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From: Despair.com

Did you happen to read a Times “opinionator” piece by Errol Morris, “It Was All Started By A Mouse,” in January of this year. Now he has just begun a new Times series called: “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is.”

Interesting. I thought of you, and what you might have to say about all this, perhaps at a moment between your bike rides, lake sails, and the weight room.

Morris, or rather David Dunning, whom Morris is interviewing, cites the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld about unknown unknowns:

“Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech … It goes something like this: ‘There are things we know we know about terrorism.  There are things we know we don’t know.  And there are things that are unknown unknowns.  We don’t know that we don’t know.’

He got a lot of grief for that.  And I thought, ‘That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.’”

In a comment following someone pointed out that engineers called unknown unknowns “unk unks.” What could you possibly say about them, let alone talk about them?

Now, in case you’ve forgotten, anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware or denies the existence of the disability.

So my question, are we all anosognosiacs? And if we are how have we survived as long as we have? And are we increasing, or decreasing the number of unknown unknowns out there as we proceed along the evolutionary path laid out for us by Darwin and followers?

Philip

From The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2009, Message in a Genome by Matthew Stremlau

My son and I continue to talk about equality and religion. My interest was always to know if our respect for one another, our giving value and importance to each individual life, if this stemmed from religious teachings, or from our very nature. I still tend to believe the latter.

Now that same son has given me to read Steven Pinker’s The Moral Instinct, a cover story from the NYTimes magazine of January 13 of this year. He had been holding on to this particular edition of the magazine upstairs in his room. I don’t think he has a collection of them, although not a Sunday goes by when I’m visiting (often “staying”) at his home in Tampa when he is not (if he’s home because he travels a lot) sprawled out on his couch reading the Sunday Times.

Pinker’s article doesn’t speak directly of equality (nor of liberty) but it does convincingly present five universal values, or, as he calls them, moral spheres. These five  spheres, he says, are good candidates for a periodic table of the moral sense, both because they are ubiquitous, and because they seem to have deep evolutionary roots.

They are, 1) the impulse to avoid harm, 2) respect for authority, 3) exalting purity, cleanliness and sanctity while loathing defilement, contamination and carnality, 4) loyalty to a group, solidarity and conformity to the group’s norms, and 5) fairness, one should reciprocate favors, reward benefactors, and punish cheaters. They are, in the words of Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, at the University of Virginia, the primary colors of our moral sense.

Does, I would ask my son, our moral sense spoken of in this manner tell us anything about equality, not to mention freedom?  Fraternity, yes, for that’s group loyalty. Freedom and equality, unlike respect for authority, purity concerns, and group loyalty, are late arrivals in the history of man. These are most of all modern, present day values.

Are they also moral values? (What other kinds of values are there?) And if so don’t we have to look for them, for their origins in the “primary colors of our moral sense?”

Perhaps our respect of others, our sense of our being created equal, comes most of all from the impulse to avoid harm, to ourselves and others. Freedom may also stem from this same impulse, whereas both equality and freedom have often clashed with three of Pinker’s moral themes, with respect for authority, exalting purity, and group loyalty…

Charles Darwin’s words at the very end of the concluding chapter of The Origin of Species, regarding all life forms, are well known and, at least by the scientific community, widely accepted as being the truth about how life forms have multiplied over hundreds of millions of years to reach the present time when they probably number in the tens of millions of distinct forms or species.

“There is grandeur," he says, "in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

There are other words of Darwin, perhaps less well known and certainly not as widely accepted, even by the scientific community, that have been instead widely and tragically resisted, tragically because the resistance has meant an endless series of wars and the accompanying suffering and body counts.

"As man advances in civilization," he writes in the 4th. chapter of Part 1 of the Descent of Man, "and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”

Why the resistance to this insight? What has prevented and still prevents us from extending our sympathies to the men of all nations and races? For in fact the One World idea, which is Darwin’s idea no less than the Origin of Species, is still without the powerful draw of the family, the tribe, and the nation.

Today the nation (actually all 192 of them, the current roster of the United Nations) puts up the greatest resistance to our world being one. Any hope that this might not always be so stems from the fact that over time the earliest political units, the family and the tribe, are warring less and cooperating more, and have mostly accepted, although not aways willingly, to become parts of the larger community or nation.

Hope is still that the nations of the world will eventually be willing and cooperating parts of a much larger world community.

