Ode to a dead mouse

When I got home,

And opened the door, 

I heard the noise, 

And my first thought was, 

“I got you! 

The glue trap 

Worked.” 

 

Then, 

I went in the kitchen 

To open carefully 

A pantry door 

Carefully, was the plan, 

In case you were 

Agitated enough to bite. 

And then I saw you 

In the sink 

Trap-attached 

By your tail and a couple of feet. 

Powerful enough 

In your panic 

To push through 

A pantry door 

Trap and all. 

 

 I partially covered you 

With a large glass lid 

Until you quickly 

Went into panicked screeching. 

So, I pulled it off. 

 

 I went outside 

For my power walk 

Figuring you would be 

Closer to dead 

When I returned. 

 

Wrong! 

You were, rather, C

loser to escaped, 

Held only by part of your tail, 

Any feet previously trapped 

Now extricated. 

 

And so I acted. 

I first tried to trap you 

And the glue trap 

In a pot. 

But then saw 

That a 2-quart pot was too shallow 

To hold you in your frenzy. 

As you tried to scramble out. 

 

Tired of hearing you 

Scooting at night 

For days on end, 

I resolved. 

 

The pot I turned over 

And dropped you in the sink, 

Small bit of tail still trap-pinned 

And brought it down 

As best I could 

On your rodentine head 

Even as your black mouse eyes 

Stared back at me. 

 

A second shot 

Had more effect 

And a third 

Brought a trickle of blood 

From your mouth. 

Fuck you, Peter Singer. 

 

On the prose side, I reject Singer’s speciesism. I’ll kill wasps and hornets, and some bees. Flies are so-so. I’ll kill mosquitoes. Spiders stay alive, unless I know it’s a black widow or brown recluse. 

But a mouse inside the house? Or apartment in my case? Between it disturbing my sleep at times, and being a potential health hazard, it has to go. I thought I had caught it in a basket nearly a week ago. I took that outside and tossed all contents into the parking lot. It sure looked like a mouse running away. Maybe it was Might Mouse and returned. Maybe it had a partner, of the opposite sex; if it was a female left inside, it definitely needed to go. Maybe I was mistaken about what I dumped out late at night, but I don’t think so. 

I didn’t like the black mouse eyes staring at me, but it is what it is. I mulled through general animal tenderness, Singer’s speciesism and other things, after dumping dying mouse and glue trap in an apartment dumpster then walking to Walmart. 

On the way back, I thought of Keynes: 

“In the long run, we’re all dead.” 

Your long run just ended mouse-young. 

I’ll be there eventually. So will you, Peter Singer.

Defining "life": a scientific and philosophical demarcation problem

What does it mean to be "alive"? Viruses in general make biologists struggle with that definition, and COVID-19 has brought that issue back to life, especially with having relatively few genes even for a virus.

In one of his latest "Elk" columns for the New York Times, Carl Zimmer weighs in heavily on the issue, not just for science, but to some degree, for philosophy of science, or per Massimo Pigliucci, more specifically, for philosophy of biology.

I think that, per his piece, and what I've read elsewhere, probably a slight majority of biologists would accept viruses as "alive," period ... maybe 55 percent? Another 15 percent might still say "nope." And, the remaining 30 percent would say something like "alive but..."

That said, the piece is worth a read otherwise, especially for the last one-third, talking about viruses and viral DNA entering the animal biome, and namely the human biome. Zimmer first notes that viruses as well as bacteria in our gut are important to our microbiome.

But, that's small potatoes.

The biggie is how, over aeons, viral DNA has entered animal DNA. For example, mammalian females' placenta development is dependent in part on old viral DNA inside mammalian genes. In this and other cases, mammals long ago not only, for the most part, neutralized threats from viral DNA but managed to repurpose it.

Zimmer discusses this issue, and his new book, even more at Quanta, with an excerpt from it.

He cites Wittgenstein, and he's barking up the right tree if we mean linguistic philosophy in general as well as some specific Wittgensteinian ideas. The issue of "family resemblance," per Witty's comment about defining "games," is one important issue.

"Cancer" book author Siddhartha Mukherjee has a review of the book. He notes that Zimmer also discusses modern new studies on things like brain organoids, as well as viruses, in wrestling with the demarcation issue. Spores also make the discussion list. So do multicellular creatures, like snakes in deep estivation.

