When I was a kid and one of my friends would ask for a bit of food–a spare french fry or nugget, say–I would always say “no” and then give them the food.
In retrospect, I was annoying.
My logic was that I would of course give my friend a french fry–I always gave my friends french fries if they wanted them–and thus the asking was superfluous. If anything, I thought we should pile all of the food up in the middle of the table and then everyone could just take what they wanted.
I don’t think I realized that some people have bigger appetites than others. Or germs.
A couple of years later I had a little job that mostly paid in candy. Since I don’t really eat candy, I became known in school as “the kid with the Skittles” because I tended to give it all away.
Around this time I began writing the first mini-essays (really only a few sentences long) that eventually morphed into this blog on the psychological/spiritual/anthropological meaning of food-sharing. (Food is necessary for life; to give it away to someone else signals that you care enough about their well-being to take a potential hit to your own survival chances, hence the significance of food sharing rituals among people.)
It’s not too surprising that by highschool I ascribed to some vague sort of communism.
Note: highschool me didn’t know anything about the history of actual communism. I just liked the idea of a political ideology based on sharing.
So I think I get where a lot of young “communists” are probably coming from. I loved my friends and enjoyed sharing with them so wouldn’t everyone be better off if everyone acted like friends and everyone shared?
There were two problems with my logic. The first, of course, is that not everyone is friends. The second is that in the real world, food costs money.
As a kid, food was, functionally, free: my parents paid for it. I got the exact same amount of french fries and pizza on my lunch tray as everyone else whether I was hungry or not, because our parents paid for it. In the real world, I don’t buy more french fries than I want to eat–I save that extra money for things I do want, like books.
So what happens if I want books and you want food? Or you want books and I want food? And you and I aren’t even friends? Or worse, when there isn’t enough food for both of us?
Sharing is great when everything is free and there’s plenty of it, or there’s a resource that you can only afford if you pitch in with several friends to purchase. (For example, everyone in the house shares the TV.) In other words, when you’re a kid.
But it scales up really badly.
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley.
Every single country that has ever tried communism ended up a disaster. Tens of millions starved to death in the USSR and China. Millions were murdered in Cambodia. North Korea is still an inescapable hellhole. Communism’s total death toll is estimated around 100 million people.
We didn’t exactly learn much about the USSR in highschool (or before.) It was one of the players in WWII, vaguely present in the few readings we had time for after the war, but certainly of much less prominence than things like the Vietnam War. It was only in college that I took actual courses that covered the PRC and USSR, (and then only because they were relevant to my career aspirations.) How much does the average person know about the history of other countries, especially outside of western Europe?
One of my kids accidentally did a report on North Korea (they were trying to do a report on South Korea, but accidentally clicked the wrong country.) The material they were given for the report covered North Korean mountains, rivers, cities, language, flag… And mentioned nothing about the country being just about one of the worst places on earth, where people are routinely starved and tortured to death.
Schools make sure to teach about the horrors of the Holocaust and slavery, but they don’t (as far as I know) teach about the horrors of communism.
So I think we could be in for a mess of trouble–because I understand just how appealing the political ideology of “sharing” sounds when you don’t know what it actually means.
Crohn‘s is an inflammatory disease of the digestive tract involving diarrhea, vomiting internal lesions, pain, and severe weight loss. Left untreated, Crohn’s can lead to death through direct starvation/malnutrition, infections caused by the intestinal walls breaking down and spilling feces into the rest of the body, or a whole host of other horrible symptoms, like pyoderma gangrenosum–basically your skin just rotting off.
Crohn’s disease has no known cause and no cure, though several treatments have proven effective at putting it into remission–at least temporarily.
The disease appears to be triggered by a combination of environmental, bacterial, and genetic factors–about 70 genes have been identified so far that appear to contribute to an individual’s chance of developing Crohn’s, but no gene has been found yet that definitely triggers it. (The siblings of people who have Crohn’s are more likely than non-siblings to also have it, and identical twins of Crohn’s patients have a 55% chance of developing it.) A variety of environmental factors, such as living in a first world country, (parasites may be somewhat protective against the disease), smoking, or eating lots of animal protein also correlate with Crohn’s, but since only 3.2/1000 people even in the West have it’s, these obviously don’t trigger the disease in most people.
Crohn’s appears to be a kind of over-reaction of the immune system, though not specifically an auto-immune disorder, which suggests that a pathogen of some sort is probably involved. Most people are probably able to fight off this pathogen, but people with a variety of genetic issues may have more trouble–according to Wikipedia, “There is considerable overlap between susceptibility loci for IBD and mycobacterial infections.[62] ” Mycobacteria are a genus of of bacteria that includes species like tuberculosis and leprosy. A variety of bacteria–including specific strains of e coli, yersinia, listeria, and Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis–are found in the intestines of Crohn’s suffers at higher rates than in the intestines of non-sufferers (intestines, of course, are full of all kinds of bacteria.)
Crohn’s treatment depends on the severity of the case and specific symptoms, but often includes a course of antibiotics, (especially if the patient has abscesses,) tube feeding (in acute cases where the sufferer is having trouble digesting food,) and long-term immune-system suppressants such as prednisone, methotrexate, or infliximab. In severe cases, damaged portions of the intestines may be cut out. Before the development of immunosuppressant treatments, sufferers often progressively lost more and more of their intestines, with predictably unpleasant results, like no longer having a functioning colon. (70% of Crohn’s sufferers eventually have surgery.)
A similar disease, Johne’s, infects cattle. Johne’s is caused by Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis, (hereafter just MAP). MAP typically infects calves at birth, transmitted via infected feces from their mothers, incubates for two years, and then manifests as diarrhea, malnutrition, dehydration, wasting, starvation, and death. Luckily for cows, there’s a vaccine, though any infectious disease in a herd is a problem for farmers.
If you’re thinking that “paratuberculosis” sounds like “tuberculosis,” you’re correct. When scientists first isolated it, they thought the bacteria looked rather like tuberculosis, hence the name, “tuberculosis-like.” The scientists’ instincts were correct, and it turns out that MAP is in the same bacterial genus as tuberculosis and leprosy (though it may be more closely related to leprosy than TB.) (“Genus” is one step up from “species;” our species is “homo Sapiens;” our genus, homo, we share with homo Neanderthalis, homo Erectus, etc, but chimps and gorillas are not in the homo genus.)
The intestines of cattle who have died of MAP look remarkably like the intestines of people suffering from advanced Crohn’s disease.
MAP can actually infect all sorts of mammals, not just cows, it’s just more common and problematic in cattle herds. (Sorry, we’re not getting through this post without photos of infected intestines.)
So here’s how it could work:
The MAP bacteria–possibly transmitted via milk or meat products–is fairly common and infects a variety of mammals. Most people who encounter it fight it off with no difficulty (or perhaps have a short bout of diarrhea and then recover.)
A few people, though, have genetic issues that make it harder for them to fight off the infection. For example, Crohn’s sufferers produce less intestinal mucus, which normally acts as a barrier between the intestines and all of the stuff in them.
Interestingly, parasite infections can increase intestinal mucus (some parasites feed on mucus), which in turn is protective against other forms of infection; decreasing parasite load can increase the chance of other intestinal infections.
Once MAP enters the intestinal walls, the immune system attempts to fight it off, but a genetic defect in microphagy results in the immune cells themselves getting infected. The body responds to the signs of infection by sending more immune cells to fight it, which subsequently also get infected with MAP, triggering the body to send even more immune cells. These lumps of infected cells become the characteristic ulcerations and lesions that mark Crohn’s disease and eventually leave the intestines riddled with inflamed tissue and holes.
The most effective treatments for Crohn’s, like Infliximab, don’t target infection but the immune system. They work by interrupting the immune system’s feedback cycle so that it stops sending more cells to the infected area, giving the already infected cells a chance to die. It doesn’t cure the disease, but it does give the intestines time to recover.
There were 70 reported cases of tuberculosis after treatment with infliximab for a median of 12 weeks. In 48 patients, tuberculosis developed after three or fewer infusions. … Of the 70 reports, 64 were from countries with a low incidence of tuberculosis. The reported frequency of tuberculosis in association with infliximab therapy was much higher than the reported frequency of other opportunistic infections associated with this drug. In addition, the rate of reported cases of tuberculosis among patients treated with infliximab was higher than the available background rates.
because it is actively suppressing the immune system’s ability to fight diseases in the TB family.
Luckily, if you live in the first world and aren’t in prison, you’re unlikely to catch TB–only about 5-10% of the US population tests positive for TB, compared to 80% in many African and Asian countries. (In other words, increased immigration from these countries will absolutely put Crohn’s suffers at risk of dying.)
There are a fair number of similarities between Crohn’s, TB, and leprosy is that they are all very slow diseases that can take years to finally kill you. By contrast, other deadly diseases, like smallpox, cholera, and yersinia pestis (plague), spread and kill extremely quickly. Within about two weeks, you’ll definitely know if your plague infection is going to kill you or not, whereas you can have leprosy for 20 years before you even notice it.
Tuberculosis is classified as one of the granulomatous inflammatory diseases. Macrophages, T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, and fibroblasts aggregate to form granulomas, with lymphocytes surrounding the infected macrophages. When other macrophages attack the infected macrophage, they fuse together to form a giant multinucleated cell in the alveolar lumen. The granuloma may prevent dissemination of the mycobacteria and provide a local environment for interaction of cells of the immune system.[63] However, more recent evidence suggests that the bacteria use the granulomas to avoid destruction by the host’s immune system. … In many people, the infection waxes and wanes.