For Darwin is no less right about the seemingly different peoples of the earth being more properly integral parts of a single world wide community than he was about the origin of the tens of millions of species presently inhabiting the earth. As he says only "artificial barriers," mostly those of language, culture, and race, prevent the peoples of the world from coming together right now.

Under the skin of the seven billion individuals now inhabiting the earth, in their cells and within the nuclei of the cells, within the spiraling helices of DNA molecules constituted into 23 pairs of chromosomes, the seven billion individuals are 99.5% identical.

Our living together, our living together at peace, may only be a function of how much we look upon one another as being the same, or alternatively how much significance we give to our differences, the one leading to cooperation, the other in extreme instances of our differences, as in Africa and the Middle East, to disputes and ultimately to war.

In our country, up until now, the "one worlders," for example, Woodrow Wilson in the 1920s, Wendell Wilkie in the 1940s, both of whom knew at first hand the devastation brought about by wars between nations, have not been able to bring our country along with them.

Rather up until now the race has been mostly to the "real worlders," to the likes of Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger et al., for whom our security lay much more in the mostly material strength of our single nation than in our moral strength, in our belonging and adhering to international and one world treaties and organizations. Will things change? Will Darwin here also be proven to be right? One would like to believe so.

    Do you want to try your hand at this? Which one’s the chicken? the rabbit? the salamander, the fish, the human? 

    (The picture was taken from the Scientific American of February, 1994, from an article by William McGinnis and Michael Kuziora: The Molecular Architects of Body Design)

    The Evo-Devo (evolution-development) biologists tell us that all forms of life have pretty much the same beginnings. And in many, as above, pretty much the same look, at least in the early stages of development. Also we’re told that pretty much the same groups of HOX genes in the five examples above, and in all other animal forms, determine exactly what changes will occur throughout the development process, leading to the great diversity of life that we see about us.

    Given that the embryos of the fish, salamander, chicken, rabbit and human (in that order above) are almost identical in the early stages of their development why is it that we humans continue to set ourselves apart from all other life forms as if somehow we were special, and that all other life was there for our benefit?

    Why also is it that humans, developing from identical embryos and who are mostly alike, why do they go on killing each other? And why is it that those who are most alike, as the peoples of the Middle East, kill one another with a particular vengeance and savagery?

Two news reports in today’s New York Times, one about elephants, "An Elephant Crack-up,  the cover story in the magazine, and the other, Monday morning’s, Columbus Day, big headline, "North Korea detonates nuclear device."

I asked myself which of these stories held the most significance for us humans, North Korea’s possession of the Bomb, or elephant packs being seriously deranged if not destroyed by the growing human encroachment on their living spaces?

My vote goes to the elephants, and here’s why. The possession of the bomb is, I believe, a civilizing force. It brings with it responsibility. Without it the nation, feeling left out, acts irresponsibly. With it the nation gains respect, although begrudgingly, and now, for its own prosperous future, quickly grasps that it has to act responsibly if it would realize that prosperity. And now as an equal. Strength to strength relationships, my strong arm facing off against your strong arm, are stabilizing forces. Strength to weakness relationships are highly unstable, and the constant source of quarrels leading to wars.
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How we treat surviving elephant populations goes much more to what we are. Do we step back and alllow this other animal population to go on possessing a territory and home of its own, beyond our grasp, or do we make its territory just one more property in our own ever expanding possession and exploitation of all the earth’s habitable land, disregarding the claims of whatever other animal species were there before us?

"Goes much more to what we are." Are we one among many precious forms of animal and plant life onthe earth? Or are we, as the only valued life form, destined to allow only those other species, such as grasses and livestock, that are now entirely in our service, insuring our survival and continual expansion, to exist alongside of us? Elephants, other than promoting the sale of circus and zoo tickets, do nothing for us. Perhaps an ivory farm? But that’s probably not cost effective.

So if ever we take the steps needed to preserve the lives of elephants by allowoing them a habitat of their own we then surmount our own egotism and are better inhabitants of the earth ourselves as a result. This is happening, let’s hope not too slowly. For there are many among us who are are trying to give these wonderful creatures space. It’s not yet news that we have succeeded, but this is a much more important and on-going story than the nuclear device that was exploded in North Korea yesterday.

