably game-like quality to many of the stories and poems in it. Very literary yet at times delightfully and self-consciously juvenile, it often contains stories about something whimsical happening with a “serious” twist, such as waking up to find out your dog can talk — but that he only talks about the Holocaust (I made that one up, but just barely). In the first issue, Zuniga — who, fittingly, has worked for Rockstar Games (the videogame manufacturers behind such classics as Grand Theft Auto) — sets the pace with a tale of a boyfriend so giving that he eventually starts losing body parts to his needy girlfriend. That’s a talking dog story but also (unlike some cutesy-for-cutesy’s-sake exercises) a disturbingly plausible metaphor for some relationships (not mine, though — Helen’s a trooper). Another piece in that first issue I loved was created by the simple but brilliant game-like means of corresponding with a series of spam e-mail senders as if they were engaged in serious, thoughtful, emotionally-significant bonding, climaxing with an angry denunciation by our author/correspondent of his penpal’s poor grammar and spelling in one missive that reads, says our author, as if his new friend has thrown his keyboard down a staircase or something.

•And it was at Opium’s most recent New York event that I saw a talk by the founder of the stripped-down but literarily interesting site TheRumpus.net, which should serve as another reminder that we need not take this whole collapse-of-the-economy thing lying down. Go out and create on the cheap — as our ancestors certainly did — or you have no one to blame but yourself.

•In fact, the aforementioned Rumpus founder noted that part of his inspiration was hearing Arianna Huffington tell him she loved the idea for his site — but then admitting to himself that she was too busy with more lucrative ventures to pay much attention to it. That’s ironic, since it means that blogs like HuffingtonPost.com are now the quasi-mainstream media that younger, fringier bloggers in some sense aspire to become. And they’re in luck! Because whatever its political crimes, and they are indeed severe, HuffingtonPost has done the world a favor by publishing The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, which is indeed thorough, informative, and useful — and just happens to include among its contributors writer Laura Vanderkam, one of my fellow Phillips Foundation Fellows, who perhaps will join us this coming Thursday at Lolita Bar, when our fellow Fellow Heather Wilhelm will be one of the speakers, before Silber and Sager duke it out about the prospects of conservatism (Vanderkam also had a great piece about self-employment in the recent issue of Manhattan Institute’s City Journal).

One amusing bit of tangential, very cautious advice from page 15 of the Huffington guide, by the way: “The term ‘weblog’ was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, the editor of Robot Wisdom (itself a blog, albeit one with some nasty anti-Semitism bopping around on it, so we don’t recommend you humor him by visiting the site).” Rocketry, Volkswagens, blogs, summoning Hellboy — is there anything those Nazis can’t do?

•Seriously, though, people who really want to build a better culture know that a strong central state is no way to do it — more often an impediment, as I was reminded by the dry but informative tome Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship in the United States (edited by Diana Furchtgott-Roth). Want to know how the young or the Latino are faring in starting businesses? You’ll find stats and charts on such questions in here (another reminder things aren’t as completely awful as they used to be, in some ways). As it happens, Helen won this book, and I won a copy of Ryan Sager’s Elephant in the Room, in the raffle at a recent New York Young Republicans Club party, and so we traded (she may get Sager to autograph the book Thursday at Lolita). I swear the raffle wasn’t fixed.

•In conclusion, since I’ve been contrasting the old days and new throughout this month’s Book Selections, let me dip back into the recent past — to my own Book Selections from December — and note again the book The Tyranny of Liberalism by James Kalb. Like me, you may differ with some of his ultimate conclusions, which are rooted in religious and strongly-traditionalist conservatism of a sort that even most Republicans these days would not understand, modernists that they are — but you might still benefit from hearing his very thorough outsider’s perspective (as it were) on the entire liberal order of modernity — the whole assumption that efficiency, statistics, pleasure, and equality are good things. Few books I’ve read do a better job of enabling you to step back and see as if for the first time a modern world that previously seemed just commonsensical and natural, with all its implicit, rarely-questioned assumptions. I dare say bulk purchases for polisci classroom use might be called for.

Of course, at times, Kalb frankly sounds as embittered (albeit much more reserved in his rhetoric) as the right-wing, quasi-anarchic superhero/narrator Rorschach from Watchmen — railing against the filthy, meaningless lives of average New Yorkers. Ah, but more about Rorshach in next month’s Book Selection(s) entry, gentle reader…

Kung Fu, Killer Cyborgs, and Motherly Love

Before celebrating romantic love tomorrow on Valentine’s Day, let’s pause to salute motherly love — and the return tonight of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a show most people probably think of as driven by action sequences and sci-fi concepts but which owes most of its emotional power to the viscerally-convincing conceit that a woman will do anything necessary, even sacrifice other people, to keep her son alive, since he is, after all, the human race’s only hope.  Despite the obvious appeal of the robot-filled show to nerd males like me, there must be more than a few moms out there watching it and thinking “This feels right somehow.”

(What feels less right about the show is the strange contrast between the actress in the title role, who is British but sounds so flawlessly American that it’s almost alarming — they can imitate our voices! — and the actress playing the series’ most-advanced Terminator, namely Shirley Manson from the band Garbage, whose pale Scottishness and robotic demeanor somehow combine to make me feel as if I’m suddenly watching Doctor Who, interfering with my suspension of disbelief.  But then, I won’t have to suspend my disbelief long, since I have no intention at this time of getting a digital converter box, do not have cable, and fully expect that if I watch tonight’s episode — along with the premiere of the new show Dollhouse from Summer Glau’s old boss, Joss Whedon — it will be the last TV broadcast I see for a long, long time, which is just as well.)