Maybe the "dopamine" theory of addiction isn't ALL wrong; ditto on serotonin and depression

 Sometimes, science is exciting indeed.

 For years, starting about the turn of the century, dopamine as "the addiction neurotransmitter" became an ever more peddled idea among simplistic and reductionist ideas of neuroscience — both professional as well as lay.

Given the number of brain receptors for dopamine, that alone made it simplistic. Dopamine does a lot more than trigger desire, or even trigger memories of desire.

Indeed.

It turns out both it and serotonin are ALSO involved in epigenetic controls.

As the author of this Quanta piece notes, reflecting on a recent piece in Science magazine and other things, this would explain, or partially explain, a LOT.

On serotonin, if part of its antidepressant effects are epigenetic, not straight neurotransmitter work, that would explain why SSRIs, and antidepressants in general, take weeks to have effect. This also would probably explain why different SSRIs affect people differently.

Finally, it would add new backdrops to the heritability of depression.

On dopamine, it might further add to why addiction "triggers" can be potent years later. And, as with serotonin and depression, it would add material to the heritability of addiction.

The bigger picture, on evolutionary biology and the extended evolutionary synthesis? This could be a further wedge undercutting evolutionary psychology, as well as deterministic thoughts on volition.

Finally, it would probably add more food for thought for evolutionary development of these and other neurotransmitters, or now, neurotransmitters/epigenetic tags.

Saplosky's 'Behave' doesn't fully do so

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A 3.5 star "magnum opus" needs some philosophy in general and Hume in particular

The book is not horrible, but it's not all that it could be or that some reviewers crack it up to be. Content, lack of content, and lack of editorial connectivity are all problems.

One biggie on the good side is about dopamine. Sapolsky, with all the latest on that, shows just how much dopamine can NOT be the "addiction neurotransmitter." (There are still plenty of the uninformed who think it is.)

1. On dopamine, at one point it becomes about rewarding anticipation of an actuality, not the actuality
2. Neurons have at least 5 dopamine receptors. D4 is the most studied … the DRD4 gene controlling for it has at least 10 different variants. The 7R form, with seven repeats of one stretch of the gene, is associated w/novelty seeking, addiction, promiscuity, risk taking etc. BUT the risk taking can be for good causes.
3. A particular variant has at most 3-4 percent effect on novelty seeking.
4. What constitutes ‘novelty seeking’ still varies from person to person.
5. In addition, the DAT (dopamine reuptake) gene also comes in different varieties.
6. Even an anticipation of a lessening of an electric shock of a Pavlovian operant conditioning type will raise dopamine

Then, I love this footnote:

Footnote, page 66: Dopaminergic responses to sexually arousing visual stimuli are greater in men than in women. Remarkably, this difference isn’t specific to humans. Male rhesus monkeys will forgo the chance to drink water when thirsty in order to see pictures of — I’m not quite sure how else to say this — crotch shots of female rhesus monkeys (while not being interested in other rhesus-y pictures).

Sapolsky has a fair amount to say about cultural evolution. No blinding light info, but generally solid.

He pretty much crushes Steve Pinker's "Better Angels" claims about our mega-violent past. (Pinker isn't totally alone in such claims, and he and fellow travelers like creating straw people out of anthropologists.) The reality, Sapolsky notes, and with which many anthropologists agree, is that primitive hunter-gatherers weren't violence-free, but they weren't totally Hobbsian. That said, Sapolsky only briefly references controversy over whether or not Pinker et al cheat by not counting internal violence by the modern state against its own citizens.

Surprisingly, after that kicking of Pinker, Sapolsky is generally accepting of sociobiology and its offspring, ev psych. He's also surprisingly at least halfway accepting of D.S. Wilson's neo-version of group selection. And, with that, for now, the book goes back to 4 stars.

Chapter on morals gets dicey. Gets close to scientism. Says he’ll talk more about virtue ethics later, but doesn’t, not in that chapter. Doesn’t recognize that many serious philosophers don’t consider the trolley problem to be serious philosophy.