Why is it that in spite of Darwin, in spite of the common cellular origin of all life on our planet, we go on thinking of "history" as that of man’s brief time on the earth, a mere 10,000 years or so? Why hasn’t "history" become the history of life on the earth and taken its rightful place in our schools? Are we better off, more civilized, more capable of furthering our civilization if we can recount the battles, say, of the American Civil War, and know nothing about, the Miocene period when large numbers of apes, including probably our own blood relatives, roamed the plains of eastern Europe and the near East? Who is more apt to respect human life, the one who can recount what happened at Shiloh, Tennessee, during the first week of April, 1862, or the one who knows that during the Miocene Epoch, roughly 15 million years ago, as many  as 100 species of apes roamed throughout the Old World, including not unlikely human ancestors such as Dryopithecus in Europe and Sivapithecus in Asia?
Furthermore we’re told (A Lesson About History’s Lessons) that kids now a days are not even learning man’s recent history in the schools. "Each of us who teaches history has been reminded repeatedly in recent years about the "historical illiteracy" of our nation’s youth. The Bradley Commission, Diane Ravitch, the evening news, even chance acquaintances tell us that the ‘typical’ American teenager cannot place the Civil War in the correct decade (or perhaps even the correct half century). That same generic seventeen-year-old, we are told, does not know the purpose of Jim Crow legislation, nor recognize the contribution of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in ending that chapter in our history. He or she does not know that England colonized North America’s Atlantic coast, and is unaware that Spain’s imperial arm extended into the American Southwest."
These comments, of which there are no end, never include mention of the much greater "hole" in kids’ knowledge of the history of life on earth. Of that much earlier history, which most certainly tells us much more about ourselves than, say, the Battle of Shiloh, by in large nothing is known by our school children, with only one exception, the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods when the dinosaurs, then terrible lizards, but now children’s playthings, ruled. So instead of teaching our children the history of life, the life that we share with all living creatures, we teach a few favored periods of history, for young children times of the dinosaurs, for older children, perhaps, the time of the Greeks and the Romans, a bit of the so-called Middle Ages, and then in great detail the modern period, primarily one of battles and wars, of men killing one another and in most instances for no good reason. Wouldn’t our children be better served to learn the history of plate tectonics, and the creation of mountains as plates crashed together, the rise of homo sapiens and how we came to be human?
It was George Santayana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana philosopher, essayist, poet, novelist, and lifelong Spanish citizen, who said that, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Now this statement is often used by history teachers, and even more often perhaps by politicians, to stress the importance of the knowledge of history. But here also they are only talking about man’s most recent history, again that of one or two thousand years. Furthermore whereas knowledge of Neville Chamberlain’s "appeasement" policy ought to have prevented the subsequent Yalta give-away of Eastern Europe, it didn’t. Nor did knowledge of the Vietnamese War prevent our current war in Iraq from taking place. So that one might just as well say that those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
But if by "past" we mean the history of past life on the earth the statement is nonsense. Whether we "remember" it or not that life will not be repeated. The dinosaurs are gone forever, as is Pangaea, as is the wooly mammoth. Rather to remember this past is to realize how precious life is. And that’s why this past ought to be taught in the schools. Too often remembering our most recent past, which has been one of wars and the slaughter of millions, seems to make us perpetrators of more of the same. Witness the predominance in our lives of Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-like groups, and the ascendancy of the military industrial complexes within our most developed nations. Knowledge of our recent, tragic past has done nothing to prevent this from coming about, whereas knowledge and understanding of life’s history might have.

Not all the time, but from time to time, actually pretty often if I
have the time to read widely, I encounter in my reading bits of what I
will call new awarenesses, or new truths, "eye openers," things that I
really didn’t know before the encounter and that have made my life
thereafter a bit richer, by enabling me to see a little bit further
into life’s mostly dark and unfathomable depths. I suppose when I ask
my grandson what he learned in school I’m assuming that he had had a
similar eye opening experience. He never does, or rather he never tells
me about it. He must have them. Everyone must. Isn’t this what living
and learning is all about? Anyway, my new understanding, or eye-opener
as I’m going to call this sort of thing in what follows, may stem from
little or nothing at all, from a few words, a brief anecdote, a new
application of a well worn idea or image, or it may come from something
more substantial, such as the reading of the works of scientists,
philosophers, thinkers of all kinds, whose new to me ideas flood my
mind as a bright light from a beacon, and whose ideas I immediately
steal and make my own. Talk about walking on the shoulders of others,
well that’s what I do.