For a beautifully violent display of daughterly love for a mother, though, I recommend the Thai martial arts movie Chocolate, which opened last week, from the makers of the Jackie-Chan-level martial arts film Ong-Bak.  Chocolate starts out slow, almost silly, and builds to such an acrobatic climactic melee that you’ll wonder how they could possibly have done it without injuring lots of people — and then you’ll see easily the most disturbing blooper reel full of injuries ever during the credits.  How could they do it without injuries?  They couldn’t.

The cutesy but effective premise is that a delicate-looking, autistic teenage girl whose nearly-only talent is imitating kung fu fighters on TV goes around innocently demanding the money that is owed to her ailing mother by a bunch of gangsters — then beating the crap out of them and their minions when they won’t pay up.  By the end, it’s like ballet, I tell you.

But for more on love and sci-fi — and more on the perpetual struggle to balance the claims of past and future — join me for my Book Selection(s) of the Month entry tomorrow, featuring Ray Bradbury and much more.

Darwin Is 200 Today

Congratulations to Charles Darwin on the 200th anniversary of his birth today. Shame on roughly half of the peasant population of the U.S., who feel compelled to reject the most basic facts about biology because their baseless religious beliefs might thereby be threatened. Science may not have all the answers to life’s problems, but neither does stupidity.

With Valentine’s Day coming up this Saturday, please take a moment to marvel at the fact that we wouldn’t fully understand the origins of the emotional attraction living things feel for each other without the insights Charles Darwin offered a century and a half ago, about the evolutionary incentives creating the reproductive impulse and the desire to protect kin — malleable though they may be to some extent in creatures as rational as ourselves. (We may get one or two Darwin-bashers at Lolita Bar one week from tonight when Ken Silber and Ryan Sager debate the question “Has the Right Hit Bottom Yet?” so consider that potential learning experience an extra reason to show.)

Take an additional moment to appreciate the hardships scientists endure to perform their research on animal life, whether it’s Darwin traveling to the Galapagos, Dr. Will Marshall (seen in the picture above) traveling to the “Land of the Lost” in an alternate timeline, or the unfortunate Ph.D. student in England whose immense bag of lizard dung was mistakenly thrown out by maintenance people.

•••

Even kids can have an intuitive sense, I think, of what seems evolutionarily-plausible and what does not, just as some of us were nerdy enough to recognize that, say, a cartoon of a spaceship shaped like a tree was probably disregarding engineering efficiency (even if we didn’t fully understand engineering). That hasn’t stopped fantasists from depicting some crazy and evolutionarily-unlikely monsters over the years, though, from the absurdly super-massive Godzilla to the even less-plausible “thought beasts of Krypton” (essentially hippos with TV sets for heads that display the thoughts of people standing nearby), creatures DC Executive Editor Dan Didio would reportedly like to see brought back in the new Superman: World of New Krypton series.

As DC Comics editor Scott Nybakken once said sarcastically to me and professional manga-seller Ali Kokmen, “That’s such a useful evolutionary adaptation, I can’t believe it hasn’t happened already.” Ah, Nybakken, that cynic spawned by (non-Kryptonian) scientist parents — but you’ll hear more about him next month. For now: congratulations again, Mr. Darwin.

Monkey Butler vs. Robot Butler (and Oompa-Loompas)

Humanity is a string stretched across an abyss between monkey and robot.

To the extent humans dream, likely in vain, of taming both the animal nature from which we have evolved and the immortal machine-people we are almost inevitably destined to become, they may entertain fantasies of turning the twin archetypes of monkey and robot into mere servants — butlers.

As it happens, my girlfriend Helen (a traditionalist conservative) strongly prefers (aesthetically) the idea of having a monkey butler, while my libertarian sci-fi comics-creator friend Paul Pope is perhaps best known for depicting a robot butler character, powered by the chemical THB. I can sympathize with both sides, having marveled at a chimpanzee bartender on either That’s Incredible or Those Amazing Animals decades ago and dreamt often of a world where robots relieve us of all physical labor.

Perhaps a debate on this topic between Helen and Paul is in order (it would at least afford an opportunity to advertise a “Rittelmeyer vs. Pope” clash and excite Catholics) — but instead we’ll discuss other divisions on the right at Lolita Bar on Feb. 19, so come see that.

•••

Before that, though, we must celebrate the 200th birthday of Darwin tomorrow, and in the meantime…

…today is the eighty-third birthday of the man who should appear next to the entry for “deadpan” in the dictionary: Leslie Nielsen (reportedly a Republican, by the way). Among the numerous Vaudeville-flavored bits of silliness on the hilarious and short-lived 80s sitcom Police Squad, which spawned the Naked Gun movies, was an introductory shot of Nielsen as Lt. Drebin driving a squad car with a chimpanzee in a cheap suit in the passenger seat, with Drebin’s voiceover informing us that he’d been investigating a murder at the zoo and was now returning to headquarters to question a suspect. That’s comedy (and speaking of deadpan comics in their eighties, kudos to the casting genius who hired notoriously not-dead actor Abe Vigoda, one of my fellow Upper East Side residents, to be the voice of the Grim Reaper in a new H&R Block TV ad — subtle!).

Another random Police Squad moment I loved was Drebin’s shoeshine boy informant telling him that if he goes up against the local mob leader, “you’d better watch out for his goon Luka,” to which Drebin, deadpan as always, asks, “What’s a goonluka?”

