I picked up a brief biography of Paul Erdos (pronounced Air-dish; it’s Hungarian) by Paul Hoffman, titled "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers." Not bad. It was free at Starbucks and caught my eye. Quite funny, actually, but that wasn’t its main value.

It played into my long-standing interest in the people who do mathematics. As pro-individual as I am, it’s hard to deny that as a group, mathematicians are less mentally well than normal, more frequently than normal. And here I’m not talking about being wierd, or socially mal-adjusted per se, or even nervous ticks and twitches and strange habits and whatnot. Mental health, not social adjustment (though there are some minor lines of attachment between the two). I mean whether or not one feels happiness, self-worth, self-fulfilment, pride, and has a firm grasp of reality and what it takes to survive.

I think it’s quite possible that scientists more constrained by technology are better able to compartmentalize their minds, such that wacky personal beliefs don’t impact their work as directly, as quickly, as severely. (I’m against compartmentalization, by the way). There is no such convenient barrier in much of pure math. Thus, whether one believes in the boogy-man or not is likelier to affect your math. Philosophy matters.

Many people consider math a science. It appears to be almost entirely deductive, beyond initial, tantalizing observations of patterns, quirks, or problems. Unlike more material-based scientists, however, mathematicians as a group seem to be prone to mysticism, depression, anxiety, and paranoia of varying degrees. I’ve seen this first-hand in people who aren’t legendary, so I have reason to think the problem isn’t confined to the people who have books written about them. In my view (which still qualifies as a glorified hunch at this point) this mysticism, in its countless forms, is in turn representative of fundamental intellectual transgressions. When you’re that smart, mere oversights or assumptions or unquestioned beliefs are tantamount to intellectual transgressions, in my book. Disagree as you see fit.

Furthermore, these transgressions tend to spur on additional transgressions, and being so fundamental, they also tear at one’s perception of the very basis of reality. This is not good. A strong grasp of, and confidence in, one’s place in reality is, in my experience, essential to mental well-being. Feeling/believing/knowing that one is capable of successfully navigating reality is also essential. No doubt there are other factors that contribute to the apparently disproportionate rates of mental illness among mathematicians. I’m just saying that bad philosophy can play a significant role as well. Chicken or egg, I don’t know. I bet it’s a mixed bag.

But, I’m very much in the information collection stage. Here’s some of the information I gained, albeit second-hand, from this book.

pg. 45. "Pythagoras certainly had his eccentriciites - he was a vegetarian who refused to eat beans because they reminded him of testicles - but he got mathematics off to a solid footing by championing the concept of proof. He also had an uncanny feel for individual numbers. He considered 220 and 284 to be friendly. His notion of a "friendly" number was based on the idea that a human friend is a kind of alter ego. Pythagoras wrote, "[A friend] is the other I, such as are 220 and 284." These numbers have a special mathematical property: each is equal to the sum of the other’s proper divisors. …

"A second pair of friendly numbers (17,296 and 18,416 was not discovered until 1636 by Pierre de Fermat. …

pg. 46: "Pythagoras saw perfection in any integer that equaled the sum of all the other integers that divided evenly into it. The first perfect number is 6. It’s evenly divisible by 1, 2 and 3, and it’s also the sum of 1, 2, and 3. The second perfect number is 28. Its divisors are 1, 2, 4, 7 and 14, and they add up to 28. During the Middle Ages, religious scholars asserted that the perfection of 6 and 28 was part of the fabric of the universe: God created the world in six days and the Moon orbits the Earth every twenty-eight days. St. Augustine believed that the properties of the numbers themselves, not any connection to the empirical world, made them perfect: "Six is a number perfect in itself, and not because God created all things in six days; rather that the inverse is true; God created all things in six days because this number is perfect. And it would remain perfect even if the work of the six days did not exist."