Crohn’s also waxes and wanes. Many sufferers experience flare ups of the disease, during which they may have to be hospitalized, tube fed, and put through another round of antibiotics or sectioning (surgical removal of the intestines) before they improve–until the disease flares up again.
Leprosy is also marked by lesions, though of course so are dozens of other diseases.
Note: Since Crohn’s is a complex, multi-factorial disease, there may be more than one bacteria or pathogen that could infect people and create similar results. Alternatively, Crohn’s sufferers may simply have intestines that are really bad at fighting off all sorts of diseases, as a side effect of Crohn’s, not a cause, resulting in a variety of unpleasant infections.
The MAP hypothesis suggests several possible treatment routes:
Improving the intestinal mucus, perhaps via parasites or medicines derived from parasites
Improving the intestinal microbe balance
Antibiotics that treat Map
Anti-MAP vaccine similar to the one for Johne’s disease in cattle
To determine how the worms could be our frenemies, Cadwell and colleagues tested mice with the same genetic defect found in many people with Crohn’s disease. Mucus-secreting cells in the intestines malfunction in the animals, reducing the amount of mucus that protects the gut lining from harmful bacteria. Researchers have also detected a change in the rodents’ microbiome, the natural microbial community in their guts. The abundance of one microbe, an inflammation-inducing bacterium in the Bacteroides group, soars in the mice with the genetic defect.
The researchers found that feeding the rodents one type of intestinal worm restored their mucus-producing cells to normal. At the same time, levels of two inflammation indicators declined in the animals’ intestines. In addition, the bacterial lineup in the rodents’ guts shifted, the team reports online today in Science. Bacteroides’s numbers plunged, whereas the prevalence of species in a different microbial group, the Clostridiales, increased. A second species of worm also triggers similar changes in the mice’s intestines, the team confirmed.
To check whether helminths cause the same effects in people, the scientists compared two populations in Malaysia: urbanites living in Kuala Lumpur, who harbor few intestinal parasites, and members of an indigenous group, the Orang Asli, who live in a rural area where the worms are rife. A type of Bacteroides, the proinflammatory microbes, predominated in the residents of Kuala Lumpur. It was rarer among the Orang Asli, where a member of the Clostridiales group was plentiful. Treating the Orang Asli with drugs to kill their intestinal worms reversed this pattern, favoring Bacteroides species over Clostridiales species, the team documented.
This sounds unethical unless they were merely tagging along with another team of doctors who were de-worming the Orangs for normal health reasons and didn’t intend on potentially inflicting Crohn’s on people. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting study.
At any rate, so far they haven’t managed to produce an effective medicine from parasites, possibly in part because people think parasites are icky.
But if parasites aren’t disgusting enough for you, there’s always the option of directly changing the gut bacteria: fecal microbiota transplants (FMT). A fecal transplant is exactly what it sounds like: you take the regular feces out of the patient and put in new, fresh feces from an uninfected donor. (When your other option is pooping into a bag for the rest of your life because your colon was removed, swallowing a few poop pills doesn’t sound so bad.) EG, Fecal microbiota transplant for refractory Crohn’s:
Approximately one-third of patients with Crohn’s disease do not respond to conventional treatments, and some experience significant adverse effects, such as serious infections and lymphoma, and many patients require surgery due to complications. .. Herein, we present a patient with Crohn’s colitis in whom biologic therapy failed previously, but clinical remission and endoscopic improvement was achieved after a single fecal microbiota transplantation infusion.
Here’s a Chinese doctor who appears to have good success with FMTs to treat Crohn’s–improvement in 87% of patients one month after treatment and remission in 77%, though the effects may wear off over time. Note: even infliximab, considered a “wonder drug” for its amazing abilities, only works for about 50-75% of patients, must be administered via regular IV infusions for life (or until it stops working,) costs about $20,000 a year per patient, and has some serious side effects, like cancer. If fecal transplants can get the same results, that’s pretty good.
Antibiotics are another potential route. The Redhill Biopharma is conducting a phase III clinical study of antibiotics designed to fight MAP in Crohn’s patients. Redhill is expected to release some of their results in April.
Mechanism of action: The vaccine is what is called a ‘T-cell’ vaccine. T-cells are a type of white blood cell -an important player in the immune system- in particular, for fighting against organisms that hide INSIDE the body’s cells –like MAP does. Many people are exposed to MAP but most don’t get Crohn’s –Why? Because their T-cells can ‘see’ and destroy MAP. In those who do get Crohn’s, the immune system has a ‘blind spot’ –their T-cells cannot see MAP. The vaccine works by UN-BLINDING the immune system to MAP, reversing the immune dysregulation and programming the body’s own T-cells to seek out and destroy cells containing MAP. For general information, there are two informative videos about T Cells and the immune system below.
Efficacy: In extensive tests in animals (in mice and in cattle), 2 shots of the vaccine spaced 8 weeks apart proved to be a powerful, long-lasting stimulant of immunity against MAP. To read the published data from the trial in mice, click here. To read the published data from the trial in cattle, click here.
Dr. Borody (who was influential in the discovery that ulcers are caused by the h. pylori bacteria and not stress,) has had amazing success treating Crohn’s patients with a combination of infliximab, anti-MAP antibiotics, and hyperbaric oxygen. Here are two of his before and after photos of the intestines of a 31 yr old Crohn’s sufferer:
Here are some more interesting articles on the subject:
Last week, Davis and colleagues in the U.S. and India published a case report in Frontiers of Medicine http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmed.2016.00049/full . The report described a single patient, clearly infected with MAP, with the classic features of Johne’s disease in cattle, including the massive shedding of MAP in his feces. The patient was also ill with clinical features that were indistinguishable from the clinical features of Crohn’s. In this case though, a novel treatment approach cleared the patient’s infection.
The patient was treated with antibiotics known to be effective for tuberculosis, which then eliminated the clinical symptoms of Crohn’s disease, too.
Through luck, hard work, good fortune, perseverance, and wonderful doctors, I seem to be one of the few people in the world who can claim to be “cured” of Crohn’s Disease. … In brief, I was treated for 6 years with medications normally used for multidrug resistant TB and leprosy, under the theory that a particular germ causes Crohn’s Disease. I got well, and have been entirely well since 2004. I do not follow a particular diet, and my recent colonoscopies and blood work have shown that I have no inflammation. The rest of these 3 blogs will explain more of the story.
What about removing Johne’s disease from the food supply? Assuming Johne’s is the culprit, this may be hard to do, (it’s pretty contagious in cattle, can lie dormant for years, and survives cooking) but drinking ultrapasteurized milk may be protective, especially for people who are susceptible to the disease.
***
However… there are also studies that contradict the MAP theory. For example, a recent study of the rate of Crohn’s disease in people exposed to Johne’s disease found no correllation. (However, Crohn’s is a pretty rare condition, and the survey only found 7 total cases, which is small enough that random chance could be a factor, but we are talking about people who probably got very up close and personal with feces infected with MAP.)
Logistic regression showed no significant association with measures of potential contamination of water sources with MAP, water intake, or water treatment. Multivariate analysis showed that consumption of pasteurized milk (per kg/month: odds ratio (OR) = 0.82, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.69, 0.97) was associated with a reduced risk of Crohn’s disease. Meat intake (per kg/month: OR = 1.40, 95% CI: 1.17, 1.67) was associated with a significantly increased risk of Crohn’s disease, whereas fruit consumption (per kg/month: OR = 0.78, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.92) was associated with reduced risk.
So even if Crohn’s is caused by MAP or something similar, it appears that people aren’t catching it from milk.
There are other theories about what causes Crohn’s–these folks, for example, think it’s related to consumption of GMO corn. Perhaps MAP has only been found in the intestines of Crohn’s patients because people with Crohn’s are really bad at fighting off infections. Perhaps the whole thing is caused by weird gut bacteria, or not enough parasites, insufficient Vitamin D, or industrial pollution.
The Pirahã are a small tribe (about 420) of Amazonian hunter-gatherers whose language is nearly unique: it has no numbers, and you can whistle it. Everett spent much of his childhood among the Piraha because his parents were missionaries, which probably makes him one of the world’s foremost non-Piraha experts on the Piraha.
Occasionally as a child I would wake up in the jungle to the cacophony of people sharing their dreams with one another–impromptu monologues followed by spurts of intense feedback. The people in question, a fascinating (to me anyhow) group known as the Piraha, are known to wake up and speak to their immediate neighbors at all hours of the night. … the voices suggested the people in the village were relaxed and completely unconcerned with my own preoccupations. …
The Piraha village my family lived in was reachable via a one-week sinuous trip along a series of Amazonian tributaries, or alternatively by a one-or flight in a Cessna single-engine airplane.
Piraha culture is, to say the least, very different from ours. Everett cites studies of Piraha counting ability in support of his idea that our ability to count past 3 is a culturally acquired process–that is, we can only count because we grew up in a numeric society where people taught us numbers, and the Piraha can’t count because they grew up in an anumeric society that not only lacks numbers, but lacks various other abstractions necessary for helping make sense of numbers. Our innate, genetic numerical abilities, (the ability to count to three and distinguish between small and large amounts,) he insists, are the same.