Perhaps the moment on the series that makes me laugh most, though, is Drebin unexpectedly drifting into a reverie about his gay lover of long ago (after a crying widow asks him if he knows what it’s like to live with a truly good man), ending with his glum recollection, “They ran him out of town like a common pygmy.” And that brings us to the Oompa-Loompas…

•••

I’m not sure the Oompa-Loompa part of this Drudge-linked article from last week about sorority hazing at Cambridge fits into the article’s overall moral outrage. Do the British think there’s something shocking or wrong about “frolicking with Oompa-Loompas” (or rather, dwarfs dressed as Oompa-Loompas)? I can understand the traditional aversion to sex antics in public, but what do they have against little people per se?

Of course, some politically-correct people will claim they’re concerned for the Oompa-Loompas’ sakes, that they’re being exploited or something. But that’s ridiculous. Being “exploited” in this way is sometimes your best ticket to the party. If you’re seven feet tall, you make a good Chewbacca. If you’re four feet tall, you make a good Oompa-Loompa. The world would be a far better, more rational place if we were all comfortable admitting that.

Some, I suppose, will lament working conditions for the Oompa-Loompas and so forth — though if they seem happy enough to sing on the job, how bad a life could it be? The Oompa-Loompas just need a prosperous economy, not politically-correct, Marxist nonsense and identity politics. If I were a dwarf, though, I’d dress like I was from Middle Earth and make people listen to my theories on mysticism and dragons. Instant spiritual-leader cred, and women at Renaissance fairs would probably have sex with me.

But to get back to the primatology stuff for a moment: I hear they’re remaking Conquest of the Planet of the Apes as a stand-alone movie — about the first hyper-intelligent ape-slave in the near future to say “No!” to his human overlords and start a rebellion. There’s your revolution if you’re looking to liberate cinematic slaves.

Scientific Caution, Political Hopes

There are, it must be said, legitimate scientific reasons to be cautious about embracing sociobiology too readily.  For one thing, we should avoid the temptation to concoct “just so” stories about each and every human trait as if it had significant survival value.

Genes (somewhat like traditions) get passed along in bundles, called alleles, that may mix the useful and the useless.  Some genetic traits of no great value may be lucky enough to be “along for the ride” on an allele containing other, far more useful traits.  If people pay a lot of attention to hair, does that mean shiny hair was always an important sexual signal, indicating good health, as some sociobiologists have hypothesized?  Or is it simply an inconsequential trait that happens to correlate with more useful but less glamorous ones, such as skin that’s less likely to develop infections?  Some traits might even be counter-productive but lucky enough to be along for the ride with highly useful ones — or simply too embedded in the system of our biology to weed out in a handful of generations (does anyone think that the vestigial ticking timebomb called an appendix is maximally efficient?).

It’s an imperfect world, full of imperfect creatures and inefficient behavior patterns.  But start looking at the world as the result of ongoing weeding-out processes, with the best available option in an array of imperfect ones tending to win out, and it all begins to make a lot more sense.

E-mail isn’t perfect, but it was a more effective solution than fax machines, so e-mail spreads and faxes wane.  Taboos against women in the workplace sidelined half the workforce, so those taboos — which made somewhat more sense when there was far more work to be done in the home (making clothes from scratch, etc.) — erode.  Communist central planning can’t get the job done, so it crumbles.  Proto-humans were smarter hunters or quicker reproducers than the other apes, so, for all their faults, they proliferated and left descendants who rule the world — and who sometimes show a terrible ingratitude toward the processes that got them here, even denying that those processes exist.  Forgetting the past isn’t a very wise or conservative thing to do.

Here’s a suggestion for a (grand-fusionist) truce: the left admits that Darwinian thinking vindicates much of what the right is saying about human nature, tradition, and market processes.  In return, the right shows that it knows when to embrace Progress and gives Darwin some long-overdue respect.

Tomorrow, though: some comic relief in the form of birthday boy Leslie Nielsen and the archetype of the monkey butler.

Religious Objections (Some of Them Veiled) to Darwin

So, Darwin, for all the conflict he has inspired, can sometimes bring left and right a little closer.  By offering a model for human behavior that vindicates competitive sorting processes (not only biology but tradition, markets, and science itself), Darwinian thinking could provide an explanation of change over time, an explanation that unifies rationalist, moralist, traditionalist, capitalist, and Progressive threads of Western thought.  These threads have been separated since roughly the eighteenth-century Enlightenment — at great cost to our intellectual life — with the right-left rift only the most obvious manifestation.

But a reunification is unlikely.  Our cultural house will probably remain divided, and for the obvious reason.  Most on the right will not stand beside the left and say “We are all Darwinists now” as long as Darwin is seen as subversive of religion.  There have been occasional signs of rapprochement over the years, such as a pro-sociobiology series of articles in the conservative magazine National Review that included a piece called “Origins of Conservatism.”  But more conservatives sound like Jeffrie Murphy, professor of philosophy and law at Arizona State University, who once wrote a sociobiology-friendly book entitled Evolution, Morality, and the Meaning of Life but years later told me, “I am now inclined to take more seriously a religious perspective on moral matters…the village atheist/science worshipper person present in that book now strikes me as a shallow fellow indeed.”