I’d be interested to read some Frege first-hand. From the description in this book of some of his work (which I suspect is accurate, if highly simplified, simply because the author knew enough mathematicians who could proof the book), he tripped over the problem of universals and fell flat on his face. Check out this attempt at a definition:

pg. 111: "Work on the foundations of mathematics was all the rage at the turn of the [20th] century. Mathematical logicians like Frege and Russell were trying to build up all of mathematics in a completely rigorous way. The idea was to take nothing for granted, to prove everything from first principles, to deduce all of mathematics from as few self-evident axions as possible. In building up elementary arithmetic, for example, they started with axioms like the so-called commutative law of addition [a+b=b+a]… That they even othered to state such self-evident propositions was a testament to their rigorous approach. But they went further, spelling out the definitions of individual numbers like the number 4 rather than taking such definitions for granted. In this formal way of thinking, numbers were defined in terms of sets. What, for example, is the number 4? Look around you, said Frege, and you’ll see fours everywhere. There’s the set of suits in a deck of cards and the set of legs on a chair. Take all the sets with four members and put them together in one big set - this set of sets constitutes the concept of "fourness.""

Or you could drink poison for breakfast every day. Good grief.

pg. 109: "Erdos saw it as his personal mission to help colleagues maintain their mathematical edge. When they fell ill, as [Stanislaw] Ulam did, he challenged their  minds back to health. Not all recoveries were as successful as Ulam’s. Some of his ill colleagues regained their mathematical ability but, trangically, not their confidence. Jon Folkman was a brilliant young mathematician who worked at Rand, the think tank in Santa Monica. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in the late 1960s. Evidently it had grown to such a large size that the prognosis for surgery wasn’t good. His doctors felt that there was little chance they could remove it; or, if they could, he might become a vegetable. But against the odds the operation was successful. "Erdos and I visited him in the hospital afterwards," said [Ronald Graham]. "No sooner had we entered the hospital room when Erdos started challenging Jon with math problems. He had just come out of brain surgery and he was able to solve the problems! Sure, he was answering a little slowly but he was answering. After he went home, though, his personality changed from before the procedure. He was a little moodier and he believed he was losing his skills. The evidence, though, was that his mathematical ability was better than ever. To test himself, he’d look through all the open problems in conference proceedings and solve them sequentially one by one. That’s incredible! Jon, like Gauss, had such high standards he never published some of his very good work. One day he bought a gun and shot himself. He was thirty-one. It was all very sad. His boss at Rand, D. Ray Fulkerson, blamed himself for not recognizing the depths of his troubles and doing someing. ‘Jon’s suicide is often on my mind,’ Fulkerson said. Later Fulkerson killed himself too.""

pg. 110: "The Austrian logician Kurt Godel was one of the mathematical giants who lost his confidence, and Erdos tried to help him get it back. Erdos met Godel at the Institute for Advanced Study, the logician’s principal home from 1933 until 1976. "Godel I talked with a great deal," said Erdos. "He was certainly a remarkable intellect. He understood everything, even what he didn’t work [on]. It is strange how little he published. He could certainly have done more things. I always argued with him" because his interests drifted toward metaphysics. "We studied Leibniz a great deal and I told him, ‘You became a mathematician so that people should study you, not that you should study Leibniz.’"

On Godel and his work on the foundations of mathematics:

pg. 111: "In 1931, back in Vienna, the twenty-five-year-old Godel stunned the scientific community by tearing asunder the very foundations of mathematics. He had managed to prove that any formal mathematical system robust enough to include the laws of arithmetic would be unable to prove its own consistency. His innocently titled paper, "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems," skewered Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics [by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead]."

Russell’s paradox:

pg. 116 (quoting Russell): Thinking about the paradoxical Cretan* led Russell to the idea ‘that a class sometimes is, and sometimes is not, a member of itself. The class of teaspoons, for example, is not another teaspoon, but the class of things that are not teaspoons is one of the things that are not teaspoons. There seemed to be instances which are not negative: for example, the class of all classes is a class. … [This] led me to consider the classes that are not members of themselves; and these, it seemed, must form a class. I asked myself whether this class is a member of itself or not. If it is a member of itself, it must possess the defining property of the class, which is to be not a member of itself. If it is not a member of itself, it must not possess the defining property of the class, and therefore must be a member of itself. Thus each alternative leads to its opposite and there is a contradiction.’"

*an ancient Greek contradiction about Epimenides the Cretan, who said that all Cretans are liars.