You see, the Piraha really can’t count. Line up 3 spools of thread and ask them to make an identical line, and they can do it. Line up 4 spools of thread, and they start getting the wrong number of spools. Line up 10 spools of thread, and it’s obvious that they’re just guessing and you’re wasting your time. Put five nuts in a can, then take two out and ask how many nuts are left: you get a response on the order of “some.”*
And this is not for lack of trying. The Piraha know other people have these things called “numbers.” They once asked Everett’s parents, the missionaries, to teach them numbers so they wouldn’t get cheated in trade deals. The missionaries tried for 8 months to teach them to count to ten and add small sums like 1 + 1. It didn’t work and the Piraha gave up.
Despite these difficulties, Everett insists that the Piraha are not dumb. After all, they survive in a very complex and demanding environment. He grew up with them; many of the are his personal friends and he regards them as mentally normal people with the exact same genetic abilities as everyone else who just lack the culturally-acquired skill of counting.
After all, on a standard IQ scale, someone who cannot even count to 4 would be severely if not profoundly retarded, institutionalized and cared for by others. The Piraha obviously live independently, hunt, raise, and gather their own food, navigate through the rainforest, raise their own children, build houses, etc. They aren’t building aqueducts, but they are surviving perfectly well outside of an institution.
Everett neglects the possibility that the Piraha are otherwise normal people who are innately bad at math.
Normally, yes, different mental abilities correlate because they depend highly on things like “how fast is your brain overall” or “were you neglected as a child?” But people also vary in their mental abilities. I have a friend who is above average in reading and writing abilities, but is almost completely unable to do math. This is despite being raised in a completely numerate culture, going to school, etc.
This is a really obvious and life-impairing problem in a society like ours, where you have to use math to function; my friend has been marked since childhood as “not cognitively normal.” It would be a completely invisible non-problem in a society like the Piraha, who use no math at all; in Piraha society, my friend would be “a totally normal guy” (or at least close.)
Everett states, explicitly, that not only are the Piraha only constrained by culture, but other people’s abilities are also directly determined by their cultures:
What is probably more remarkable about the relevant studies, though, is that they suggest that climbing any rungs of the arithmetic ladder requires numbers. How high we climb the ladder is not the result of our own inherent intelligence, but a result of the language we speak and of the culture we are born into. (page 136)
This is an absurd claim. Even my own children, raised in identically numerate environments and possessing, on the global scale, nearly identical genetics, vary in math abilities. You are probably not identical in abilities to your relatives, childhood classmates, next door neighbors, spouse, or office mates. We observe variations in mathematical abilities within cultures, families, cities, towns, schools, and virtually any group you chose that isn’t selected for math abilities. We can’t all do calculus just because we happen to live in a culture with calculus textbooks.
In fact, there is an extensive literature (which Everett ignores) on the genetics of intelligence:
Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.[6][18][19] It may seem reasonable to expect that genetic influences on traits like IQ should become less important as one gains experiences with age. However, that the opposite occurs is well documented. Heritability measures in infancy are as low as 0.2, around 0.4 in middle childhood, and as high as 0.8 in adulthood.[7] One proposed explanation is that people with different genes tend to seek out different environments that reinforce the effects of those genes.[6] The brain undergoes morphological changes in development which suggests that age-related physical changes could also contribute to this effect.[20]
A 1994 article in Behavior Genetics based on a study of Swedish monozygotic and dizygotic twins found the heritability of the sample to be as high as 0.80 in general cognitive ability; however, it also varies by trait, with 0.60 for verbal tests, 0.50 for spatial and speed-of-processing tests, and 0.40 for memory tests. In contrast, studies of other populations estimate an average heritability of 0.50 for general cognitive ability.[18]
In plain speak, this means that intelligence in healthy adults is about 70-80% genetic and the rest seems to be random chance (like whether you were dropped on your head as a child or had enough iodine). So far, no one has proven that things like whole language vs. phonics instruction or two parents vs. one in the household have any effect on IQ, though they might effect how happy you are.
(Childhood IQ is much more amenable to environmental changes like “good teachers,” but these effects wear off as soon as children aren’t being forced to go to school every day.)
A full discussion of the scientific literature is beyond our current scope, but if you aren’t convinced about the heritability of IQ–including math abilities–I urge you to go explore the literature yourself–you might want to start with some of Jayman’s relevant FAQs on the subject.
Everett uses experiments done with the Piraha to support his claim that mathematical ability is culturally dependent, but this is dependent on is claim that the Piraha are cognitively identical to the rest of us in innate mathematical ability. Given that normal people are not cognitively identical in innate mathematical abilities, and mathematical abilities vary, on average, between groups (this is why people buy “Singapore Math” books and not “Congolese Math,”) there is no particular reason to assume Piraha and non-Piraha are cognitively identical. Further, there’s no reason to assume that any two groups are cognitively identical.
Mathematics only really got started when people invented agriculture, as they needed to keep track of things like “How many goats do I have?” or “Have the peasants paid their taxes?” A world in which mathematical ability is useful will select for mathematical ability; a world where it is useless cannot select for it.
Everett may still be correct that you wouldn’t be able to count if you hadn’t been taught how, but the Piraha can’t prove that one way or another. He would first have to show that Piraha who are raised in numerate cultures (say, by adoption,) are just as good at calculus as people from Singapore or Japan, but he cites no adoption studies nor anything else to this end. (And adoption studies don’t even show that for the groups we have studied, like whites, blacks, or Asians.)
Let me offer a cognitive contrast:
The Piraha are an anumeric, illiterate culture. They have encountered both letters and numbers, but not adopted them.
The Cherokee were once illiterate: they had no written language. Around 1809, an illiterate Cherokee man, Sequoyah, observed whites reading and writing letters. In a flash of insight, Sequoyah understand the concept of “use a symbol to encode a sound” even without being taught to read English. He developed his own alphabet (really a syllabary) for writing Cherokee sounds and began teaching it to others. Within 5 years of the syllabary’s completion, a majority of the Cherokee were literate; they soon had their own publishing industry producing Cherokee-language books and newspapers.
The Cherokee, though illiterate, possessed the innate ability to be literate, if only exposed to the cultural idea of letters. Once exposed, literacy spread rapidly–instantly, in human cultural evolution terms.
By contrast, the Piraha, despite their desire to adopt numbers, have not been able to do so.
(Yet. With enough effort, the Piraha probably can learn to count–after all, there are trained parrots who can count to 8. It would be strange if they permanently underperformed parrots. But it’s a difficult journey.)
That all said, I would like to make an anthropological defense of anumeracy: numeracy, as in ascribing exact values to specific items, is more productive in some contexts than others.
Do you keep track of the exact values of things you give your spouse, children, or close friends? If you invite a neighbor over for a meal, do you mark down what it cost to feed them and then expect them to feed you the same amount in return? Do you count the exact value of gifts and give the same value in return?
In Kabloona, de Poncin discusses the quasi-communist nature of the Eskimo economic system. For the Eskimo, hunter-gatherers living in the world’s harshest environment, the unit of exchange isn’t the item, but survival. A man whom you keep alive by giving him fish today is a man who can keep you alive by giving you fish tomorrow. Declaring that you will only give a starving man five fish because he previously gave you five fish will do you no good at all if he starves from not enough fish and can no longer give you some of his fish when he has an excess. The fish have, in this context, no innate, immutable value–they are as valuable as the life they preserve. To think otherwise would kill them.
It’s only when people have goods to trade, regularly, with strangers, that they begin thinking of objects as having defined values that hold steady over different transactions. A chicken is more valuable if I am starving than if I am not, but it has an identical value whether I am trading it for nuts or cows.
So it is not surprising that most agricultural societies have more complicated number systems than most hunter-gatherer societies. As Everett explains:
Led by Patience Epps of the University of Texas, a team of linguists recently documented the complexity of the number systems in many of the world’s languages. In particular, the researchers were concerned with the languages’ upper numerical limit–the highest quantity with a specific name. …
We are fond of coining new names for numbers in English, but the largest commonly used number name is googol (googolplex I define as an operation,) though there are bigger one’s like Graham’s.
The linguistic team in question found the upper numerical limits in 193 languages of hunter-gatherer cultures in Australia, Amazonia, Africa, and North America. Additionally, they examined the upper limits of 204 languages spoken by agriculturalists and pastoralists in these regions. They discovered that the languages of hunter-gatherer groups generally have low upper limits. This is particularly true in Australia and Amazonia, the regions with so-called pure hunter-gatherer subsistence strategies.
In the case of the Australian languages, the study in question observed that more than 80 percent are limited numerically, with the highest quantity represetned in such cases being only 3 or 4. Only one Australian language, Gamilaraay, was found to have an upper limit above 10, an dits highest number is for 20. … The association [between hunter-gathering and limited numbers] is also robust in South America and Amazonia more specifically. The languages of hunter-gatherer cultures in this region generally have upper limits below ten. Only one surveyed language … Huaorani, has numbers for quantities greater than 20. Approximately two-thirds of the languages of such groups in the region have upper limits of five or less, while one-third have an upper limit of 10. Similarly, about two-thirds of African hunter-gatherer languages have upper limits of 10 or less.
There are a few exceptions–agricultural societies with very few numbers, and hunter-gatherers with relatively large numbers of numbers, but:
…there are no large agricultural states without elaborate number systems, now or in recorded history.