•••

Convinced that the materialist account of life is reductionist, a tiny band of conservative scientists have even been working in the opposite direction from the sociobiologists, you might say, attempting to show that the complexities of biology can only be explained by rejecting Darwin and invoking “intelligent design,” some unseen maker.  Intelligent design theorists have gotten press attention far out of proportion to their numbers and influence within scientific circles (and I’m giving them a little more right now, I must admit).  By studiously avoiding using religion as an authoritative source, referring only to scientific observations such as the surprising complexity of cell structures, the intelligent design theorists avoid becoming the outright laughingstocks that their predecessors, the creationists, were (with their accounts of dinosaurs being killed by the Flood, etc.).  Like the creationists, though, they claim that it is Darwinism that is dogma.

Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, author of the anti-evolution book Darwin’s Black Box, told me he thinks sociobiology is a fad, one more example of evolutionists telling stories that can explain anything they choose.  “It’s superficially plausible, which is why I guess it sells.  There are some anatomical similarities between chimps and humans, and evolutionists are always good at pointing out that the similarities can imply common descent…The fact is, nobody knows what it would take to develop a language instinct in something that looks remarkably like a person but didn’t have that language instinct.”  His prediction, then, for the fate of sociobiology?  “I predict that sociobiology will draw a picture of humanity that is remarkably similar to the personal predilections of the people who subscribe to it, and after a while it will fade away.”

•••

Intelligent design theorists routinely claim that species-making differences simply could not arise in the few billion years of life on Earth, and many conservatives are happy to take them at their word.  Anti-Darwinists ought to at least be given pause, though, by the incredible variation that has taken place just within dog populations in the past few thousand years, in some cases mere centuries or decades.  Who, if arriving from another planet and lacking familiarity with Darwinian theory, would have thought that wolf-like creatures could beget St. Bernards and chihuahuas in a just a few thousand generations?  They are as strikingly different in their way as chimps and humans, but we know dogs have a common ancestry.

The anti-Darwinists might respond that we know the lineage of dogs but that for other, more ancient animals we lack “transitional” fossils showing one species turning into another.  The fact is, though, that every fossil is transitional, since each generation is constantly blending into the next, with changes happening very gradually.  It’s not as if one should expect to find something like a werewolf in the fossil record, transmuting before our eyes from one species into another — though if the anti-Darwinists need something that blatant, recently-unearthed feathered lizards ought to count for something.

If God designed life on Earth, there is absolutely no evidence of it.  He would seem to have designed it to look exactly as though it resulted from billions of years of unplanned evolution.  From mosquito populations that shift toward a higher proportion of mosquitoes who prefer human blood after their supply of rat hosts diminishes, to the widely acknowledged phenomenon of bacterial antibiotic resistance (caused because each generation of bacteria descends from those bacteria that were resistant to the previous round of antibiotics), evolution is happening in small, gradual ways all the time, all around us.

Luckily, even the Vatican acknowledges this and discourages claiming that every remaining gap in our knowledge is evidence for the direct intervention of God.

Kitcher vs. Singer: Two Views of Ev-Psych's Relevance

Sexual double standards. An instinctual moral sense. Innate tribalism. Tradition vindicated as functional. Markets vindicated as a natural process. It all begins to sound as if Darwin’s world is a rather conservative one (except for requiring no God, of course).

Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy of science at University of California at San Diego, wasn’t happy about this when I communicated with him about it a decade ago. “E.O. Wilson, it should be noted, was a genuine liberal, sometimes distressed by his own conclusions. Today’s Darwinian psychologists seem delighted with what they find,” charged Kitcher. “These endeavors are often defended in the name of free inquiry, and the investigators cast themselves as bold challengers of orthodoxy…In fact, they frequently succeed in capturing public attention precisely because they pander to old stereotypes, especially about the ‘proper’ roles of men and women…and any morally sensitive venture into the biological understanding of human behavior would be much more cautious.”

•••

For good or ill, it does seem that sociobiology’s impact is, on balance, a conservative one. But no less left-wing a figure than Princeton philosopher Peter Singer — notorious for his defenses of infanticide and bestiality — now says it may be time for the creation of what he calls a “Darwinized left,” and it is clear he means by this a somewhat more conservative, more sociobiological left.

Singer notes the practical limits that evolutionary theory puts on the left’s ambitions to transform selfish human nature. As he put it in a speech on the topic, “Wood carvers presented with a piece of timber and a request to make wooden bowls from it do not simply begin carving according to a design drawn up before they have seen the wood.”

Singer acknowledges that a system that harnesses our instinctual self-interest may be wiser than one that attempts to eradicate or ignore it, and he even notes that arch-capitalist Adam Smith got this idea right two centuries ago. Singer goes further, arguing for the interrelatedness of self-interest and virtue on the basis of the insights gained from “tit for tat” strategies: “By being provokable, [tit for tat] creates a virtuous spiral in which life gets harder for cheats, and so there are fewer of them. Therefore cooperators do better because they are more likely to encounter another cooperator rather than a cheat.”

While praising altruistic actions such as blood donations, Singer recognizes that, as evolutionary theory would predict, our charitable instincts tend to taper off as the beneficiaries become more foreign, more anonymous — less clearly kin. If it is true that our desire to help others is motivated at the gut level by whether we think of them as kin, then we should make redoubled efforts to “expand the circle,” as Singer puts it, of our kin-like relations (and indeed some evidence, such as an aversion to incest even among adoptive siblings or collectively raised children, suggests that relatedness is to some degree a state of mind rather than pure genetics — our kin-regarding instincts can be fooled).