In English, for those of you who have better things to do than figure out the details of a convoluted presentation of a false paradox:

"A few years later, Russell came up with a popularized version of his paradox. Imagine the Barber of Seville who shaves every man who does not shave himself. Does the Barber of Seville shave himself? If he does, he doesn’t, and if he doesn’t, he does. Try as Frege did, [who Russell and his paradox skewered], he could not circumvent Russell’s cunning conundrum about the class of all classes."

On to Godel, who in turn skewered Russell and Whitehead:

"Godel demonstrated that no complex mathematical system was complete. In other words, no matter what axioms are chosen, meaningful mathematical statements can be made whose truth or falseness can never be demonstrated within the system. … Godel’s second discovery was even more devastating. He demonstrated that it was impossible to prove that any given complex mathematical system was consistent. In other words, you can never be sure that the set of axioms won’t lead to a contradiction. On the Richter scale of mathematical discoveries, Godel’s was a 10. That mathematics was incomplete and possibly inconsistent was a body blow to those who saw mathematics as the most logical of logical systems, and few in the field didn’t see it that way. In the wake of Godel, most card-carrying mathematicians still clung to the belief that mathematics was in fact free of contradictions, even though they now knew they could never prove this. As Andre Weil, number theorist extraordinaire, put it: "God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.""

pg. 118: "Genius though he was, Godel was not a poster boy for mathematical sanity. Obsessed with ghosts and demons and an imagined heart ailment, he checked himself in and out of sanitariums many times in his adult life for treatment of depression and acute anxiety. He was always a finicky eater, but as he got older he ate less and less, refusing to take food from anyone but his wife Adele, fearing that other people were secretly trying to poison him. At sixty-four he weighed only eighty-six pounds. In the middle of 1977, when Adele was hospitalized for major surgery, he stopped eating altogether, and by the following January starved himself to death at the age of seventy-one. In his dying days he had serious doubts that his life’s work amounted to anything more than the discovery of another silly paradox a la Barber of Seville."

Shall we say it together? "Check your premises."

pg. 126: "Ernst Straus [a mathematician and an assistant for four years to Einstein] was one of the few people who had the opportunity to observe firsthand the differences in style between the master physicist and the master mathematician. In a tribute to Erdos on his seventieth birthday, Straus said" "Einstein often told me that the reason he chose physics over mathematics was that mathematics is so full of beautiful and attractive questions that one might easily waste one’s powers in pursing them without finding the central questions. In physics he had the ‘nose’ for the central questions and he felt that it was the chief duty of the scientist to pursue those questions and not let himself be seduced by any problem - no matter how difficult or attractive it might be. Erdos has consistently and successfully violated every one of Einstein’s prescriptions. He has succumbed to the seduction of every beautiful problem he has encountered - and a great number have succumbed to him. This just proves to me that in the search for truth there is room for Don Juans like Erdos and Sir Galahads like Einstein."

I have a recent fascination with "You ate WHAT?!?!?" foods. A non-participatory hold-over urge from China, I suspect. I think I have an internal barometer for personal challenge. It’s recently been met. So this grosses me out instead of spurring me on to greater heights.

The kinetic food challenge (very poor sound, but you’ll get the idea):

http://www.bloomsbury.com/media/nucobra.mpg

Someone else was telling me yesterday more about blood. I think it was from lamb. "You know, it’s the pancake-y thing left over. You slice it up and eat it. It’s good!" For some reason this grosses me out more than the prospect of a nice little square of ducks’ blood in a soup. Blood and breakfast do NOT mix.

To be continued…

They’re building it. Right now.

http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=182168

—-

The Dubai Bubble: Glass, or Reinforced Steel?

In Dubai, the Sky’s No Limit

The zany, ambitious Persian Gulf boomtown is chockablock with oddities. Man-made islands shaped like palms are just a start.

By Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer October 13, 2005

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — When Salem Moosa looks out over the skyscrapers spreading like a metallic rash over the sand, this is what he sees: The Eiffel Tower. The Pyramids. The Taj Mahal. He’s angling to build all of them — but bigger than the originals. And, if you ask Moosa, perhaps even better. …

Bigger. Brighter. More outlandish. Construction-fevered Dubai is almost Gatsby-esque in its audacious thirst for reinvention. This once-sleepy port of pearl traders and pirates is gunning to turn itself into one of the great capitals of the postmodern world.

If Americans pushed west to manifest destiny, the Emirates are pushing into the sky. There is a vague consensus here that great cities arrange themselves around ambitious architecture, and Dubai is determined to outdo them all. You feel it when you drive down the highway, eyes assaulted by a string of quixotic slogans: "The earth has a new center." "History rising." "Impossible is nothing."

"We can’t keep up with it. We’re walking around and things are popping up, and we just had no idea," says Trevor L. Evans, a Canadian-born transplant who markets real estate here for Better Homes. "And some of it seems really wacky."

Perched at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and the Indian subcontinent, Dubai was among the old-style tribal sheikdoms that stayed under British control until 1971. Upon independence, it joined with its neighbors to form the United Arab Emirates.

With relatively little oil to bolster its economy, this trading hub has long used ingenuity to lure business. There are no taxes, and the city is endowed with an efficient, well-appointed national airline and relatively hassle-free airport.

The city cashed in on the chill that followed Sept. 11, which drove some rattled Arab and Muslim investors to pull their money out of the West lest it be seized under anti-terrorism legislation. Much of that cash has found its way into Dubai’s explosive real estate market. So has money earned by Persian Gulf Arabs in the current oil boom, which has pumped up Dubai like some hyper-charged steroid.

Today’s freewheeling Dubai is a bewildering stew of nationalities, a place where natives make up less than 20% of the population of about a million. It’s also a place where politics is seldom spoken of — people are much too busy amassing cash and spending it as flamboyantly as possible.

Misgivings rumble into the conversation sometimes. People wonder whether the go-go economy has enough real stuff underpinning it to sustain itself, or whether the real estate bubble will pop. Human rights groups have accused developers of exploiting thousands of foreign men who come from countries such as India and Pakistan to toil in the hot sun for about $200 a month.

"The city is losing its authenticity. It’s losing its past," says Abdel Khaleq Abdullah, a television talk show host. "Maybe in globalization, identity is irrelevant. That’s what the government says. But in reality, hell no, you’re losing something very precious."

He casts a bemused glance around him at the Wafi Center, a posh shopping mall where Yves Saint Laurent, Marks & Spencer and Tiffany cluster behind an exterior of glass pyramids. As he sits in a cafe, waiters brush past, trays of cappuccinos aloft. The floors gleam; expensive perfumes waft through the air; among the milling Asians and Europeans, there is hardly an Arab in sight.

"I’m not sure these guys know what they want to be," he says. "They’re just riding the roller coaster and they haven’t reached the top yet. Is this thing going to burst? And if it does, who will pay for it?"

But in times of spectacular growth, pessimism is not particularly popular.

"Since I got here 27 years ago, I’ve been hearing that it’s a bubble," scoffs Ghassan Tahboub, an advisor to Dubai’s crown prince. Night has fallen, and the Porsches and Jaguars and Ferraris are jostling and crawling along Sheik Zayed Road, the six-lane artery that serves as the backbone of the city.

"When they built this road, they said, ‘Dubai is mad. Why do they need such a street?’ " Tahboub says. Referring to one of the city’s many development projects, he adds: "You’ve seen Internet City? Five years ago it was sand." By way of punctuation, he points outside to the dirt on the edge of the road.

I sat with my feet propped up on the railing outside my two-bit apartment and looked up at the sky. The clouds reflected the orange lights and rumbling hum of the city back to me while the blinking lights of a passenger plane traversed the black sky beyond. I watched the steady stare of the street lamp, heard the tinkle of chimes tripping across an unknown distance, and felt the tiniest breeze disturb the fine hairs on the back of my hands. My pulse rocked me gently while a headache dug into my skull and blisters gnawed at my feet. I took a big deep breath and caught the thought dashing across my mind: "I love." I waited for the rest, but realized that was it. I smiled an inward smile. There it is: all.