So how did the first people develop numbers? Of course we don’t know, but Everett suggests that at some point we began associating collections of things, like shells, with the cluster of fingers found on our hands. One finger, one shell; five fingers, five shells–easy correspondences. Once we mastered five, we skipped forward to 10 and 20 rather quickly.
Everett proposes that some numeracy was a necessary prerequisite for agriculture, as agricultural people would need to keep track of things like seasons and equinoxes in order to know when to plant and harvest. I question this on the grounds that I myself don’t look at the calendar and say, “Oh look, it’s the equinox, I’d better plant my garden!” but instead look outside and say, “Oh, it’s getting warm and the grass is growing again, I’d better get busy.” The harvest is even more obvious: I harvest when the plants are ripe.
Of course, I live in a society with calendars, so I can’t claim that I don’t look at the calendar. I look at the calendar almost every day to make sure I have the date correct. So perhaps I am using my calendrical knowledge to plan my planting schedule without even realizing it because I am just so used to looking at the calendar.
“What man among you, if he has 100 sheep and has lost 1 of them, does not leave the 99 in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.” Luke 15:3-5
Rather than develop numbers and then start planting barley and millet, I propose that humans first domesticated animals, like pigs and goats. At first people were content to have “a few,” “some,” or “many” animals, but soon they were inspired to keep better track of their flocks.
By the time we started planting millet and wheat (a couple thousand years later,) we were probably already pretty good at counting sheep.
Our fondness for tracking astronomical cycles, I suspect, began for less utilitarian reasons: they were there. The cycles of the sun, moon, and other planets were obvious and easy to track, and we wanted to figure out what they meant. We put a ton of work into tracking equinoxes and eclipses and the epicycles of Jupiter and Mars (before we figured out heliocentrism.) People ascribed all sorts of import to these cycles (“Communicator Mercury is retrograde in outspoken Sagittarius from December 3-22, mixing up messages and disrupting pre-holiday plans.”) that turned out to be completely wrong. Unless you’re a fisherman or sailor, the moon’s phases don’t make any difference in your life; the other planets’ cycles turned out to be completely useless unless you’re trying to send a space probe to visit them. Eclipses are interesting, but don’t have any real effects. For all of the effort we’ve put into astronomy, the most important results have been good calendars to keep track of dates and allow us to plan multiple years into the future.
Speaking of dates, let’s continue this discussion in a week–on the next Anthropology Friday.
*Footnote: Even though I don’t think the Piraha prove as much as Everett thinks they do, that doesn’t mean Everett is completely wrong. Maybe already having number words is (in the vast majority of cases) a necessary precondition for learning to count.
One potentially illuminating case Everett didn’t explore is how young children in numerate culture acquire numbers. Obviously they grow up in an environment with numbers, but below a certain age can’t really use them. Can children at these ages duplicate lines of objects or patterns? Or do they master that behavior only after learning to count?
Back in October I commented on Schiller and Peterson’s claim in Count on Math (a book of math curriculum ideas for toddlers and preschoolers) that young children must learn mathematical “foundation” concepts in a particular order, ie:
Developmental sequence is fundamental to children’s ability to build conceptual understanding. … The chapters in this book present math in a developmental sequence that provides children a natural transition from one concept to the next, preventing gaps in their understanding. …
When children are allowed to explore many objects, they begin to recognize similarities and differences of objects.
When children can determine similarities and differences, they can classify objects.
When children can classify objects, they can see similarities and difference well enough to recognize patterns.
When children can recognize, copy, extend and create patterns, they can arrange sets in a one-to-one relationship.
When children can match objects one to one, they can compare sets to determine which have more and which have less.
When children can compare sets, they can begin to look at the “manyness” of one set and develop number concepts.
This developmental sequence provides a conceptual framework that serves as a springboard to developing higher level math skills.
The Count on Math curriculum doesn’t even introduce the numbers 1-5 until week 39 for 4 year olds (3 year olds are never introduced to numbers) and numbers 6-10 aren’t introduced until week 37 for the 5 year olds!
Note that Schiller and Everett are arguing diametrical opposites–Everett says the ability to count to three and distinguish the “manyness” of sets is instinctual, present even in infants, but that the ability to copy patterns and match items one-to-one only comes after long acquaintance and practice with counting, specifically number words.
Schiller claims that children only develop the ability to distinguish manyness and count to three after learning to copy patterns and match items one-to-one.
As I said back in October, I think Count on Math’s claim is pure bollocks. If you miss the “comparing sets” day at preschool, you aren’t going to end up unable to multiply. The Piraha may not prove as much as Everett wants them to, but the neuroscience and animal studies he cites aren’t worthless. In general, I distrust anyone who claims that you must introduce this long a set of concepts in this strict an order just to develop a basic competency that the vast majority of people seem to acquire without difficulty.
Of course, Lynne Peterson is a real teacher with a real teacher’s certificate and a BA in … it doesn’t say, and Pam Schiller was Vice President of Professional Development for the Early childhood Division at McGraw Hill publishers and president of the Southern Early Childhood Association. She has a PhD in… it doesn’t say. Here’s some more on Dr. Schiller’s many awards. So maybe they know better than Everett, who’s just an anthropologist. But Everett has some actual evidence on his side.
But I’m a parent who has watched several children learn to count… and Schiller and Peterson are wrong.
Map of gene-flow in and out of Beringia, from 25,000 years ago to present
Scientists have long believed that the first humans made it to the Americas by crossing from now-Russia to now-Alaska. When and how they did it–by boat or by foot–remain matters of contentious debate. Did people move quickly through Alaska and into the rest of North America, or did they hover–as the “Bering standstill” hypothesis suggests–in Beringia (or the Aleutian Islands) for thousands of years?
Archaeologists working at the Upward Sun River site (approximately in the middle of Alaska) recently uncovered the burials of three children: a cremated three year old, and beneath it, a 6-12 week old infant and a 30 week, possibly premature or stillborn fetus. The three year old has been dubbed “Upward Sun River Mouth Child,” and the 6 week old “Sun-Rise Girl Child.” Since these aren’t really names, I’m going to dub them Sunny (3 yrs old), Rosy (6 weeks), and Hope (fetus).
They died around 11,500 years ago, making them the oldest burials so far from northern North America. Rosy and Hope were probably girls; cremation rendered Sunny’s gender a mystery. Rosy and Hope were covered in red ocher and buried together, accompanied by four decorated antler rods, two dart points and two stone axes. (Here’s an illustration of their burial.) The site where the children were buried was abandoned soon after Sunny’s death–perhaps their parents were too sad to stay, or perhaps the location was just too harsh.
Rosy and Hope were well enough preserved to yield DNA.
Surprisingly, they weren’t sisters. Rosy’s mother’s mtDNA hailed from haplogroup C1b, which is found only in the Americas (though its ancestral clade, haplogroup C, is found throughout Siberia.) Hope’s mtDNA is from haplogroup B2, which is also only found in the Americas. Oddly, B2’s parent clade, (B), isn’t common in Siberia–it’s much more common in places like Vietnam, Laos, the Philippines, and Saipan. It’s not entirely absent from Siberia, but it got to Alaska without leaving a larger trail remains a mystery.
Since they are found in the Americans but not Asia, we know these lineages most likely evolved over here; the main questions are when and where. If the Bering Standstill hypothesis is correct and the Indians spent 10-20,000 years stranded in Beringia, they would have had plenty of time to evolve new lineages while still in Alaska. By contrast, if they crossed relatively quickly and then dispersed, these new lineages would have had much less time to emerge, and we would expect them to show up as people moved south.
Or there could have been multiple migration waves, with different haplogroups arriving in different waves. (There were multiple migration waves, but the others occurred well after Sunny and the others were buried.)
In fact, there are five mtDNA lineages found only in the Americas (A2, B2, C1, D1, and X2a.) With Hope and Rosy, we have now identified all five mtDNA lineages in North American burials over 8,000 years old, lending support to the Beringian Standstill hypothesis.
But were the Upward Sun River children’s families ancestral to today’s Native Americans? Not quite.
It looks like Sunny’s tribe split off from the rest of the Beringians (or perhaps the others split off from them) around 22-18,000 years ago. Most of the others headed south, while Sunny’s people stayed in Alaska and disappeared (perhaps because all of their children died.) So Sunny’s tribe was less “grandparent” to today’s Indians and more “great aunt and uncle,” but they still hailed from the same, even older ancestors who first set out from Siberia.
I have previously favored the Aleutian or at least a much more rapid Beringian route, but it looks like I was wrong. I find the idea of the Bering Standstill difficult to believe, but that may just be my own biases. Perhaps people really did get stuck there for thousands of years, waiting for the ice to clear. What amazing people they must have been to survive for so long in so harsh an environment.
Steven Pinker recently gave a short speech at Harvard (where he works) on how hearing certain facts without accompanying leftist counter-arguments causes people to become “infected” with right-wing thoughts:
The difference between Pinker and the Left is that Pinker is (trying) to be honest. Pinker believes in truth. He believes in believing true things and discussing true things. He believes that just because you believe a true thing doesn’t mean you have to go down this road to believing other, in his opinion untrue, things. You can believe more than one true thing. You can simultaneously believe “Blacks commit more homicide than whites” and believe “Blacks should not be discriminated against.”
