Other ways of being

I gorra new Podcast: Mindscapes run by Sean Carroll where he "hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers. Science, society, philosophy, culture, arts, and ideas." I should be okay for a while because it's been running since 2018 and 290+ thinkers have given an hour of their time to the project. Sean Carroll was trained a cosmic physicist [PhD Harvard 1993] but has also been one of those Public Intellectuals like Steven Pinker. Cosmology is hard and physicists in search of new challenges were definitely the grit that niggles at the start of the rise and rise of molecular biology in the 1950s. Carrol has read Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? for example and has ideas about evolution because he's read widely in the field and is interested in Life, The Universe and Everything including the antics of the diverse inhabitants of this our small blue planet.

Mindscapes 269 featured Sahar Heydari Fard on "Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics". She has not read Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? but she is up to speed on, say, punctuated equilibria and other key issues in the evolutionary philosophy. So her convo with Carroll was quite high-falutin' but pretty interesting, not to say gripping. The question addressed was what tools are available to document and support change in society. Like 1950s physicists brought their ways of seeing to DNA, proteins and evolution in the 1960s; so with social dynamics today: maybe we don't need to re-invent the wheel if established complexity theory can be mobilized to make models to get our heads around really hard problems (and unintended consequences) in society. 

One of the biological theories that the philosophical physicist and the philosophical economist cite with approval is Wright's idea of adaptive landscapes. Acknowledging that the Perfick is the enemy of the Good enough. They like the idea of local optimum solutions that may not be The Answer but are pretty good in a particular place and time. But Wright's landscape is barely a theory, let alone a testable hypothesis - it's a metaphor! But Fard riffs off on the idea to imagine an actual landscape of communities all trying to get along with the cards they have been dealt - a maybe sharing some of Things That Work with other similar communities to save them having to re-invent the wheel er blackjack table [Mixed metaphor morass alert!].  But that's okay: matter a damn where the ideas come from; just seize those which seem useful. The podcast set my poor mind off in a number of different directions. 

① One was to reflect on our Kindred Neanderthals who kept on keeping on for 200,000 years - through climate changes the like of which we haven't yet experienced - sharing, propagating and using a very basic set of technological tools: chipped stones, tanned hides, sharp sticks and red fire. The Blob has asked, rhetorically, where do the ideas come from? in science. For reasons unknown, Neanderthals don't seem to have budged much on the implemented ideas front for a hella long time.

② I was talking to my neighbour Local Solar the other day. He asserted that he was, like me, def'ny a morning person. But he recognised that night-owls had their place too. He reckoned the distinction went back to when the common ancestor of Us and Neanderthals had just come down from the trees. It was desirable that someone in the clan should be awake to tend the fire (and keep watch for cave-bears). Groups which segregated for larks and owls [as we do for green eyes and brown], retaining some of each type, survived better while less bioclock diverse parties left the stage. I'd never heard that argument before and I've no idea if it's even testable scientifically. But I love the idea that we are selected to be diverse rather than identical (to a fallen angel?)

③ Carroll and Fard were also asking how stable societies can nevertheless embrace change. For hundreds of years Han Chinese carried out foot-binding on their infant girls. Then in the space of one generation, about 100 years ago, the practice was shoved into the dustbin of history. This collective decision worked where Edicts from Manchu Emperors in the 1600s had been brushed aside. How come? Lots of other cultural norms in that society - some of which seem weird to us - continue as before. When we came back to Ireland in 1990, it was still pretty darned white, pretty darned catholic and pretty darned bacon & cabbage. In 1996, when we moved to the deepest rural midlands, our nearest neighbour confessed that they'd just tried frozen pizza for the first time - induced to do so by their teenage daughter. Now there is a Chinese take-away in Borris (pop ca. 800), not to mention Polskie sklepy, black and amber GAA players and Grand Theft Auto. 

One way to make change in the way we live now is to present lots of options and give some of them a go. Immigrants? Bring 'em on!