I am a creature of the night. I suspect there is a non-trivial biological component to this, albeit unknown in its exact identity, at least to me. I love the night. I live at night. I wish the City Council (or equivalent) felt similarly. The Collective, whoever they are, dislikes businesses open late. No cafes - in this college town - are open past 11. No bars past about 1am. I’m not even sure if 7-eleven is open 24 hours. I couldn’t hang out there even if it was. Hegemony of the diurnal. I wouldn’t gripe if it was the result of diurnals’ dollars speaking louder than my (few) nocturnal ones. But no. There are laws.

Dear ol’ Duan once informed me that he’d read that a majority of Nobel Prize winners were, shall we say, nocturally inclined. I’m not sure what can be concluded from this observation. At least not at the personal level. I am who and what I am, within the (unknown) range that I am capable of changing myself. Still… the biologist in me wants to know Why? Why so many night-owls with big heavy medals around their necks?

But, that question is only interesting in its most general conclusions. What does interest me is how much I enjoy the night. Why? Would I enjoy the night as much if, say, I lived in Vegas or New York, which are just as alive at night as in the day? Or is it really a visual thing? And if so, am I picking up more on urban night-ness, or is it more general than that? I was pretty darn conservative in my sleep patterns last summer out in the middle o’ nowhere; but then, I also had a boss checking in at 8am. No such thing exists now.

Too many variables to say definitively. I’m still inclined to say that there’s a biological element. I’d like to know what it is, so I could manage it more knowledgably, even if that effectively turned out being a whole-hearted acceptance of sleep patterns similar to what I have now. Knowledge makes all the difference. As always.

I am occasionally pleased long-term with my writing. This is one. This is a re-post of my first post. A reminder - for me.

The aim of this blog: Forward thinking, introspection, self-evaluation, speculation, celebration, building, dreaming, possibilities. It’s a recording of my best, of my incipient best, and of hairy problems. It’s not meant to be a diary, a newspaper, a gossip column, or a naturalistic snapshot meant to record the daily comings and goings of my life. My breakfast is not worthy of mention. Many of my ideas are. Discussing my breakfast takes me nowhere. Discussing an idea - well, that’s the beginning of every empire.

Rationale: What I call "dreaming" - my wild speculation, idealism, adventurism on par with Calvin’s Spaceman Spiff - that I have endulged in all my life, has historically proven to be a dangerously preditive and directive force. Psychologists probably would call it a self-visualization technique. I still call it dreaming. I "dream" myself very high - what if I got to do this, or was that, or created this, etc. etc. Spaceman Spiff meets Wonderwoman. And then I think, what would it take for this Spiff-craft to fly? Several humongous things way out of reach, and a whole lot of little ones within reach. So just for shits and giggles, a self-dare and private entertainment - and I love being entertained - I set out to do just one of those little things. And the dream fades away into my sub-consciousness, and I dream up another, always a variation on a theme, and do the whole process again because it’s fun, and each time, being braver, I dream a little higher, gingerly treading into new galaxies in my Spiff-craft. And then one day I stop and turn around and look at what I’ve done, and I’m floored at how far I’ve come. Because I never would have thought it real, tangible, achievable when I dreamt that first dream.

But, having recognized this process, I’m going to wrest my future’s direction and success from the whim of my subconscious and harness the process explicitly, replacing my flickering temerity with the roaring flames of certainty, of owned self-esteem and pride. Because they are there, in the palm of my hand. All it takes is for my mind to grasp that, and I’ll hold on to them like the rocks that they are. It works, I know it, and I know how. So I’ll do it, and I’ll make no apologies. Not for learning. Not for breaking new ground. I don’t care how worn that ground is. It just has to be new to me. And that’s what this is all about: Me, my life, my world.

Eureka. I thought I’d have to read the collected works of Aristotle to discover this. I’ve found a shortcut that I’ve deemed acceptable. My goal: find the ancient Greek work that is the connotative equivalent of "the whole of everything, all that is, the way that everything is." In English, the phrase "the whole of existence, and all that it entails" basically captures what I’m driving at.