By contrast, the Left is not trying to be honest. It is not looking for truth. It just wants to win. The Left does not want people to know that crime stats vary by race, that men and women vary in average interests and aptitudes, that communism is an atrociously bad economic system. Merely saying, “Hey, there are things you can’t say out loud without provoking a very loud controversy from the left,” has provoked… a very loud controversy from the left:
The Left is abusing one of its own because merely saying these things out loud is seen as a betrayal of Leftist goals.
And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ —George Orwel, 1984
I was really excited about this book when I picked it up at the library. It has the word “numbers” on the cover and a subtitle that implies a story about human cultural and cognitive evolution.
Regrettably, what could have been a great books has turned out to be kind of annoying. There’s some fascinating information in here–for example, there’s a really interesting part on pages 249-252–but you have to get through pages 1-248 to get there. (Unfortunately, sometimes authors put their most interesting bits at the end so that people looking to make trouble have gotten bored and wandered off by then.)
I shall try to discuss/quote some of the book’s more interesting bits, and leave aside my differences with the author (who keeps reiterating his position that mathematical ability is entirely dependent on the culture you’re raised in.) Everett nonetheless has a fascinating perspective, having actually spent much of his childhood in a remote Amazonian village belonging to the Piraha, who have no real words for numbers. (His parents were missionaries.)
Which languages contain number words? Which don’t? Everett gives a broad survey:
“…we can reach a few broad conclusions about numbers in speech. First, they are common to nearly all of the world’s languages. … this discussion has shown that number words, across unrelated language, tend to exhibit striking parallels, since most languages employ a biologically based body-part model evident in their number bases.”
That is, many languages have words that translate essentially to “One, Two, Three, Four, Hand, … Two hands, (10)… Two Feet, (20),” etc., and reflect this in their higher counting systems, which can end up containing a mix of base five, 10, and 20. (The Romans, for example, used both base five and ten in their written system.)
“Third, the linguistic evidence suggests not only that this body-part model has motivated the innovation of numebers throughout the world, but also that this body-part basis of number words stretches back historically as far as the linguistic data can take us. It is evident in reconstruction of ancestral languages, including Proto-Sino-Tibetan, Proto-Niger-Congo, Proto-Autronesian, and Proto-Indo-European, the languages whose descendant tongues are best represented in the world today.”
Note, though, that linguistics does not actually give us a very long time horizon. Proto-Indo-European was spoken about 4-6,000 years ago. Proto-Sino-Tibetan is not as well studied yet as PIE, but also appears to be at most 6,000 years old. Proto-Niger-Congo is probably about 5-6,000 years old. Proto-Austronesian (which, despite its name, is not associated with Australia,) is about 5,000 years old.
These ranges are not a coincidence: languages change as they age, and once they have changed too much, they become impossible to classify into language families. Older languages, like Basque or Ainu, are often simply described as isolates, because we can’t link them to their relatives. Since humanity itself is 200,000-300,000 years old, comparative linguistics only opens a very short window into the past. Various groups–like the Amazonian tribes Everett studies–split off from other groups of humans thousands 0r hundreds of thousands of years before anyone started speaking Proto-Indo-European. Even agriculture, which began about 10,000-15,000 years ago, is older than these proto-languages (and agriculture seems to have prompted the real development of math.)
I also note these language families are the world’s biggest because they successfully conquered speakers of the world’s other languages. Spanish, Portuguese, and English are now widely spoken in the Americas instead of Cherokee, Mayan, and Nheengatu because Indo-European language speakers conquered the speakers of those languages.
The guy with the better numbers doesn’t always conquer the guy with the worse numbers–the Mongol conquest of China is an obvious counter. But in these cases, the superior number system sticks around, because no one wants to replace good numbers with bad ones.
In general, though, better tech–which requires numbers–tends to conquer worse tech.
Which means that even though our most successful language families all have number words that appear to be about 4-6,000 years old, we shouldn’t assume this was the norm for most people throughout most of history. Current human numeracy may be a very recent phenomenon.
“The invention of number is attainable by the human mind but is attained through our fingers. Linguistic data, both historical and current, suggest that numbers in disparate cultures have arisen independently, on an indeterminate range of occasions, through the realization that hands can be used to name quantities like 5 and 10. … Words, our ultimate implements for abstract symbolization, can thankfully be enlisted to denote quantities. But they are usually enlisted only after people establish a more concrete embodied correspondence between their finger sand quantities.”
Some more on numbers in different languages:
“Rare number bases have been observed, for instance, in the quaternary (base-4) systems of Lainana languages of California, or in the senary (base-6) systems that are found in southern New Guinea. …
Several languages in Melanesia and Polynesia have or once had number system that vary in accordance with the type of object being counted. In the case of Old High Fijian, for instance, the word for 100 was Bola when people were counting canoes, but Kora when they were counting coconuts. …
some languages in northwest Amazonia base their numbers on kinship relationships. This is true of Daw and Hup two related language in the region. Speakers of the former languages use fingers complemented with words when counting from 4 to 10. The fingers signify the quantity of items being counted, but words are used to denote whether the quantity is odd or even. If the quantity is even, speakers say it “has a brother,” if it is odd they state it “has no brother.”
What about languages with no or very few words for numbers?
In one recent survey of limited number system, it was found that more than a dozen languages lack bases altogether, and several do not have words for exact quantities beyond 2 and, in some cases, beyond 1. Of course, such cases represent a miniscule fraction of the world’s languages, the bulk of which have number bases reflecting the body-part model. Furthermore, most of the extreme cases in question are restricted geographically to Amazonia. …
All of the extremely restricted languages, I believe, are used by people who are hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists, eg, the Munduruku. Hunter gatherers typically don’t have a lot of goods to keep track of or trade, fields to measure or taxes to pay, and so don’t need to use a lot of numbers. (Note, however, that the Inuit/Eskimo have a perfectly normal base-20 counting system. Their particularly harsh environment appears to have inspired both technological and cultural adaptations.) But why are Amazonian languages even less numeric than those of other hunter-gatherers from similar environments, like central African?
Famously, most of the languages of Australia have somewhat limited number system, and some linguists previously claimed that most Australian language slack precise terms for quantities beyond 2…. [however] many languages on that continent actually have native means of describing various quantities in precise ways, and their number words for small quantities can sometimes be combined to represent larger quantities via the additive and even multiplicative usage of bases. …
Of the nearly 200 Australian languages considered in the survey, all have words to denote 1 and 2. In about three-quarters of the languages, however, the highest number is 3 or 4. Still, may of the languages use a word for “two” as a base for other numbers. Several of the languages use a word for “five” as a base, an eight of the languages top out at a word for “ten.”
Everett then digresses into what initially seems like a tangent about grammatical number, but luckily I enjoy comparative linguistics.
In an incredibly comprehensive survey of 1,066 languages, linguist Matthew Dryer recently found that 98 of them are like Karitiana and lack a grammatical means of marking nouns of being plural. So it is not particularly rare to find languages in which numbers do not show plurality. … about 90% of them, have a grammatical means through which speakers can convey whether they are talking about one or more than one thing.
Mandarin is a major language that has limited expression of plurals. According to Wikipedia:
The grammar of Standard Chinese shares many features with other varieties of Chinese. The language almost entirely lacks inflection, so that words typically have only one grammatical form. Categories such as number (singular or plural) and verb tense are frequently not expressed by any grammatical means, although there are several particles that serve to express verbal aspect, and to some extent mood.
Some languages, such as modern Arabic and Proto-Indo-European also have a “dual” category distinct from singular or plural; an extremely small set of languages have a trial category.
Many languages also change their verbs depending on how many nouns are involved; in English we say “He runs; they run;” languages like Latin or Spanish have far more extensive systems.
In sum: the vast majority of languages distinguish between 1 and more than one; a few distinguish between one, two, and many, and a very few distinguish between one, two, three, and many.
From the endnotes:
… some controversial claims of quadral markers, used in restricted contexts, have been made for the Austronesian languages Tangga, Marshallese, and Sursurunga. .. As Corbett notes in his comprehensive survey, the forms are probably best considered quadral markers. In fact, his impressive survey did not uncover any cases of quadral marking in the world’s languages.
Everett tends to bury his point; his intention in this chapter is to marshal support for the idea that humans have an “innate number sense” that allows them to pretty much instantly realize if they are looking at 1, 2, or 3 objects, but does not allow for instant recognition of larger numbers, like 4. He posits a second, much vaguer number sense that lets us distinguish between “big” and “small” amounts of things, eg, 10 looks smaller than 100, even if you can’t count.
He does cite actual neuroscience on this point–he’s not just making it up. Even newborn humans appear to be able to distinguish between 1, 2, and 3 of something, but not larger numbers. They also seem to distinguish between some and a bunch of something. Anumeric peoples, like the Piraha, also appear to only distinguish between 1, 2, and 3 items with good accuracy, though they can tell “a little” “some” and “a lot” apart. Everett also cites data from animal studies that find, similarly, that animals can distinguish 1, 2, and 3, as well as “a little” and “a lot”. (I had been hoping for a discussion of cephalopod intelligence, but unfortunately, no.)
How then, Everett asks, do we wed our specific number sense (1, 2, and 3) with our general number sense (“some” vs “a lot”) to produce ideas like 6, 7, and a googol? He proposes that we have no innate idea of 6, nor ability to count to 10. Rather, we can count because we were taught to (just as some highly trained parrots and chimps can.) It is only the presence of number words in our languages that allows us to count past 3–after all, anumeric people cannot.
