Humans are master meaning generators

A hashtag in the sky above a school at dusk in southern Rhode Island.  

Was it put there intentionally? What does it mean?

For as long as we’ve been writing about exquisite Paleolithic cave paintings and carefully crafted Stone Age tools we’ve been debating their meanings.  And the debate carries on because meaning is difficult to interpret and that’s largely because “what does it mean?” is a loaded question.

“Meaning” is a hallmark of humanity and, as the thinking often goes, it is a unique aspect of Homo sapiens. No other species is discussing meaning with us. We’re alone here. So we’re supposed to be at least mildly shocked when we learn that Neanderthals decorated their bodies with eagle talons. And it’s supposed to be even harder to fathom that Neanderthals marked symbolic thinking on cave walls. But such is the implication of lines marked by Neanderthals in the shape of a hashtag at Gibraltar. 

source: "The Gibraltar Museum says scratched patterns found in the Gorham’s Cave, in Gibraltar, are believed to be more than 39,000 years old, dating back to the times of the Neanderthals. Credit: EPA/Stewart Finlayson"

This sort of meaningful behavior, combined with the fact that many of us are harboring parts of the Neanderthal genome, encourages us to stop seeing Neanderthals as separate from us. But another interpretation of the hashtag is one of mere doodling; its maker was not permanently and intentionally scarring the rock with meaning. These opposing perspectives on meaning, whether it’s there or not, clash when it comes to chimpanzee behavior as well.  

We’ve grown comfortable with the ever-lengthening list of chimpanzee tool use and tool-making skills that researchers are reporting back to us. But a newly published chimpanzee behavior has humans scratching their heads. Chimpanzees in West Africa fling stones at trees and hollow tree trunks. The stones pile up in and around the trees, looking like a human-made cairn (intentional landmark) in some cases.  Males are most often the throwers, pant-hooting as they go, which is a well-known score to various interludes of chimpanzee social behavior. 

source: "Mysterious stone piles under trees are the work of chimpanzees.© MPI-EVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation"

Until now, chimp behaviors that employ nature’s raw materials—stones, logs, branches, twigs, leaves—have been easy to peg as being “for” a reason. They’re for cracking open nutritious nuts, for stabbing tasty bushbabies (small nocturnal primates), or for termite fishing. But throwing stones at trees has nothing to do with food. If these chimps do it for a reason then it’s a little more esoteric. 

Maybe they do it for pleasure, to let off steam, or to display, or maybe they do it because someone else did it. It may be all of those things at once, and maybe so much more. Maybe you’d call that ritual. Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d say that they do it because that’s what chimps do in those groups: they walk on their knuckles; they eat certain foods; they make certain sounds; they sleep in certain terms in certain trees; and they do certain things with rocks, like fling them in certain places. Maybe we could just say that this behavior is the way of certain chimpanzees, hardly more mystifying than other behaviors that we’ve come to expect of them.

For comparison, I have certain ways. There are piles of books near my desk. They pile up on tables and shelves. I could fling books on the floor but I don’t. I’m not against flinging them on the floor; it’s just not how things are usually done. I share this behavior with many other, but not all, humans in the presence of books, tables, and shelves.  Until I wrote this paragraph, I never gave it much thought, it’s not something that factors even remotely into how I see the world or my place in it, and yet the piling of books on tables and shelves is quite a conspicuous and, therefore, large part of my daily life.

  

So, why isn’t someone setting up a camera trap in my office and writing up “human accumulative book piling” in Nature? Because this type of behavior, whatever it means, is quintessentially human. No one could claim to discover it in a prestigious publication unless they discovered it in a nonhuman. And they did.

Normally what we do when we learn something new about chimpanzee behavior is we end up crossing one more thing off our list of uniquely human traits. “Man the tool-maker” was nixed decades ago. What should we cross off the list now with this new chimp discovery? Would it be “ritual” and by extension “meaning,” or would it be “piling up stuff”? About that Neanderthal hashtag, do we cross off “art” or “symbolism” and by extension “meaning,” or would we just cross off “doodling,” which holds a quite different meaning? Rather than crossing anything off our list, do we welcome Neanderthals into our kind so we can keep our monopoly on hashtags? Whatever we decide, case by case, trait by trait, we usually interpret our shrinking list of uniquely human traits to be clear demonstration that other animals are becoming more human-like the more we learn about the world.

That’s certainly one way to see it.  But there’s another, more existential, and therefore, arguably, more human way to look at that shrinking list of uniquely human traits: Humans are becoming less human-like the more we learn about the world.

#WhatDoesThatEvenMean #PantHoot #Hashtag #ThisIsMyCaveWall 

Darwin and the evolution of my brain

 My drawing ability stalled out at the second grade level.  To wit, this drawing of an imaginary place that I did in reply to a request from my daughter just 3 months ago.

It is embarrassingly bad, and it perfectly illustrates why I didn't draw for my entire life.  At least by hand.  (What are those green blobs in the pond? Frogs? Lily pads?)  Ok, yes, somehow I did manage to produce illustrations for two different, 'serious' books, but I thought of that as 90% Adobe Illustrator and 10% me.  But I did learn as I went along, or maybe AI and I trained each other.