But I’m interested in the Ancient Greek equivalent (for my own non-nefarious ends). I recall from my philosophy one-oh-whatever class the word "physis" [pronounced foo’-sis] meaning "nature" or "the nature of things." Close, but the only cigar? One friend suggested "kosmos," which is not equivalent to the modern word "cosmos" which basically means "universe." I want a more essential, not-necessarily-astronomical connotation than "cosmos." Is "kosmos" the one I’m after? Another friend suggested "pan". As in, the root of our prefix "pan" which means "all" or "everything," and also the Greek god Pan, which I think Francis Bacon also discussed in the context of "all that is", but perhaps in one of his allegorical spins.

I looked up Pan online. Loads and loads about a randy little goat-man. And as much as that converges on the word ‘horn’, and my current fondess for that structure, it doesn’t fit my ends. Yes, etymologically the word ‘pan’ is all around us: pandemic, panic, pandemonium, and also many phylogenetically defined taxonomic categories (i.e. revisions on Linneus’ kingdom, phylum, class, order, yadda, yadda, yadda). Yet, if taxonomy is any indication, "pan" is more an adjective, a modifier of some subset of what already is known to exist, meaning "all." It doesn’t have the metaphysical import of what I’m driving at. Still… on the fence.

So I searched some more. And I came upon this article. I’m not as concerned about the drive towards Heidegger (yet….), but I really appreciated the analysis of Heraclitus’ use of the word ‘kosmos.’ (And Heraclitus pre-dated Aristotle, but post-dated Pythagorus). I don’t dig a lot of Heraclitus’ misanthropy, or his near-worship of fire as the pan-explanative (heh heh) force in the, uh, kosmos. Still, on the assumption that Heraclitus’ use of words had some fidelity to the larger language context of his times, and that it had some continuity after him, I feel comfortable extrapolating his meaning of the word ‘kosmos’ beyond the span of his particular life.

Of particular interest is the phrase "physis of kosmos", which seems to translate into "the nature of all which is." Jackpot. That’s what I’m after. Interestingly though, is another phrase that, if you translate the Greek letters straight across, comes out as "ta panta". This appears to mean "the [mere] sum of all entities." And simply adding up everything doesn’t tell you its nature (physis); it’s the sum plus the nature I’m after; and I think that’s "kosmos."

Also of note: for Heraclitus (via the author of the above article, which is actually a journal article, if you investigate the guy’s site and c.v.), the word [translated directly, by moi] "sophronein" means "thinking well", or, to recognize and be acquainted with the very un-concealment of the nature (physis) of all that is (kosmos).

I first noticed her jacket. It was my favorite color: favorite-faded-Levi’s blue. And it was leather, with the collar turned up, but not like how the trying-too-hard-to-be-cool kids do it. The skinny metal frames of her glasses were teal blue. And she wore dusty blue mascara. Her face was lean, and her nose noble, and when she smiled you could see all the way back to her molars. I could tell by the angle of her chin and the set to her mouth that she was razor sharp and lived all the way out to her skin. She didn’t need anybody, but she wanted the whole world, and foremost in it herself.

And her hair was pure white.

I’d say by the skin of her hands she was in her 60’s or 70’s. And when she got off the train, her steps were careful but brisk. She reminded me of Marian Diamond.

I don’t often imagine myself as an old person - but maybe a little more often than most. Tonight I think I caught a tangible glimpse of my mind’s version of my future self.

When I am an old woman, I will wear blue. Just as I do now.

I wish I had written this.

The Invitation
by Oriah

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shriveled and closed
from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to
be careful
be realistic
remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night
of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

Thinking about the essential role of hierarchy in any theory of macroevolution, I’m toying with a couple proto-realizations.

If hierarchy is, at core, both an epistemological formulation and a reflection of reality - that is, our conceptual ordering of stuff that really is "out there" - then hierarchy is first and foremost a mental sort of thing. It doesn’t exist in reality the way my wilting spider plants do. It is, however, a recognition of certain patterns that do exist in reality. Again, though, labeling something as a pattern also suggests a conceptual base. That is, I’m not convinced cats recognize plaid or polka dots the way humans do; it’s just more varied visual stimuli.