But I feel like Everett is railroading us to a particular conclusion. For example, he sites neurology studies that found one part of the brain does math–the intraparietal suclus (IPS)–but only one part? Surely there’s more than one part of the brain involved in math.
The IPS turns out to be part of the extensive network of brain areas that support human arithmetic (Figure 1). Like all networks it is distributed, and it is clear that numerical cognition engages perceptual, motor, spatial and mnemonic functions, but the hub areas are the parietal lobes …
(By contrast, I’ve spent over half an hour searching and failing to figure out how high octopuses can count.)
Moreover, I question the idea that the specific and general number senses are actually separate. Rather, I suspect there is only one sense, but it is essentially logarithmic. For example, hearing is logarithmic (or perhaps exponential,) which is why decibels are also logarithmic. Vision is also logarithmic:
The eye senses brightness approximately logarithmically over a moderate range (but more like a power law over a wider range), and stellar magnitude is measured on a logarithmic scale.[14] This magnitude scale was invented by the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus in about 150 B.C. He ranked the stars he could see in terms of their brightness, with 1 representing the brightest down to 6 representing the faintest, though now the scale has been extended beyond these limits; an increase in 5 magnitudes corresponds to a decrease in brightness by a factor of 100.[14] Modern researchers have attempted to incorporate such perceptual effects into mathematical models of vision.[15][16]
So many experiments have revealed logarithmic responses to stimuli that someone has formulated a mathematical “law” on the matter:
Fechner’s law states that the subjective sensation is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity. According to this law, human perceptions of sight and sound work as follows: Perceived loudness/brightness is proportional to logarithm of the actual intensity measured with an accurate nonhuman instrument.[3]
p = k ln S S 0
The relationship between stimulus and perception is logarithmic. This logarithmic relationship means that if a stimulus varies as a geometric progression (i.e., multiplied by a fixed factor), the corresponding perception is altered in an arithmetic progression (i.e., in additive constant amounts). For example, if a stimulus is tripled in strength (i.e., 3 x 1), the corresponding perception may be two times as strong as its original value (i.e., 1 + 1). If the stimulus is again tripled in strength (i.e., 3 x 3 x 3), the corresponding perception will be three times as strong as its original value (i.e., 1 + 1 + 1). Hence, for multiplications in stimulus strength, the strength of perception only adds. The mathematical derivations of the torques on a simple beam balance produce a description that is strictly compatible with Weber’s law.[6][7]
In any logarithmic scale, small quantities–like 1, 2, and 3–are easy to distinguish, while medium quantities–like 101, 102, and 103–get lumped together as “approximately the same.”
Of course, this still doesn’t answer the question of how people develop the ability to count past 3, but this is getting long, so we’ll continue our discussion next week.
People like to signal. A LOT. And it is incredibly annoying.
It’s also pretty detrimental to the functioning of the country.
Take Prohibition. The majority of Americans never supported Prohibition, yet it wasn’t just a law passed by Congress or a handful of states, but an actual amendment to the Constitution, (the 18th) ratified by 46 states (only Rhode Island and Connecticut declined to ratify. I assume they had a large Irish population or depended on sales of imported alcohol.)
Incredibly, a coalition driven primarily by people who couldn’t even vote (women’s suffrage was granted in the 19th amendment) managed to secure what looks like near-unanimous support for a policy which the majority of people actually opposed!
Obviously a lot of people voted for Prohibition without understanding what it actually entailed. Most probably thought that other people’s intemperate drinking should be curbed, not their own, completely reasonable consumption. Once people understood what Prohibition actually entailed, they voted for its repeal.
But this is only part of the explanation, for people support many policies they don’t actually understand, but most of these don’t become disastrous Constitutional amendments.
What we have is a runaway case of social signaling. People did not actually want to get rid of all of the alcohol. People wanted to signal that they were against public drunkenness, Germans (this was right after WWI,) and maybe those Irish. Prohibition also had a very vocal group of people fighting for it, while the majority of people who were generally fine with people having the occasional beer weren’t out campaigning for the “occasional beer” party. It was therefore more profitable for a politician to signal allegiance to the pro-Prohibition voters than to the “occasional beer” voter.
Social signaling leads people to support laws because they like the idea of the law, rather than an appreciation for what the law actually entails, creating a mess of laws that aren’t very useful. For example, on Dec. 12, 2017, the Senate unanimously passed a bill “to help Holocaust survivors and the families of victims obtain restitution or the return of Holocaust-era assets.”
In the midst of increasing crime, an opioid epidemic, starving Yemenis, decimated inner cities, rising white death rates, economic malaise, homelessness, and children with cancer, is the return of assets stolen 75 years ago in a foreign country really our most pressing issue?
No, but do you want to be the guy who voted against the Justice for Holocaust survivors bill? What are you, some kind of Nazi? Do you want to vote in favor of drunken alcoholics? Criminals? Sex offenders? Murderers? Racists? Satanic Daycares?
Social signaling inspires a bunch of loud, incoherent arguing, intended more to prove “I am a good person” or “I belong to Group X” than to hash out good policy. Indeed, social signaling is diametrically opposed to good policy, as you can always prove that you are an even better person or better member of Group X by trashing good policies on the grounds that they do not signal hard enough.
The Left likes to do a lot of social signaling about racism, most recently exemplified in the tearing down of Civil War Era statues. I’m pretty sure those statues weren’t out shooting black people or denying them jobs, but nonetheless it suddenly became an incredibly pressing problem that they existed, taking up a few feet of space, and had to be torn down. Just breathe the word “racist” and otherwise sensible people’s brains shut down and they become gibbering idiots.
The Right likes to social signal about sex, which it hates so much it can’t shut up about it. Unless people are getting married at 15, they’re going to have extra-marital sex. If you want to live in an economy where people have to attend school into their mid-twenties in order to learn everything, then you either need to structure things so that people can get married and have kids while they are still in school or they will just have extra-marital sex while still in school.
Right and Left both like to signal about abortion, though my sense here is that the right is signaling harder.
The Right and Left both like to signal about Gun Control. Not five minutes after a mass shooting and you’ll have idiots on both sides Tweeting about how their favorite policy could have saved the day (or how the other guy’s policy wouldn’t have prevented it at all.) Now, I happen to favor more gun control (if you ignore the point of this entire post and write something mind-numbingly stupid in response to this I will ignore you,) but “more gun control” won’t solve the problem of someone buying an already illegal gun and shooting people with it. If your first response to a shooting is “More gun control!” without first checking whether that would have actually prevented the shooting, you’re being an idiot. (By contrast, if you’re out there yelling “Gun control does nothing!” in a case where it could have saved lives, then you’re the one being an idiot.)
This doesn’t mean that people can’t have reasonable positions on these issues (even positions I disagree with.) But yelling “This is bad! I hate it very much!” makes it much harder to have a reasonable discussion about the best way to address the issues. If people can personally benefit by social signaling against every reasonable position, then they’ll be incentivised to do so–essentially defecting against good policy making.
So what can we do?
I previously discussed using anonymity to damp down signaling. It won’t stop people from yelling about their deeply held feelings, but it does remove the incentive to care about one’s reputation.
Simply being aware of the problem may help; acknowledge that people will signal and then try to recognize when you are doing it yourself.
In general, we can tell that people are merely signaling about an issue if they don’t take any active steps in their own personal lives to resolve it. A person who actually rides a bike to work because they want to fight global warming is serious; someone who merely talks a good talk while flying in a private jet is not.
“Anti-racists” who live in majority white neighborhoods “for the schools” are another example–they claim to love minorities but mysteriously do not live among them. Clearly someone else–maybe working class whites–should be forced to do it.
Signalers love force: force lets them show how SERIOUS they are about fighting the BAD ISSUE without doing anything themselves about it. The same is true for “anti-abortion” politicians, eg Kasich Signs Law Banning Abortions After Diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome. Of course Kasich will not be personally adopting or raising any babies with Down’s syndrome, nor giving money to their families to help with their medical bills. Kasich loves Down’s babies enough to force other people to raise them, but not enough to actually care for one himself.
Both sides engage in this kind of behavior, which looks like goodness on their own side but super hypocritical to the other.
The positions of anyone who will not (or cannot) put their money where their mouth is should be seen as suspect. If they want to force other people to do things they don’t or can’t, it automatically discredits them.
Communism, as in an entire country/economy run by force in order to achieve a vision of a “just society,” ranks as the highest expression of social signaling. Not only has communism failed miserably in every iterations, it has caused the deaths of an estimated 100 million people by starvation, purge, or direct bullets to the head. Yet communist ideology persists because of the strength of social signalling.
Local optima–or optimums, if you prefer–are an illusion created by distance. A man standing on the hilltop at (approximately) X=2 may see land sloping downward all around himself and think that he is at the highest point on the graph.
But hand him a telescope, and he discovers that the fellow standing on the hilltop at X=4 is even higher than he is. And hand the fellow at X=4 a telescope, and he’ll discover that X=6 is even higher.
A global optimum is the best possible way of doing something; a local optimum can look like a global optimum because all of the other, similar ways of doing the same thing are worse. To get from a local optimum to a global optimum, you might have to endure a significant trough of things going worse before you reach your destination. (Those troughs would be the points X=3.03 and X=5.02 on the graph.) If the troughs are short and shallow enough, people can accidentally power their way through. If long and deep enough, people get stuck.
The introduction of new technology, exposure to another culture’s solutions, or even random chance can expose a local optimum and propel a group to cross that trough.