Here's one of my first Illustrator drawings, from our earlier book.

From Genetics and the Logic of Evolution, Weiss and Buchanan, 2004

I remember how much I struggled just to make this simple line drawing.

And then one of my favorites, which not coincidentally was among the last I did for The Mermaid's Tale.

From The Mermaid's Tale; Weiss and Buchanan, 2009

Ok, two of my favorites.

C. elegans body plan; The Mermaid's Tale; Weiss and Buchanan, 2009

I learned a lot about using AI by the time that book was finished.  But see drawing above as to how much that applied to hand drawing.

And then a few months ago, by chance I saw that a painter at the local art co-op was offering a beginning drawing class. On a whim, I decided to sign up.  I knew someone in college who drew her way through Norway on a postcard-sized sketchbook, and I always thought it would be wonderful to be able to do that, though I had no illusion that I would ever be able to.  Still, I liked the idea of perhaps being able to improve my drawing at least to the point of being able to enjoy doing it.

I took the list of supplies we'd need to the art store before the first class, bought the pencils, erasers, pencil sharpener, and the suggested sketch pad, which was so large that it was unwieldy to carry.  I was embarrassed to walk out of the store with that 18 x 24" sketch pad under my arm.  I felt a total fraud.

The first class was a bit intimidating -- one woman was already seated at her easel, half-way through copying a da Vinci drawing, which didn't help.  As it turned out, she was a private student but I didn't know that at the time.  I sat down at one of the free drawing tables and opened the sketch pad to the first yawningly empty sheet of paper.  I laid my 2HB pencils and my erasers and my sharpener next to the paper, and looked around at the 6 other students doing the same.  What if they were all as good as the woman copying the master?

Introductions followed -- relief, the rest of us really were beginners -- and then the instructor sat down to demonstrate what he was asking us to do.  He put a simple box on the pedestal that was the hub of the circle of tables and nervous students, and began to draw.  Yes, he did put up his thumb to measure the size of the object.  It was in fact a revelation to me that artists actually do that -- and the beginning of the evolution of my brain.

After watching how it was supposed to be done, I sat back down to try to draw the box myself.  Huge blank sheet, everyday object, render to paper.  Just picking up the pencil was awkward, and the act of putting the first line to paper felt like it was being done by someone else's arm, driven by someone else's brain.  But I did it, and this is what I drew.

Ok, tentative lines, no attention to technical issues, but there are lines on paper.  That was good enough for day 1.

We had eight classes, three hours long, each utterly basic but utterly eye-opening to someone stuck in second grade drawing mode.  Perspective! Oh, that's why I could draw the diagrammatic figures for the books that I did with Illustrator!  No need to make them look life-like.  Oh, we're supposed to draw what we see, not what we think we see!  Revolution.  Negative space! A whole new way of seeing.  Organizational lines, vanishing points, units; all basic, all essential.

As I practiced, somehow the rust fell away, and my muscles started to be willing to move.  Not just arm muscles, but the seeing, rendering muscles.  We went outside to draw houses for one class, and here's the one I drew.

Still tentative, still technical issues, and the house looks rather more haunted in my rendering than it does on the street (it's a very tidy, well-kept house, in fact), but still, progress I thought.  I started to sort of like what I drew, so I kept drawing.

And then the other day I woke up wondering if I could draw Darwin.  Who does that?  So, me, online photo of Darwin, sketchbook and a pencil.  I wish I'd taken more photos as I worked, because the fascinating thing, to me, is that at some point early on, my lines on paper began to actually look like the famously familiar photo of this man.  This absolutely amazed me, and continues to.

Here's a photo of just the face, before I added the trimmings, which turn out not to be necessary for the effect.  I actually kind of like this picture better than the 'finished' one.  But the thing is, it was Darwin after just the first eye was done.

Now, 'finished' (which brings up another artistic problem: how do you know when you're finished?)

How does the brain turn lines on paper into a sense of a three-dimensional person?  Is it because we know this image so well that we excuse my raw attempt at rendering it, and fill in the blanks?  Simple (or not so simple) pattern recognition?  That could be.

And, to pull this tale back to the beginning of evolutionary time, at the end of each drawing class we looked at all of our drawings, and 'critiqued' them.  To me the fascinating thing, each week, was how very differently each of the seven of us put pencil to paper; same beginnings, usually the same object, totally different renderings.  One woman drew a bird's-eye view of the house she was sitting in front of, in the beautiful dark confident lines she used for everything; another man drew every shingle on the roof of his chosen house.  Speciation in action.

As well as evolution of the mind.  My mind, my understanding, my confidence and ability to tell my muscles what to do.  I have a long way to go, having drawn my way into a number of technical corners in just this one Darwin drawing, and I have no idea where to even begin working with color, but I've learned a lot.  Not least about what this optical illusion, this effect of graphite on paper, tells us about the power of the brain, of its constant, effortless brilliance at solving 'the binding problem', the putting together of the results of what so many different parts of the brain are perceiving and making final sense of it.  Indeed, to the brain, this isn't a 'problem' at all.  Even ants and bees and crows and dolphin brains can do it.  It's a 'problem' only for those who want to put it into words.