So I’m thinking hierarchy isn’t an intangible, non-sensible thing that actually exists out there (otherwise scientists would build churches instead of laboratories). Put this way, it seems exceedingly obvious. But discussions of hierarchy in biology can begin to grade that way, especially if you cut your teeth on tangible things like DNA and cells and tissues; these are hierarchical in organization and much more readily understood than properties of lineages that take millions of years to play out. The conceptual ice gets thinner the farther away from individual experience you go. Which is not to say that evolution is on thin ice. It just requires a longer, slightly more arduous conceptual journey, where skipping key steps can land you in a camp closer to the creationists than the bona fide scientists of evolution. I think this is how you get otherwise intelligent people insisting that we’re incapable of scientifically understanding biological processes. But, that aside….

If hierarchy is essentially epistemological, then this reinforces a very linear view of time. Which makes sense. Trying to crunch through how hierarchy "works" in a strictly linear fashion though, when levels of evolutionary hierarchies inevitably work at different time scales, has me thinking that different levels of a hierarchy are simply different ranges of context. For example, "microevolution" is typically construed as changes in gene frequences in populations over time scales amenable to human careers and even, if you’re lucky, graduate study. Gene frequencies, and to a lesser extent the morphologies affected by those gene frequencies, are what is noticable. Presumably there’s a lot of background noise, or changes so slow or small or infrequent that we have difficulty picking up on them in manipulative, experimental settings.

However, if we enforce the linearity (of time, not pure extrapolation of methods or results) up to scales covered by "macroevolution", the difference between the two has got to be simply a matter of informational context. That is, if we were able to detect and make sense of every scrap of information available to us now, the types of patterns we see at macroevolutionary scales (but currently not at microevolutionary ones) should be predicted (even if we can’t predict the exact outcome for particular instances). That is, microevolutionary processes would thus be seamlessly connected to macroevolutionary ones (which is what I’ve thought all along) even if there is a differential distribution of patterns and processes between the two, which is what we see now and where the rift comes in.

I think the impression of discontinuity between levels (on my part) comes from reading Gould. And I’m not sure that that’s what he intended. But the manner in which he discusses different types of evolutionary processes segregating at different hierarchical levels of biological organization, it’s hard to conceptually squish them all into a single time-slice - to envision how they’re all (potentially) occuring all at once.

I keep mentally returning to this data set my stats prof gave us for analyzing sun spot cycles. At each point in time, only one data point was taken. One time point, one value (I think it may have been in months). However, with ten or fifty years of data, you can start sorting, and pulling out patterns at multiple "levels". At the coarsest level, you map on a best-fit equation, and there appears to be a high-frequency cycle that accounts for a majority of the data. Of course, it’s not exact, there’s still quite a bit of noise. In the next round, you remove all that is accounted for by the first equation, and look at the leftover noise again. The next best-fit equation accounts for some 70-90% of that data, but the equation indicates a lower-frequency cycle for the sun-spot pattern.  You do this iteratively, revealing something like five different frequencies of sun-spot cycles, all from the same set of chronologically-linear data.

I think something conceptually similar must happen for evolution. I’m not quite sure how yet. But I think it’s captured by the idea of the tortoise and the hare. Short-term, the hare is the obvious winner. Gene frequency change in populations is far and away the best explainer of evolution we have yet. Or rather, it’s the one we know the best so far. But is it capable of explaining, over the long-run, the big patterns in evolution? I’m quite doubtful. There’s a tortoise in the race, that no one pays attention to until it shows up at the finish line. So you’ve got the population geneticists eyeballing the race near the start-line, and the paleontologists with their clipboards standing at the finish line. Of course they’re going to argue. But it’s all one race. And I think the dark horse - er, the tortoise - is some aspect of developmental biology. Maybe modularity (sensu lato) combined with group selection. Very, very cool. And I think bovids are a great system for investigating this.

Good news, Mom and Dad: I’ve finally figured out what I "am", professionally. I’m an evolutionary developmental paleobiologist. With serious theoretical leanings. Here’s a label I can live with. Length of a group name, however, is often inversely proportionate with size of membership. For example, Ishkabibble, as it’s called.