Echoing concerns of anti-urban Founding Fathers such as Jefferson (who thought anonymous city life makes callousness and bad behavior more likely) and concerns of modern paleoconservatives (who argue that a society of anonymous masses and immigrants may not make for good neighbors), Singer asks: “What structures can overcome the anonymity of the huge, highly mobile societies that have come into existence in this century and show every sign of increasing in size with the globalization of the world economy?”

Interestingly — and refreshingly — Singer does not call for a retreat from the increasing interconnectedness of the world but, contrary to many on the left, urges the embrace of globalization (in his book One World: The Ethics of Globalization). You can’t expand the circle of kin-like relations — and accompanying altruistic feelings — while severing the ties of trade between people.

Evolutionary Economics

In recent years, the closest analog to Spencer’s benign form of Social Darwinism may have been an obscure, short-lived movement centered on the book Bionomics by Michael Rothschild.  “The economy is an ecosystem,” Michael Rothschild told me.  For a short time in the mid-90s, this analogy became popular, especially with libertarians and other free-market advocates (though Rothschild, who makes no claim to being a biologist, eventually left bio-economic theorizing to start the more pragmatic software company Maxager).  The economy, says Rothschild, is “a virtual rainforest, and within that are not species but industries.  They’re comprised of organizations rather than organisms.  Those organizations exist in product market spaces, market niches.  Those organizations adapt, are shaped to survive, as in biological or ecological niches.”  Just an analogy?  Rothschild anticipates and even embraces this criticism, starting Bionomics with a quote from sociobiologist E.O. Wilson: “The key instrument of the creative imagination is analogy.”

Rothschild’s new economic lingo was well-timed, coming immediately after the collapse of Communism, when thinkers were groping for new economic metaphors less rooted in a central planner/technician mentality.  Rothschild likens business plans and procedures to DNA and corporate departments to cell structures, with similar economic influences sometimes giving rise to analogous corporate structures in places and times far removed from each other, just as similar environmental pressures sometimes create analogous biological structures in unrelated animals.  In some sense, economic competition, biological evolution, changes in tradition and culture over time, and the history of technology can all be seen as sorting processes, in which the codes that work tend to be preserved and proliferated while the ones that do not are weeded out.

But bionomics is a bunch of pseudo-science, charged New York Times columnist (now econ Nobelist) Paul Krugman in a column on Slate.  Still, Krugman patted himself on the back for drawing his own parallels, years earlier, between evolution and economics.  I asked Krugman how he thinks bionomics will be remembered.  “Evolutionary ideas are definitely going to play a significant role in economics,” he said via e-mail. “In many cases, an ‘evolutionary’ argument is the only way to predict the outcome of some games, and anyway eventually we will want to go beyond the usual assumption of utility-maximization for some deeper explanation of behavior.  But the bionomics guys have nothing to do with all this — just another small-time econo-cult, of the kind that crops up with regularity over the years.”

But I — like Skeptic magazine editor Michael Shermer, who recently wrote the evo-nomics book The Mind of the Market — think there’s more than faddishness to the idea that biological evolution offers at least a highly eye-opening analogy for market processes.  (Sometimes, they meld perfectly, as in discussions of monkey butlers and chimpanzee bartenders — but more on that next week.)

Evolving Tradition

Owen Jones, a professor specializing in law and behavioral biology at Arizona State University when I spoke to him several years ago, says that many human traditions seem less arbitrary — and seem to vary less from culture to culture — once you view them as functions of a common human nature. Traditions he explains, “are remarkably similar in several salient, non-random aspects. Patterns of jealousy, affection for children, attention to familial relationships, moral outrage at being cheated, and the like will capture a disproportionately large focus of cultural practices and traditions…think of marriage ceremonies as one modern epiphenomenon of evolved predispositions to mate…think of proscriptions against violence as a modern effort to reduce the manifestations of evolved aggressions.” So even the most carefully thought-out, new-fangled rules work with the raw material nature provided.

Tradition itself, rarely analyzed in scientific terms, can be thought of as an evolutionary sorting process, suggests anthropologist William H. Durham in his book Coevolution. It’s not a matter of “genes vs. culture,” nor “genes, then culture,” but of two parallel systems interacting and developing together down across the ages. True, traditions can be taken up or abandoned without their carriers necessarily having more offspring or dying, but since people tend to choose from the practices with which they are familiar, their menu of options will be dictated in part by which practices made people more likely to survive.

Most people choose from “thinkable” variations on the traditions they learned from their predecessors and contemporaries. Durham calls the slightly different tradition-bundles amongst which we choose allomemes (after Richard Dawkins’s term “meme” for a single catchy idea). Which of these bundles survive will depend partly on which ones appear to work, not simply on who lives long enough to have children — though that would obviously be one good criterion for judging which ones work. So tradition is partly a matter of choice, partly a matter of what made survival easier.

To give concrete examples: there is an obvious evolutionary reason that rules against murder and rules in favor of childbearing would tend to be propagated, while pro-murder and anti-childbearing codes would tend to be short-lived (as would religions that forbid all reproduction). The conservative idea that traditions have been vindicated by their survival over time makes some basic evolutionary sense, then — though some theorists, such as anarchist law professor Butler D. Shaffer, author of Calculated Chaos, caution that institutions begun for practical reasons, which were initially an aid to people’s survival, have a tendency to calcify into systems aimed first and foremost at their own preservation. Traditions themselves are competing to survive, you might say. Tradition, then, looks less arbitrary when viewed through the lens of evolution, but not perfect.