For example, back in 1400, Europeans were perfectly happy to get their Chinese silks, spices, and porcelains via the overland Silk Road. But with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the Silk Road became more fragmented and difficult (ie dangerous, ie expensive) to travel. The increased cost of the normal road prompted Europeans to start exploring other, less immediately profitable trade routes–like the possibility of sailing clear around the world, via the ocean, to the other side of China.
Without the eastern trade routes first diminishing in profitability, it wouldn’t have been economically viable to explore and develop the western routes. (With the discovery of the Americas, in the process, a happy accident.)
West Hunter (Greg Cochran) writes frequently about local optima; here’s an excerpt on plant domestication:
The reason that a few crops account for the great preponderance of modern agriculture is that a bird in the hand – an already-domesticated, already- optimized crop – feeds your family/makes money right now, while a potentially useful yet undomesticated crop doesn’t. One successful domestication tends to inhibit others that could flourish in the same niche. Several crops were domesticated in the eastern United States, but with the advent of maize and beans ( from Mesoamerica) most were abandoned. Maybe if those Amerindians had continued to selectively breed sumpweed for a few thousand years, it could have been a contender: but nobody is quite that stubborn.
Teosinte was an unpromising weed: it’s hard to see why anyone bothered to try to domesticate it, and it took a long time to turn it into something like modern maize. If someone had brought wheat to Mexico six thousand years ago, likely the locals would have dropped maize like a hot potato. But maize ultimately had advantages: it’s a C4 plant, while wheat is C3: maize yields can be much higher.
Teosinte is the ancestor of modern corn. Cochran’s point is that in the domestication game, wheat is a local optimum; given the wild ancestors of wheat and corn, you’d develop a better, more nutritious variety of wheat first and probably just abandon the corn. But if you didn’t have wheat and you just had corn, you’d keep at the corn–and in the end, get an even better plant.
(Of course, corn is a success story; plenty of people domesticated plants that actually weren’t very good just because that’s what they happened to have.)
Japan in 1850 was a culturally rich, pre-industrial, feudal society with a strong isolationist stance. In 1853, the Japanese discovered that the rest of the world’s industrial, military technology was now sufficiently advanced to pose a serious threat to Japanese sovereignty. Things immediately degenerated, culminating in the Boshin War (civil war, 1868-9,) but with the Meiji Restoration Japan embarked on an industrialization crash-course. By 1895, Japan had kicked China’s butt in the First Sino-Japanese War and the Japanese population doubled–after holding steady for centuries–between 1873 and 1935. (From 35 to 70 million people.) By the 1930s, Japan was one of the world’s most formidable industrial powers, and today it remains an economic and technological powerhouse.
Clearly the Japanese people, in 1850, contained the untapped ability to build a much more complex and advanced society than the one they had, and it did not take much exposure to the outside world to precipitate a total economic and technological revolution.
Sequoyah’s syllabary, showing script and print forms
A similar case occurred in 1821 when Sequoyah, a Cherokee man, invented his own syllabary (syllable-based alphabet) after observing American soldiers reading letters. The Cherokee quickly adopted Sequoyah’s writing system–by 1825, the majority of Cherokee were literate and the Cherokee had their own printing industry. Interestingly, although some of the Cherokee letters look like Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic letters, there is no correspondence in sound, because Sequoyah could not read English. He developed his entire syllabary after simply being exposed to the idea of writing.
The idea of literacy has occurred independently only a few times in human history; the vast majority of people picked up alphabets from someone else. Our Alphabet comes from the Latins who got it from the Greeks who adopted it from the Phoenicians who got it from some proto-canaanite script writers, and even then literacy spread pretty slowly. The Cherokee, while not as technologically advanced as Europeans at the time, were already a nice agricultural society and clearly possessed the ability to become literate as soon as they were exposed to the idea.
“We also pass a ruin of what once must have been a grand building. The walls are marked with logos from a Belgian University. This must have once been some scientific study centre of sorts.”
Likewise, contact between Europeans and groups like the Australian Aboriginees did not result in the Aboriginees adopting European technology nor a new and improved fusion of Aboriginee and European tech, but in total disaster for the Aboriginees. While the Japanese consistently top the charts in educational attainment, Aboriginee communities are still struggling with low literacy rates, high dropout rates, and low employment–the modern industrial economy, in short, has not been kind to them.
Along a completely different evolutionary pathway, cephalopods–squids, octopuses, and their tentacled ilk–are the world’s smartest invertebrates. This is pretty amazing, given that their nearest cousins are snails and clams. Yet cephalopod intelligence only goes so far. No one knows (yet) just how smart cephalopods are–squids in particular are difficult to work with in captivity because they are active hunter/swimmers and need a lot more space than the average aquarium can devote–but their brain power appears to be on the order of a dog’s.
After millions of years of evolution, cephalopods may represent the best nature can do–with an invertebrate. Throw in a backbone, and an animal can get a whole lot smarter.
And in chemistry, activation energy is the amount of energy you have to put into a chemical system before a reaction can begin. Stable chemical systems essentially exist at local optima, and it can require the input of quite a lot of energy before you get any action out of them. For atoms, iron is the global–should we say universal?–optimum, beyond which reactions are endothermic rather than exothermic. In other words, nuclear fusion at the core of the sun ends with iron; elements heavier than iron can only be produced when stars explode.
So what do local optima have to do with diversity?
The current vogue for diversity (“Diversity is our greatest strength”) suggests that we can reach global optima faster by simply smushing everyone together and letting them compare notes. Scroll back to the Japanese case. Edo Japan had a nice culture, but it was also beset by frequent famines. Meiji Japan doubled its population. Giving everyone, right now, the same technology and culture would bring everyone up to the same level.
But you can’t tell from within if you are at a local or global optimum. That’s how they work. The Indians likely would have never developed corn had they been exposed to wheat early on, and subsequently Europeans would have never gotten to adopt corn, either. Good ideas can take a long time to refine and develop. Cultures can improve rapidly–even dramatically–by adopting each other’s good ideas, but they also need their own space and time to pursue their own paths, so that good but slowly developing ideas aren’t lost.
I’m about halfway through Caleb Everett’s Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Cultures. Everett begins the book with a lengthy clarification that he thinks everyone in the world has equal math abilities, some of us just happen to have been exposed to more number ideas than others. Once that’s out of the way, the book gets interesting.
When did humans invent numbers? It’s hard to say. We have notched sticks from the Paleolithic, but no way to tell if these notches were meant to signify numbers or were just decorated.
The slightly more recent Ishango, Lebombo, and Wolf bones (30,000 YA, Czech Republic) seem more likely to indicate that someone was at least counting–if not keeping track–of something.
The Ishango bone (estimated 20,000 years old, found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo near the headwaters of the Nile,) has three sets of notches–two sets total to 60, the third to 48. Interestingly, the notches are grouped, with both sets of sixty composed of primes: 19 + 17 + 13 + 11 and 9 + 19 + 21 + 11. The set of 48 contains groups of 3, 6, 4, 8, 10, 5, 5, and 7. Aside from the stray seven, the sequence tantalizingly suggests that someone was doubling numbers.
Ishango Bone
The Ishango bone also has a quartz point set into the end, which perhaps allowed it to be used for scraping, drawing, or etching–or perhaps it just looked nice atop someone’s decorated bone.
The Lebombo bone, (estimated 43-44,2000 years old, found near the border between South Africa and Swaziland,) is quite similar to the Ishango bone, but only contains 29 notches (as far as we can tell–it’s broken.)
I’ve seen a lot of people proclaiming “Scientists think it was used to keep track of menstrual cycles. Menstruating African women were the first mathematicians!” so I’m just going to let you in on a little secret: scientists have no idea what it was for. Maybe someone was just having fun putting notches on a bone. Maybe someone was trying to count all of their relatives. Maybe someone was counting days between new and full moons, or counting down to an important date.
Without a far richer archaeological assembly than one bone, we have no idea what this particular person might have wanted to count or keep track of. (Also, why would anyone want to keep track of menstrual cycles? You’ll know when they happen.)
The Wolf bone (30,000 years old, Czech Republic,) has received far less interest from folks interested in proclaiming that menstruating African women were the first mathematicians, but is a nice looking artifact with 60 notches–notches 30 and 31 are significantly longer than the others, as though marking a significant place in the counting (or perhaps just the middle of the pattern.)
Everett cites another, more satisfying tally stick: a 10,000 year old piece of antler found in the anoxic waters of Little Salt Spring, Florida. The antler contains two sets of marks: 28 (or possibly 29–the top is broken in a way that suggests another notch might have been a weak point contributing to the break) large, regular, evenly spaced notches running up the antler, and a much smaller set of notches set beside and just slightly beneath the first. It definitely looks like someone was ticking off quantities of something they wanted to keep track of.
Here’s an article with more information on Little Salt Spring and a good photograph of the antler.
I consider the bones “maybes” and the Little Salt Spring antler a definite for counting/keeping track of quantities.
Inca Quipu
Everett also mentions a much more recent and highly inventive tally system: the Incan quipu.
A quipu is made of knotted strings attached to one central string. A series of knots along the length of each string denotes numbers–one knot for 1, two for 2, etc. The knots are grouped in clusters, allowing place value–first cluster for the ones, second for the tens, third for hundreds, etc. (And a blank space for a zero.)