Let me backtrack: I’m reading the best paper I’ve read in months. That’s a conservative understatement. This guy, Rasmus G. Winther, starts out by recapping all the biological concepts I’m currently dancing with: modularity, hierarchy, function, development, individuality, etc. On page two, he all but starts by talking about Aristotle, then hits Cuvier, Goeffroy, Darwin, Owen, Spemann, Waddington, Riedl, and then the compendiums on the history of these people and their fields. Comparative anatomy meets embryology meets evolution meets philosophy = evo-devo, philosophically treated. I’m in heaven. Cloud ten.

And now, the kicker. Check out this line-up. Where the hell was I??? Well, that’s unfair I suppose. I didn’t have the same brain then that I have now. Shoot, this mind-blowing paper, I think I had to read it for a class last year. I didn’t even give it a star in the corner like I do for good ones. If I wasn’t thinking about that… what was I thinking about? I really don’t remember. Actually, I take that back. A year ago was kinda shitty. I forgive myself for letting my brain limp along. I’m making up for lost time now though, and at a good pace it seems.

Which brings me to the observation/opinion that you have to be at least half-way to understanding the ideas already before you can really hear what a person has to say. Otherwise, it’s just gibberish that skips right off the top of your brain. It’s probably why none of my non-bio or non-philosophy friends (uh, what few there are) and family can really understand me. It’s natural, I think. Not to be lamented, just recognized and worked with or worked around.

Cloud ten, I’m telling you.

The ref: Winther RG. 2001. Varieties of modules: Kinds, levels, origins and behaviors. Journal of Experimental Zoology (Mol Dev Evol). 291:116-129.

Places in the US I want to go (An on-going list):

Casper, WY. Man-made energy.

Boulder, CO. Self-made man.

Des Moines, IA. Senator Allison Monument

Bedminster, NJ. Genius of Electricity.

Bronx, NY. Hall of Fame of Great Americans.

New York, NY. Rockefeller Center.

Boston, MA. Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial.

Washington, DC. The Lincoln Memorial.

San Francisco, CA. The Golden Gate Bridge.

I’ve found lengthy, informed, considered discussions of concepts near and dear to my heart - but not too close, of course. Evolving Thoughts, coming this way.

…But after the horn development paper, and sorting data, and mixed in with re-learning stats and gearing up for histology and doing my own philosophy, my own way, for my own purposes. Even if I was handed a copy of The Answers tomorrow, it would only facilitate me doing it myself. Blindly swapping one Good Book for another is not improvement. Not that I do that; but Haste is knocking at the door.

I find I’m converging on the same Square One I placed myself in four years ago: clear off a table, close your books, and think for yourself. Last time it was on Everything. This time it’s just philosophy of biology. The rest I’m letting trickle in at a saner pace. I’m as eager as I was then, and considerably more informed, though not yet as knowledgable as I aim to be.

Within the family Bovidae are the antelope, cattle, sheep and goats. If you know me at all, you’ve probably heard me say this upwards of a dozen times. Well, there are several divisions (of varying arbitrariness and controversy), starting with the sub-families (Bovinae, Antilopinae). After that comes the tribal level (Bovini, Alcelaphini, Hippotragini, Antelopini, etc.) Within the Bovinae, there are two or three tribes, including the Bovini (oxen) and Tragelaphini (the spiral-horned bovines). Tonight I’m thinking about the tragelaphines. They are very cool. And there’s a whole bunch of eland near New Orleans. I do wish they were more closely related to the Hippotragini, which are super, super cool. I would have an easier excuse to study them.

There are nine species (many of which have multiple sub-species) within Tragelaphini. They really should make a Bushman’s Trivial Pursuit or have African Interior Jeapordy or somesuch.

Pics moved here

Turns out, the Santa Fe Institute isn’t the only horse in the race to understand complexity. The New England Complex Systems Institute is also a contender. The funny thing is, there seems to be next to no overlap in people, publication, resources, and institutions, not to mention geography, between SFI and NECSI. Granted, SFI seems a smidge more theoretical, and NECSI tends towards the applied side, keeping a coterie of corporations and applied research projects. Still… what gives?