What do I mean by a new understanding
stemming from an encounter with just a few words, from “little or
nothing at all”? Here’s an example. Earlier today I was reading an
article in the Wall Street Journal about how the creators of worms and
viruses are now attacking the Mac operating system, and to do so "they
use what are called ‘social engineering’ techniques to trick users into
doing things that they shouldn’t do, like unwittingly installing
programs. The Anna Kournikova worm from 2001, for example, infamously
tricked Windows users into installing it by masquerading as photos of
the leggy Russian tennis star attached to e-mails.”

My “eye opener” in this instance was just this one sentence from the article: “These approaches exploit a bug in peoples’ brains, which is much harder to patch."
Wow, weaknesses in my brain that are virus and worm prone and that are
hard to patch, no less so than computer operating systems. Makes you
wonder how many “bugs” you carry about with you during your daily
activities. Makes you certainly less sure of yourself because suddenly
you know that your brain probably does contain a number of bugs
(downloaded from where?) that do interfere with what should be normal
brain (whatever that is) activity. I wonder what “bug” it is in the
suicide bomber’s brain, placed there by a fanatical Imam, and that then
permits the terrorist’s message to enter the brain, take root, and
eventually destroy that brain and others along with it in the single
mad action of blowing himself or herself up. Now that is a deadly
virus. The ultimate worm of all worms. And how are we to correct faulty
operating systems of this kind? We don’t yet even know how they enter
and take root in someone’s brain. In this case our Norton or McAfee
anti-virus software are our intelligence services but so far these
services have not proved up to the task of finding and destroying the
suicide bug.

Here’s another example, this time not a few words,
but a simple anecdote, of how something you thought you already knew
comes alive again and with a new force, bringing new life to old
knowledge as it were. For me this was another eye opener. The old
knowledge was that similar, very much alike features of our anatomy
closely relate us to all other mammals, as well as to other organisms
even further removed from us in the Linnean order of living things. For
we’ve known for a long time, well before Charles Darwin even, that many
seemingly very different species belong by their common anatomical
structures, to the same biological class of animals. Here’s the example
of how a simple anecdote can make this old truth come alive again. I
encountered this one in last Sunday’s Times in Chip Brown’s account of
a Taliban at Yale (see my last Blog entry). The Taliban, Rahmatullah,
who will eventually enroll as a freshman at Yale College, asks his
benefactor Mike Hoover a question:

"Do
you believe people are related to dogs?" (Dogs are not favored in
Afghan society; the question dared him to contradict common sense.)

"Yes," Hoover said.  The Taliban all laughed in amazement.

"How can you possibly believe that? We are so different."

"You see only differences. I see similarities."

"Similarities! Like what?"  (Hoover wanted his first example to be an intellectual bunker buster, so he thought carefully.)

"Bilateral symmetry," he said. The laughter stopped, which pleased him.

"What does that mean?"

"It
means dogs have eyes on either side of their nose, just like humans.
Dogs have two nostrils, just like humans. They have two lungs. They
have toenails. They have a heart in the center of their chest. Dog
blood and human blood are indistinguishable."

No new
knowledge, but oh did that old knowledge come alive in this exchange
between the American, Mike Hoover, and the young members of the
Taliban.

Then there are the eye openers that bring new
knowledge. And as long as one seeks to learn there is no end to this
kind of experience. Here’s just one of many examples of new knowledge
that I have acquired from reading Robert Wright’s books, in this case,
Nonzero, or The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright is discussing the growth
of complexity during the evolution of biological organisms on this
earth. How much can we conclude from this? Is it the meaning of life to
grow in complexity, reaching at some far off point in time, what,…
God, a “mind” straddling the entire Globe, as thinkers such as Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin have imagined it?

Wright asks the question,
does the growth in complexity represent progress? Then he reminds us
that Stephen Jay Gould rejected the idea of progress, as well as the
importance of man’s place in life’s history. Run it again from the
beginning and there’s a good chance that man would not even appear.
Gould showed clearly that the multicellular biological organisms now
living on the earth, and in particular man, were not at all the
principal form of life on the earth, nor did he make up more than a
tiny part of the history of life on earth. For in regard to numbers of
individuals, biological mass weight, and probably even numbers of
distinct species, bacteria were, and are, far more remarkable. Man is
just one species, and even today when he numbers in the billions, he is
bested not only by bacteria, but also by the ants and termites in
respect to total biological mass weight, and he is bested by most other
life forms in regard to total time on the earth, that being so far well
less than a million years, or a tiny instant in the 4.5 billion year
history of the earth. So if we look at the huge place of single celled
bacteria among living things we can’t then make too much of the
relatively small place taken up by the multi-cellular organisms
including man. For these forms make up only a small segment of life’s
history and presence on the earth. Bacteria have always dominated the
whole picture and still do. And bacteria have shown no movement towards
more complex forms. They are much the same today as they were 2 billion
or more years ago.