And, speaking of, his last chapter, on the justice system, could use a lot of philosophy. And has none. Philosophy is missing elsewhere, too.

He uses Hume to introduce Damasio's idea of "emotional reasoning," which includes modeling hypothetical situations to feel potential emotional affect. But, he doesn't reference Damasio that much after that and doesn't mention Hume at all. Of course, Hume's famous "Is ≠ ought" is VERY pertinent in the justice system chapter, if no place else. The whole emphasis on "neuro-" in this last chapter comes close to scientism, and Sapolsky could use some help on matters of volition, which, rather than "free will," is the preferred terminology among many philosophers.

Then there's an occasional WTF. Here's the biggest, on 486:

In one such study, Michael Tomasello (a frequent critic of de Waal — stay tuned) ....

Stay tuned for WHAT? Per the index, and my reading, that's the only reference to Tomasello (who IS an insightful person) in the whole book.

Similarly, after promising, in the first few pages after that Hume reference, to talk more about Damasio later on, he really doesn't. There's only two brief references to him after the first 100 pages.

In short, although it's been several years since Sapolsky has had a tome, and I've liked his previous work this baby came off in some ways as looking like a rush job which needed a better editor as well as a philosopher to be among its readers.

I'd heard good stuff about it, but, because it's at 4.5 stars, my 3.5 star rating and the non-allowance of half-stars mean I bump it downward.


View all my reviews

4 strands of biology, sociology, economics, philosophy connect

The four strands? Competitiveness in general, capitalism, Pop Evolutionary Psychology and social Darwinism.

Regular readers know that I’ve recently written about No. 4, including listing one candidate most wouldn’t put there. I’ve regularly written about Pop Ev Psych and its largely unscientific, occasionally pseudoscientific claims; I’ve been wary of it even when less liberal than I am now, so this is not driven by political issues.

I am that liberal, though … left-liberal of a sort for America, at least. So, in various ways, I’ve definitely written about No. 2, capitalism?

No. 1, competitiveness, somewhat ties all the others together.

Evolution by natural selection does involve a degree of competitiveness, to be sure. However, that competitiveness is usually against members of other species, more than members of one’s own species. To the degree there is intraspecific competition, it’s often sexual selection that’s the driver. That said, at the same time, group selection can be a driver for collaboration with other members of the same species.

So, that’s biology. Pop Ev Psych is sociology, primarily in what it says about its adherents. Ditto for social Darwinism (the fourth modern variety of social Darwinism, New Atheism, has many libertarian adherents, and yes, adherents is the right word). Capitalism is obviously a matter of economics.

Philosophy? Trying to extrapolate from the biological basis of and need for competitiveness to the other three gets us to Davie Hume’s famous is-ought distinction. (It’s worth noting that, in my opinion, many people who claim that Hume’s comments on this are misconstrued, misinterpreted, wrongly implied, etc., have personal reasons for stating this; see ox, whose and goring.)

Just because we have to fight to escape a lion (or per the old joke, run faster than a companion also seeking to escape it) doesn’t mean that Wall Street plutocracy, Pop Ev Psych “just so” stories and the beliefs behind them, or the social Darwinism of either New Atheism or old-time religion has to be that way.

Because it doesn’t.

And, this is part of why the American education system is problematic, and not just K-12 education.

I don’t think I am overstating matters when I say 90 percent of Americans are unfamiliar with Hume’s is-ought distinction. And that’s sad. Hume is one of the most “approachable,” largely non-technical, philosophers in modern, or even modern plus ancient, philosophical history.

Identical twins aren't so identical, not even their brains

That's been known to be true for some time. Depending on when the single fertilized egg divided, identical twins can have separarate amniotic sacs, umbilical cords and placentas, the same sac, the same cord as well, or even the same placenta.


And now, we're learning that identical twins may not have entirely the same genetic makeup, not even in brain cells.  As a result, twin studies for illnesses, behavior, etc., may be called into a bit of question, and future twin studies more carefully controlled for subjects.

At the same time, the authors occasionally slip into quasi-teleological language while wondering why evolution "allows" this. Their proposed answer as to why this may happen is interesting, but could serve to have that language nuanced better. Also, even if you allow for the teleological/personifying language, that may not be the reason why this happens; maybe epigenetic events are at least partially involved, even with identicals. After all, they don't share 100 percent the same environment.