Thus a sequence of 2 knots, 4 knots, a space, and 5 knots = 5,402
The Incas, you see, had an empire to administer, no paper, but plenty of lovely alpaca wool. So being inventive people, they made do.
Everett then discusses the construction of names for numbers/base systems in different languages. Many languages use a combination of different bases, eg, “two twos” for four, (base 2,) “two hands” to signify 10 (base 5,) and from there, words for multiples of 10 or 20, (base 10 or 20,) can all appear in the same language. He argues convincingly that most languages derived their counting words from our original tally sticks: fingers and toes, found in quantities of 5, 10, and 20. So the number for 5 in a language might be “one hand”, the number for 10, “Two hands,” and the number for 20 “one person” (two hands + two feet.) We could express the number 200 in such a language by saying “two hands of one person”= 10 x 20.
(If you’re wondering how anyone could come up with a base 60 system, such as we inherited from the Babylonians for telling time, try using the knuckles of the four fingers on one hand [12] times the fingers of the other hand [5] to get 60.)
Which begs the question of what counts as a “number” word (numeral). Some languages, it is claimed, don’t have words for numbers higher than 3–but put out an array of 6 objects, and their speakers can construct numbers like “three twos.” Is this a number? What about the number in English that comes after twelve: four-teen, really just a longstanding mispronunciation of four and ten?
Perhaps a better question than “Do they have a word for it,” is “Do they have a common, easy to use word for it?” English contains the world nonillion, but you probably don’t use it very often (and according to the dictionary, a nonillion is much bigger in Britain than in the US, which makes it especially useless.) By contrast, you probably use quantities like a hundred or a thousand all the time, especially when thinking about household budgets.
Roman Numerals are really just an advanced tally system with two bases: 5 and 10. IIII are clearly regular tally marks. V (5) is similar to our practice of crossing through four tally marks. X (10) is two Vs set together. L (50) is a rotated V. C (100) is an abbreviation for the Roman word Centum, hundred. (I, V, X, and L are not abbreviations.) I’m not sure why 500 is D; maybe just because D follows C and it looks like a C with an extra line. M is short for Mille, or thousand. Roman numerals are also fairly unique in their use of subtraction in writing numbers, which few people do because it makes addition horrible. Eg, IV and VI are not the same number, nor do they equal 15 and 51. No, they equal 4 (v-1) and 6 (v+1,) respectively. Adding or multiplying large Roman numerals quickly becomes cumbersome; if you don’t believe me, try XLVII times XVIII with only a pencil and paper.
Now imagine you’re trying to run an empire this way.
You’re probably thinking, “At least those quipus had a zero and were reliably base ten,” about now.
Interestingly, the Mayans (and possibly the Olmecs) already had a proper symbol that they used for zero in their combination base-5/base-20 system with pretty functional place value at a time when the Greeks and Romans did not (the ancient Greeks were philosophically unsure about this concept of a “number that isn’t there.”)
(Note: given the level of sophistication of Native American civilizations like the Inca, Aztec, and Maya, and the fact that these developed in near total isolation, they must have been pretty smart. Their current populations appear to be under-performing relative to their ancestors.)
But let’s let Everett have a chance to speak:
Our increasingly refined means of survival and adaptation are the result of a cultural ratchet. This term, popularized by Duke University psychologist and primatologist Michael Tomasello, refers to the fact that humans cooperatively lock in knowledge from one generation to the next, like the clicking of a ratchet. In other word, our species’ success is due in large measure to individual members’ ability to learn from and emulate the advantageous behavior of their predecessors and contemporaries in their community. What makes humans special is not simply that we are so smart, it is that we do not have to continually come up with new solutions to the same old problems. …
Now this is imminently reasonable; I did not invent the calculus, nor could I have done so had it not already existed. Luckily for me, Newton and Leibniz already invented it and I live in a society that goes to great lengths to encode math in textbooks and teach it to students.
I call this “cultural knowledge” or “cultural memory,” and without it we’d still be monkeys with rocks.
The importance of gradually acquired knowledge stored in the community, culturally reified but not housed in the mind of any one individual, crystallizes when we consider cases in which entire cultures have nearly gone extinct because some of their stored knowledge dissipated due to the death of individuals who served as crucial nodes in their community’s knowledge network. In the case of the Polar Inuit of Northwest Greenland, population declined in the mid-nineteenth century after an epidemic killed several elders of the community. These elders were buried along with their tool sand weapons, in accordance with local tradition, and the Inuits’ ability to manufacture the tools and weapons in question was severely compromised. … As a result, their population did not recover until about 40 years later, when contact with another Inuit group allowed for the restoration of the communal knowledge base.
The first big advance, the one that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, was language itself. Yes, other animals can communicate–whales and birds sing; bees do their waggle dance–but only humans have full-fledged, generative language which allows us to both encode and decode new ideas with relative ease. Language lets different people in a tribe learn different things and then pool their ideas far more efficiently than mere imitation.
The next big leap was the development of visual symbols we could record–and read–on wood, clay, wax, bones, cloth, cave walls, etc. Everett suggests that the first of these symbols were likely tally marks such us those found on the Lebombo bone, though of course the ability to encode a buffalo on the wall of the Lascaux cave, France, was also significant. From these first symbols we developed both numbers and letters, which eventually evolved into books.
Books are incredible. Books are like external hard drives for your brain, letting you store, access, and transfer information to other people well beyond your own limits of memorization and well beyond a human lifetime. Books reach across the ages, allowing us to read what philosophers, poets, priests and sages were thinking about a thousand years ago.
Recently we invented an even more incredible information storage/transfer device: computers/the internet. To be fair, they aren’t as sturdy as clay tablets, (fired clay is practically immortal,) but they can handle immense quantities of data–and make it searchable, an incredibly important task.
But Everett tries to claim that cultural ratchet is all there is to human mathematical ability. If you live in a society with calculus textbooks, then you can learn calculus, and if you don’t, you can’t. Everett does not want to imply that Amazonian tribesmen with no words for numbers bigger than three are in any way less able to do math than the Mayans with their place value system and fancy zero.
But this seems unlikely for two reasons. First, we know very well that even in societies with calculus textbooks, not everyone can make use of them. Even among my own children, who have been raised with about as similar an environment as a human can make and have very similar genetics, there’s a striking difference in intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Humans are not identical in their abilities.
Moreover, we know that different mental tasks are performed in different, specialized parts of the brain. For example, we decode letters in the “visual word form area” of the brain; people whose VWAs have been damaged can still read, but they have to use different parts of their brains to work out the letters and they end up reading more slowly than they did before.
Memorably, before he died, the late Henry Harpending (of West Hunter) had a stroke while in Germany. He initially didn’t notice the stroke because it was located in the part of the brain that decodes letters into words, but since he was in Germany, he didn’t expect to read the words, anyway. It was only when he looked at something written in English later that day that he realized he couldn’t read it, and soon after I believe he passed out and was taken to the hospital.
Why should our brains have a VWA at all? It’s not like our primate ancestors did a whole lot of reading. It turns out that the VWA is repurposed from the part of our brain that recognizes faces :)
Likewise, there are specific regions of the brain that handle mathematical tasks. People who are better at math not only have more gray matter in these regions, but they also have stronger connections between them, letting the work together in harmony to solve different problems. We don’t do math by just throwing all of our mental power at a problem, but by routing it through specific regions of our brain.
Interestingly, humans and chimps differ in their ability to recognize faces and perceive emotions. (For anatomical reasons, chimps are more inclined to identify each other’s bottoms than each other’s faces.) We evolved the ability to recognize faces–the region of our brain we use to decode letters–when we began walking upright and interacting to each other face to face, though we do have some vestigial interest in butts and butt-like regions (“My eyes are up here.”) Our brains have evolved over the millenia to get better at specific tasks–in this case, face reading, a precursor to decoding symbolic language.
And there is a tremendous quantity of evidence that intelligence is at least partly genetic–estimates for the heritablity of intelligence range between 60 and 80%. The rest of the variation–the environmental part–looks to be essentially random chance, such as accidents, nutrition, or perhaps your third grade teacher.
So, yes, we absolutely can breed people for mathematical or linguistic ability, if that’s what the environment is selecting for. By contrast, if there have been no particular mathematical or linguistic section pressures in an environment (a culture with no written language, mathematical notation, and very few words for numbers clearly is not experiencing much pressure to use them), then you won’t select for such abilities. The question is not whether we can all be Newtons, (or Leibnizes,) but how many Newtons a society produces and how many people in that society have the potential to understand calculus, given the chance.
Lifted gratefully from La Griffe Du Lion’s Smart Fraction II article
Just looking at the state of different societies around the world (including many indigenous groups that live within and have access to modern industrial or post-industrial technologies), there is clear variation in the average abilities of different groups to build and maintain complex societies. Japanese cities are technologically advanced, clean, and violence-free. Brazil, (which hasn’t even been nuked,) is full of incredibly violent, unsanitary, poorly-constructed favelas. Some of this variation is cultural, (Venezuela is doing particularly badly because communism doesn’t work,) or random chance, (Saudi Arabia has oil,) but some of it, by necessity, is genetic.
But if you find that a depressing thought, take heart: selective pressures can be changed. Start selecting for mathematical and verbal ability (and let everyone have a shot at developing those abilities) and you’ll get more mathematical and verbal abilities.
But this is getting long, so let’s continue our discussion next week.
evolutionistx 