P.S. Speaking of traditionalism, I wonder whether the left — for consistency’s sake — will freak out over Obama’s new office of faith-based initiatives, as they did over Bush’s.  I suspect not.  (I, of course, say separate church and state and then dispose of both.)

Group Identity, Protest Groups

Far from being a license to behave like animals, sociobiology may give us a keener awareness of how easily our instincts can be manipulated, thus giving us more incentive to exercise self-control.

George C. Williams, with the Department of Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook, was instrumental in refining theories about parental investment in offspring, but he’s wary about looking to nature for advice. He says natural selection is an “evil” process, and that we must be on guard against its selfish, biasing effects. “There’s terminology that evokes certain kinds of emotions,” says Williams. “In Henry V, the king calls his troops a ‘band of brothers.’ This idea that these guys standing next to me, all ready to shoot arrows at those horrible Frenchmen, these are my brothers and it’s my duty to keep them from getting shot at by the French, obviously creates a kind of paternal view of the king as the leader of the whole group. This kind of familial relationship…well, you don’t have to be a sociobiologist to understand this. It comes naturally to people. Feminists talk about ’sisterhood’ nowadays.”

It is easier to evoke a gut loyalty to family or tribe, even a pseudo-family or pseudo-tribe, than to something more abstract like a complex conception of justice. “Sociobiology,” he adds, “doesn’t provide a set of values that should be pursued. You have to decide what your values are, and then maybe sociobiology will tell you what tactics are likely to be effective in pursuing those values.” Sociobiology would also seem to suggest we be at least as wary of appeals to nationalism or race-purity as to left-wing calls for “solidarity.”

•••

Nonetheless, in 1997, anti-racist protesters at liberal Brown University, convinced that sociobiology encourages racist thinking, proudly likened themselves to the 70s anti-sociobiology activists. That prompted Kenneth Miller, a Brown biology professor, to defend sociobiology and free speech in the school newspaper. He recalled how lectures by the eminent entomologist and founding sociobiologist E.O. Wilson in the 70s “were met with frank attempts by activists to intimidate the scientist, his audience, or his hosts into calling the events off.” Miller questioned how long free speech at Brown would survive if activists still admire such tactics.

Sociobiologists may be able to explain even the outrage of the leftists in evolutionary terms, though. Richard Alexander, from the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan, says we are designed to be a bit self-righteous. Since we have a mix of selfish and altruistic instincts, and since the people around us do too, we “gain not only from making ourselves appear more moral (altruistic) than we really are, but as well from being moralistic about others who are playing in the same game.” In the ongoing tit-for-tat game, it behooves us to appear more altruistic than the next guy.

Alexander argues that this subtle link between altruism and self-interest/kin-interest is what has confused philosophers for so long about the nature of humans’ moral sense. “It’s partly the inevitable and unending conflict inherent in all of this that keeps us from establishing definitive answers to those questions philosophers have engaged futilely for so long. The futility is partly that they and everyone else tried to do it while ignorant of evolution.”

P.S. By the way, my favorite example of someone trying to deny his group identity this week is Jay Carney, former Time Washington bureau chief, telling the New York Times that his new job is not evidence that he may have had political biases as a journalist. Sure, he’s Biden’s communications director now (at a time when many journalists have taken jobs with the new administration), but he says “I don’t see this as a partisan job at all,” in part because Biden values “bipartisanship.” Keep that standard in mind the next time a journalist tells you with a straight face that the media is “objective.”

The Evolution of Morality

University of Michigan political science professor Robert Axelrod set up a famous computer experiment, a tournament of very simple computer-simulated beings, detailed in his book The Evolution of Cooperation.  He wanted to see which basic behavior patterns would reap the greatest rewards in a world where the pseudo-beings could help or harm one another upon each encounter.  The tournament demonstrated that a “tit for tat” program, one that cooperated on its first encounter with another being and afterwards responded in kind to the actions of its neighbor (harm for harm, help for help), fared better than almost any other program, despite its great simplicity.  It rewarded cooperation and punished betrayal, instead of being either pacifistic or overly vengeful.

It may be no coincidence that almost all early ethical and legal codes were some variation on the simple idea of “an eye for an eye” or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  These basic justice rules may be written in our nature after all, much as conservatives have sometimes contended.  Real human beings, much like the creatures in Axelrod’s simulation, are the product of countless generations of interpersonal conflict, with each succeeding generation (if the model is accurate) being slightly more likely to possess instincts for tit-for-tat behavior, since that is the most sustainable basic strategy: reward kindness with kindness, aggression with aggression (subsequent experiments have shown the even greater efficacy of a slightly modified formula, forgiving the first wrong but thereafter employing tit-for-tat).  Proto-humans whose instincts happened to tend in another direction — such as attacking anyone they saw, whether friend or foe — would tend not to form bonds, receive aid, or pass their antisocial impulses on to a new generation.  This theory is sometimes called evolutionary ethics.

Biologist Robert Trivers at Rutgers, who I mentioned in yesterday’s entry, says that perhaps his own greatest contribution to the field “was to show how cooperation and altruistic behavior find a ready home in evolutionary biology…[We] provided biology with a foundation for a sense of justice.  So, instead of seeing our sense of fairness and justice as being just cultural artifacts, which might in principle disappear with a different upbringing, you saw that there was quite a biological substratum for why we feel that way.”  Trivers’ view of evolution is upbeat enough that he even incorporated Darwinian themes into a marriage ceremony he officiated in California for two biologists, noting how their love was the end product of billions of years of creatures seeking one another out, intermingling to create something new, and feeling devotion to their offspring and kin.  He concluded with Darwin’s comment that “there is grandeur in this view of life.”