And, it may turn out that on a statistical average, such transposition isn't favorable or unfavorable, and that we're talking about a ramped-up genetic drift. Or maybe more modest transposition was more favorable, and now, the degree of favorability has lessened. From what little I know, genetic studies like this are kind of like studying individual frames, or at best, snippets, from a movie, when the backdrop for the movie may have been radically different at another point.

Michael Ruse, Dawkins fail to understand philosophical necessity

It's ironic to say that about a famed Ph.d. philosopher, and an atheist and skeptic of sorts to boot, as well as about a famous evolutionary biologist, if this is the case.

But, here, Ruse defends Richard Dawkins in advancing a secularist defense of natural evil in particular and, in relation to natural selection rather than a creator god, of the problem of evil in general.

But supposing that God did (and had to) create through law, then Richard Dawkins of all people offers a piece of candy to the Christian. Dawkins argues that the only physical way to get organic adaptation -- the design-like nature of living beings -- is through natural selection, that very painful mechanism that worried Darwin! Other mechanisms are either false (such as Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics) or inadequate (such as saltationism, change by sudden jumps). In other words, although Darwinism does not speak to all cases of physical evil -- the earthquakes -- it does speak to the physical evil that it itself is supposed to bring on. It is Darwinism with suffering, or nothing.

So, Ruse seems to be claiming that Dawkins says a certain amount of "nature bloody red in tooth and claw" was necessary for evolution. And, as a philosopher, Ruse appears to be giving this the imprimatur that it was philosophically necessary.

But, just as there's no philosophical necessity for the amount of evil in the world for God to do good, there's no necessity for a certain amount of evil, in terms of natural evil, for natural selection to operate.

Dawkins isn't a philosopher, not even a real amateur one, so he can be partially forgiven. But, this is a BIG #fail for Ruse.

Free will not so free? And not so human-specific?

I've long been of the opinion that "free will" vs. "determinism" is, if not a false dilemma, at least something close — a pair of false polarities, rather than something on a continuum.

(I've also been of the opinion, taking Dan Dennett's stance on consciousnesss that there's no "Cartesian meaner" to its logical conclusion — as does Daniel Wegner and others, I'm not alone — that there's no conscious, central, controlled location for free will in humans, as well. That is, there's no "Cartesian free willer" either. But, I digress.)

There's a German-based neuroscientist who agrees with me on the "polarities" angle. But, that's not all.

Bjoern Brembs also says that this free will — free will within constraints — is exhibited by animals, too.

Brembs and others have used mathematical models to simulate brain activity on a computer, finding that what worked best was a combination of deterministic behaviour and what is known as stochastic behaviour - which may look random but actually, in time, follows a defined set of probabilities.

Personally, I actually don't see this as that big of a deal. Given that consciousness itself is understood as being on some sort of continuum, rather than "we conscious humans" vs. "you unconscious animals," how could a will, and a will that is partially free, also not exist, and again, on a continuum?

That then said, I do find it a bit more questionable to extend some degree of free will, as Brembs does, all the way down to the level of flies, just as I would find it questionable to attribute consciousness to an animal with so few neurons.

To talk about a dog, or the old laboratory vertebrate standby, the lab rat, as having some degree or type of free will? Yes. The laboratory insect standby, a fruit fly? Per Carl Sagan, that's an extraordinary claim. I expect more evidence.

I'll stand by for more research; this is surely going to be a hot topic not just for months but for years.

One gesture worth 1,000words on language evolution

Chimpanzee gestural control is left-brain-centric, shedding new light on the evolution of human language, since it is also largely localized in the left hemisphere.

“The de­gree of predom­i­nance of the right hand for ges­tures is one of the most pro­nounced we have ev­er found in chim­panzees in com­par­i­son to oth­er non-com­mu­nica­tive man­u­al ac­tions. We al­ready found such man­u­al bi­ases in this spe­cies for point­ing ges­tures ex­clu­sively di­rect­ed to hu­mans. These ad­di­tion­al da­ta clearly showed that right-hand­edness for ges­tures is not spe­cif­ic­ally as­so­ci­at­ed to interac­tions with hu­mans,” William D. Hop­kins said.