Here are, for me, some of the eye opening passages from Wright’s book, Nonzero:

“Yes.
Gould is saying not only that bacteria are pretty simple creatures;
he’s saying that they outnumber us. Or, as he puts it: “modal”
complexity shows no tendency to grow; the level of complexity at which
the greatest number of living things resides—the mode—has not changed
noticeably since at least 2 billion years ago. Back then, most living
things were about as complex as a bacterium. One billion years ago,
ditto. Now, ditto.

"Indeed, not only do bacteria outnumber us;
they outweigh us. In fact, they outweigh just about anything, if you
add up all the underground bacteria. Also, they can survive under lots
of weird conditions. “On any possible, reasonable, or fair criterion,
bacteria are—and always have been—the dominant forms of life on earth.”

To
go on, what about the numbers of different species? Do we know how many
there are? Do we know that there are more bacterial species than all
others combined? No, we don’t yet know the answers to either question.
The biologist E. O. Wilson estimates known species at approximately 1.4
million, while another study estimates the number at approximately 1.5
million. And there are scientists who say that there could be tens of
millions more of spiecies still unknown.

When I think about it
it’s probably biology more than any other academic discipline that has
opened my own eyes to things previously unseen. I learn, from this same
investigation that began while reading Robert Wright’s Nonzero, that
while it is relatively easy to classify mammals and plants, this is not
true in regard to bacteria, hence one source of our ignorance in regard
to their total numbers. Another source of our difficulty in determining
the number of species living on the earth is that biodiversity is not
evenly distributed throughout the world. There are many imbalances,
skewing the counting process. For example, over half of all described
species are insects, including approximately 300,000 known beetles, a
fact which led biologist J. B. S. Haldane to remark that God has "an
inordinate fondness for beetles." Also seventy percent of the world’s
species occur in only 12 countries: Australia, Brazil, China, Columbia,
Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico, Peru, and Zaire. The
tropical rain forests, common to these countries, are believed to
contain more than half the number of all species on Earth.

To return to our bacteria we learn, still from Edward O Wilson, that "the
vast majority of bacterial types remain completely unknown, with no
name and no hint of the means needed to detect them. Take a gram of
ordinary soil, a pinch held between two fingers, and place it in the
palm of your hand. You are holding a clump of quartz grains laced with
decaying organic matter and free nutrients, and about 10 billion
bacteria. How many bacterial species are present are present in that
gram of soil? How many species of bacteria are there in the world?
Bergey’s Manual of Systematic Bacteriology, the official guide updated
to 1989, list about 4,000. There has always been a feeling among
microbiologists that the true number, including the undiagnosed
species, is much greater, but no one could even guess by how much. Ten
times more? A hundred? Recent research suggests that the answer might
be at least a thousand times greater, with the total number ranging
into the millions.”

Wilson wrote those words in 1992.
Much more recently, just last year, in 2005, a group led by William
Whitman at the University of Georgia made a direct estimate of the
total number of bacteria, not the number of species, but the number of
individuals, and as you would expect that number makes the number of
humans look downright puny. Their estimate of that number is five
million trillion trillion, that’s a five with 30 zeroes after it. Or,
if each bacterium were a penny, the stack would reach a trillion light
years. The team also found that the total amount of bacterial carbon in
the soil and subsurface, where over 90% of the bacteria live, to be yet
another staggering number, 5 X 10**17 g or the weight of the United
Kingdom, a quantity nearly equal to the total carbon found in plants.
All eye openers.

My final “eye opener” is taken also from the
Georgia study in regard to the rate of mutations and how bacteria
operate in nature. The authors point to the fact that “events
that are extremely rare in the laboratory could occur frequently in
nature. … And because the number of bacteria is so large in nature,
events that would occur once in 10 billion years in the laboratory
would occur every second in nature. New species, anyone?”