Fearing Eugenics, Resisting Sociobiology

Some might argue that the last thing the world needs is for the right to embrace Darwinian thinking.  What was the nightmare of eugenics, some on both right and left would ask, if not the misapplication of Darwinian ideas to right-wing political ends?  Nightmarish eugenics may have been — a perverse use of state power and pseudo-science to slaughter or sterilize those deemed unfit — but it was not per se a right-wing phenomenon.

Today associated with the death camps of the Nazis, eugenics was once considered common sense by well-meaning people across the political spectrum.  Margaret Sanger, revered by feminists as an early advocate of contraceptives, promoted them in part to lower the birth rate of undesirables.  In the minds of many in that day, eugenics was not so much a plan for racial war as it was a natural extension of the immense successes of public hygiene in eliminating disease outbreaks.  First eliminate cholera, then the mentally retarded, you might say.  The proto-fascists’ calisthenics, open-air hikes, and organic diets were all part of a larger ideal of health and purity that had no place for freaks and genetic defectives.  But witty socialist George Bernard Shaw, too, like many left-leaning early modernists, subscribed to a “superman” ideal (he phrased even his arguments for vegetarianism in strikingly masculine and triumphalist terms by today’s standards, noting in Preface to Androcles and the Lion that meat-eaters have suffered “the most ignominious defeats by vegetarian wrestlers and racers and bicyclists”).

Of course, just because evolution is an often-brutal process doesn’t mean we have any obligation to help it along, nor to steer it any particular direction (and if a retarded person could have survived and even reproduced were he not attacked by the state, then he is not “unfit” in any strictly Darwinian sense).  It is not the case that everyone who studies evolution harbors a desire to crush the weak — but that was pretty much the view that student protesters took of Darwinians in the 1970s, reacting against a new wave of interdiscplinary scholars referred to as sociobiologists, who strove to explain modern human behavior in terms of the evolutionary incentive structures that shaped our ancestors.  That intellectual endeavor was enough to get the scientists hounded off campuses by student protesters, who likened sociobiology to eugenics.  Though sociobiology has no political program, the late Stephen Jay Gould (whose own writings on evolution were often more admired by lay readers than by his colleagues) helped fan the flames by calling sociobiologists reactionaries (an online commenter, identifying himself as a student of University of New Mexico sociobiologist Randy Thornhill, once complained that Stephen Jay Gould was venerated as progressive while sociobiologists like Robert Trivers are called reactionary, yet Trivers was a Black Panther sympathizer and “Gould was sitting on his ass in Harvard, while Trivers immunized poor children in the Jamaican countryside!”).

What sort of ideas got the sociobiologists labeled right-wing?  Consider their Darwinian take on four hot-button subjects, as I look at them over the course of the next four days: moral intuitions, group identity, tradition, and economics.

Darwin for Conservatives

We know the expected pattern: the right objects to the theory of evolution, and a secular/left world stands by science.  But it has not always been thus.  Evolution has been employed to defend some fairly conservative social theories over the past century and a half, while the left’s own use of evolutionary theory has at times been as mystical as the thinking of the creationists.

Almost from the moment Darwin’s On the Origin of Species reached the public (150 years ago this November), though, people have been trying to squeeze more out of the story of evolution, to make it reveal purpose and teleology in the universe.  The results haven’t always fit easily into the contemporary right-left political spectrum.

•••

Take the Victorians: today, they’re sometimes deployed as the very symbols of sexual repression and capitalist callousness, yet they made a receptive audience for evolutionary theory precisely because they believed in Progress.  They had seen incredible advances in their own lifetimes — industry, electricity, steam engines, rising literacy (indeed, for all the praise the twentieth century heaped on itself, it couldn’t compare to the progress seen in the nineteenth century, when Westerners went from living much like medieval peasants to living with the telegraph and trolley car).  But was Progress, in retrospect, a left-wing or right-wing impulse?  For Hegel (to some extent) and for Marx (more obviously) it was a left-wing impulse, and one that was often described in quasi-mystical terms.  Hegel saw social change as God’s dialectical way of making Reason manifest in the development of the world, and George Bernard Shaw later took social change as evidence of an elan vital, or “life force,” pushing humanity toward a glorious, socialist, religion-free destiny.  (That blend of Progressivism and mysticism spawned movements like theosophy and is echoed to this day in New Age and hippie rhetoric.)

So are today’s right-wing critics of Darwin correct?  Was Darwin part of a left-wing triad, a kindred spirit of Marx and Freud, pushing humanity forward toward an illusory self-knowledge and breaking the bonds of traditional morality in the process?  Well, not quite.  For it is increasingly clear that Darwin had some conservative implications — and conservative effects.

The chief exponent of Progress in the nineteenth century, political theorist Herbert Spencer, believed the idea of evolution applied to more than biology.  Spencer also believed in laissez-faire capitalism and “the right to ignore the state,” what would today be called libertarianism (all this was fairly mainstream thinking in the Victorian era — today’s political writers can only dream of achieving the popularity and acceptance that Spencer did with volumes such as Social Statics).