Read the full story for more information.

Bonobos busted making war as well as love

Many researchers (Frans de Waal comes immediately to mind) have long suspected that frequent bonobo copulation in zoos was a stress response as much as anything else. Well, bonobos making war — even females certainly provides indirect confirmation to that idea.

Now, I don’t doubt that bonobos are nonetheless, more peaceful than common chimpanzees, on whom they were found hunting. But, the “free love primate” is dead.

And, thank doorknob for that. From where I sit, this idea was a cross-species version of psychological projectionism.

And, in terms of evolutionary psychology, it was probably a dangerous idea, too.

Darwinism looks to explain collective behavior

Wired has a great article on what the next frontier, or hurdle if you will, is for the explanatory power of modern neo-Darwinism — the development of groups and collectives. This includes bees in a hive, ants in a colony, bacteria in a collective, and even more complex things such as the vast array of bacteria that make up 90 percent of the cells in our own “human” bodies.

The main question is, how can neo-Darwinian theory as currently constituted explain these developments of evolutionary biology — if it can?

Down in front, creationists and IDers. Wired is a serious magazine and isn’t asking for “explanations” from you.

But, some of the evolutionary biologists quoted in the story say that something, either a greatly modified neo-Darwinianism or else some appended theory of emergent properties, based on things like chaos theory, complexity theory, and the “tipping points” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, is going to be needed to do the trick.

”There’s nothing wrong with neo-Darwinian evolution in its own right,” Carl Woese said, “but it’s not large enough to encompass what we know now.”

Woese’s specialty is bacteria, and he’s not afraid of bold theories that turn conventional scientific wisdom on its head. In 1977, he and colleague George Fox rearranged the animal kingdom from five branches into three, two of which comprise microbes.

Microbes make up much of Earth’s biomass, and they also cast into relief the shortcomings of neo-Darwinian evolution. A bucket of seawater can contain 60,000 bacterial species, and to Woese, these must be seen as a collective rather than as disparate units.

At the collective level, said Woese, bacteria exhibit patterns of organization and behavior that emerge suddenly, at tipping points of population variation and density called “saltations.” Natural selection still favors — or disfavors — the ultimate outcome of these jumps, but the jumps themselves seem to defy explanation solely through genetic changes or individual properties.

Such jumps don’t just call into question whether evolution is capable of producing sudden rather than gradual change. That debate raged during the later stages of the last century, but has been largely settled in favor of what paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould termed punctuated equilibrium. By contrast, Woese invokes yet-to-be-quantified rules of complexity and emergence. These, he said, may also explain other exceptional jumps, such as the transition from protein fragments to single cells and from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones.

Contrary to IDers, creationists, or New Agers, etc., Woese works with rules that have a basis in science and/or mathematics, rules that are ultimately testable through construction of hypotheses.

Part of the issue hinges on debate over an idea stated most forcefully by philosopher Daniel Dennett: Is neo-Darwinism algorithmic or not? I am guessing Woese would either say “I don’t know,” or “possibly not.” Other evolutionary biologists might agree with Dennett, yet others might reject his claim forcefully.

”Selection probably happens at all scales, from gene to individual to species to collection of species to ecosystem to we don’t even know what,” said Maya Paczuski, head of the Complexity Science Group at the University of Calgary.

Paczuski’s group sees evolution as taking place at all these levels, with what happens in ecosystems rippling down to individuals, back up to populations, across to other populations, and so on — all simultaneously, and in tandem with the mysterious dynamics of networked complexity.

But does it all happen mechanically? Or does evolution obey some larger imperative?

University of Nevada evolutionary biologist Guy Hoelzer calls that imperative biospheric self-organization. "The idea of evolution is embedded within self-organization,” he said. “It coordinates the ecological roles of species so that ecosystems persist and process a great deal of energy.”

I, too, doubt Dennett’s idea, though as a scientific layperson (but not a philosophical one), I don’t think I have enough of a scientific background to be able to reject it forcefully. I do think that, to some degree, the developmental processes we eventually discover in the emergent properties of biological groups, collectives and ecosystems will show enough discontinuity with neo-Darwinism to be likely to develop as separate subfield within evolutionary biology.