For proposing that biological change over time was analogous to cultural change over time, Spencer is now remembered as the quintessential Social Darwinist.  That label has been enough for some to paint Spencer as a defender of the rapacious and powerful against the weak and impoverished.  But while Spencer believed in capitalism, individualism, and the cultural superiority of the West — hardly a set of a views that would qualify him as a leftist today — he saw those principles as winners precisely because they tended to foster peace, prosperity, freedom, and voluntary interaction, not violence and oppression.  Contrary to the image the public has today of Social Darwinists as exterminators of the weak, Spencer predicted that societies relying on authoritarianism and force would tend to collapse and, as it were, be weeded out of the political genepool.

In a way, the collapse of Soviet Communism 130 years later was more accurately predicted by Spencer than by Hegel, though Hegel’s dialectical thinking got renewed attention when Communism imploded, while Spencer wallows in obscurity.  Conservatives, instead of gloating that Marx is dead and Darwin will be next, should be rushing to embrace Social Darwinism.  But if conservatives fail to see that the Darwinists are in some sense on their side, postmodernist lit-crit types are beginning to see the connection, and on some campuses, left-wing professors have in recent years been expressing doubts about the validity of evolution precisely because it strikes them as too convenient an ideological fit with the prevailing attitudes of the (hated) Victorian era.  If left-wing students begin protesting when assigned Darwin or Spencer, perhaps conservatives will finally, reflexively, give these thinkers a sympathetic re-reading.

Welcome to the Month of Evolution

Just as my “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property)” blog entries last month noted the hundredth anniversary of Barry Goldwater’s birth, the “Month of Evolution” I begin today will include a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. He ranks with Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, and Albert Einstein among those who have helped us understand the basic rules by which the universe operates.

Though some are still troubled by its implications (or misunderstand them), evolution is a phenomenon hard to deny or overlook once the rather simple and intuitive idea is first articulated. In the broadest-applicable terms (not even specific to biology per se), where there is replication with variation (that is, variation relevant to the odds of members of the new generation themselves being replicated), successive generations will tend to resemble the more-prolific replicators of the prior generation, with the attributes of the population thus changing over time.

If biological evolution were not occurring over time, it would require an explanation (such as the discovery that all organisms happen to be identical and face identical environmental influences). Given the countless observed manifestations of biological evolution, from changing bird beaks to shifting bacteria strains, full-fledged Darwin-doubters are in as weak and delusional a position as gravity-deniers, so I’ll spend little time this month responding to them. As I do not claim to be a biologist or zoologist, I won’t attempt to write an introductory textbook either. But I will ask some questions about how the lessons of natural selection may or may not apply to other areas of our thinking.

•••

As it happens, just a few days ago, I tried to get into a party held by Pandora.com, which has become the music site I most often listen to for the simple reason that it employs a sort of evolutionary mechanism: You create a music channel to your liking by clicking on little thumbs-up and thumbs-down symbols as any given song plays, training the resulting channel to repeatedly play songs of the sort you like and weed out ones you don’t. The system isn’t perfect — ironically, the channel I based on the band literally called My Favorite tends to degenerate after a few hours into a techno station no matter how much I try to train it not to — but like the Hayekian philosophy mentioned yesterday, Google, or Wikipedia (founded by Hayek fans), at least Pandora is generally marked by ongoing improvement and refinement, progress in the best sense of the word.

I’m not the only one who thinks so, apparently, since 3,000 people RSVPed for the Pandora party, and girlfriend Helen and I were unable to get in (another cruel blow in a week that brought word of the site Culture11, one place Helen’s been blogging, shutting down — if anyone out there’s inclined to give her other assignments). We did, however, make it to a small New York Young Republican Club party going on one block away at the same time — very convenient for an advocate of “conservatism for punks” and on a day that also assuaged my nerd facet by bringing the final issue of the momentous comic book Final Crisis. (The two NYYRCs, each bearing exactly the same name, are more a study in dialectical synthesis than Darwinian evolution, I suppose, periodically attempting to overcome their long-term schism.)

Two days later, we also visited Helen’s old stomping grounds, Yale, for a debate by Yale’s Party of the Right, an encouraging gaggle of eccentrics, contrarians, and extremists more philosophically stimulating than your average conventional Republican gathering (and there was at least one actual conservative punk, tattoos and all). These kids may yet generate some new ideas that will aid in a conservative renewal (much the way genetic diversity can increase the odds of a population springing back after a mass die-off, if you will — but please join me at Lolita Bar on Feb. 19 if you want to hear a fuller discussion about the right’s state of decrepitude or renewal — especially if you tell me within the next few days that you want to be the pessimistic half of the debate-pair). With a competitive intensity — and almost Polar-Bear-swimmers-like fondness for subjecting themselves to trials by combat, philosophical or otherwise — these young rightists were quite different from the more bland and conformist folk I recall among the College Republicans of my day. Almost enough to give one hope.

As it happens, one of the first philosophical disagreements recounted to me by a PoR member upon our arrival at Yale was about evolutionary psychology and whether ethical lessons can be drawn from it. I don’t think one can simply read “oughts” from the “is” of evolution, but as I’ll discuss in the days ahead, evolutionary theory, much like economics, can show us what is likely, what is at least possible, and what is probably unworkable. It shows us, for instance, that the imperative to reproduce is likely to be strong — and it shouldn’t surprise us that that imperative is inculcated by religions that tend to grow (“be fruitful and multiply”) and jettisoned by ones that tend to dwindle (the Shakers, the Hale-Bopp comet cult, etc.). Luckily, being a rational animal and knowing your nature doesn’t just mean having to submit to it (as the nasty and fatalistic old story of the fox and scorpion would have you believe); we can recognize our natural inclinations but, thank goodness, can also choose a different path, possibly a much better one.