Do scientists have heroes? Should we?

Yes, science has Nobel prizes and MacArthur 'genius' grants and NIH-funded "Centers of Excellence" and highly selective journals, among other ways of plucking ordinary people from the scientific masses and turning them into heroes.  Or at least treating them as such.  Purported major journals are now deifying the greats and near-greats with interviews and splashy stories that match what can be found in mags near the checkout counter.  We've got lists ranking scientists by number of Twitter followers.  But is this an important part of science? Can science proceed without this?  Can it proceed with it -- could this hero-creation side of science be a distraction?

Charles Darwin

Appropriately I suppose, because of the source of inspiration for this post, it requires a bit of name dropping: I was chatting a few days ago with an old friend of mine, Penn Jillette, magician etc., when the subject of heroes came up.  He asked if I'd seen what some famous guys (he named them) had said about a thing we were talking about (which I won't name because which famous guys he was talking about is irrelevant to this story, and the subject might make it obvious), and I said no.  I said I needed heroes less and less as I got older, because I can see the flaws and limits in their science, as we all have, relative to their reputations.  He said it was the opposite for him; he needs them more now.  For inspiration.  But he agreed with me about the flaws in the arguments of the people he'd mentioned.

I thought about this for a bit, intrigued by the idea of scientific heroes.  I told Penn that I was thinking of writing something about how my being a scientist and him being an artist/performer might affect why we differ so much on heroes, but that I didn't really understand what he'd meant.  I said I could imagine what he meant and use his name, or imagine what he meant and not use his name, or he could explain a bit more about what he meant and tell me whether or not to use his name.  He said he had no clue what he meant, and I could decide whether to use his name after I wrote whatever I wrote.  That helped.  Some.

I've known Penn for a long time, so I can think back to when we were young, and find differences between us even way back then.  (Well, other than almost everything.)  I do have to say, though, that most of what I say here is pretty much a guess, not vetted or confirmed by Penn.

Marie Curie; Wikipedia

Penn, of Penn & Teller, is a magician, author, filmmaker, musician, atheist, political commentator, and much more.  Certainly a lot of people look up to him, listen to his opinions, read his books, watch his TV shows and movies. In a what-comes-around-goes-around kind of way, I imagine he's a lot of people's hero.  He probably has inspired a bunch of kids to grow up and do the best they could.

Penn probably was a performer before I knew him, but he certainly was in high school.  He was wowed and inspired by a ton of other performers, and as he said, he has tried hard to be as good or better than people who wowed him when he was young.  I remember spending many hours listening to him practice sounding like Neil Young on the guitar, sitting in a chair by the window of his room.  But he loved a lot of musicians.  And more; comedians, writers, old Vaudevillians, quirky teachers even.  They taught him a lot, and set standards that he wanted to meet or exceed.

Magicians, artists, musicians, build their skills and develop their own voice by spending many many hours -- 10,000, according to lore -- replicating what others have done.  Saw a woman in half, copy the drawings of master artists, play notes written by others until they sound like so many musicians have played before.  Even surgeons learn their craft this way.

Harry Houdini; Wikimedia Commons

I've been a scientist almost as long as Penn has been a performer, though I didn't know in high school where I was headed.  Still, even if I had known I was eventually going to be writing about evolution, it would have done nothing for me to sit at my desk and copy paragraphs out of The Origin of Species, or, say, try to replicate Darwin's handwriting, or reproduce Mendel's experiments with peas.

Of course, science is the accumulation of knowledge more than the accumulation of specific skill sets.  Yes, we have to know how to pipet or follow a lab protocol, but we needn't spend 10,000 hours sitting in a chair by our bedroom window practicing how to pipet like Madame Curie, or Barbara McClintock.

Ken had a student once who was stunned when he learned in class that while biologists respect Darwin, we never go back and check the Origin to see if what we think is true really was, the way some fundamentalists check the Bible for truth.

So, what is it about a scientist that could be heroic?  To me, maybe being able to look at the same data everyone else is looking at, pull together what look like misfitting pieces, and draw a new and different conclusion?  What Thomas Kuhn called a 'paradigm shift', but these turn out to be a lot rarer than most scientists seem to hope.  Not life-saving, necessarily, but stunning, if that counts as heroic.  But one can't really aspire to this.  It just happens.  And this isn't what most Nobel prizes are rewarded for.

A lot of scientists become public figures, and then perhaps someone's hero, because they've done good science.  Or because they write popular science books.  But, to me, this doesn't imbue them with special knowledge about questions that science can't answer -- religion, the existence of free will and so on -- or with deeper insight into non-scientific issues; politics, ethics, just war.  So I don't turn to them for answers or even for insights particularly.  And, good science takes a whole community -- even Darwin wasn't the first, or the only person to articulate ideas about the origins of diversity on earth.

Are Nobel laureates heroes?  Their discoveries may have been remarkable for their time, but a lot of them went on to Important jobs but rarely delivered comparable freight afterwards -- that's nobody's fault, but some universities spend a lot of funds for the name, that, dare one say it?, might better go to younger investigators whose gun hasn't yet been fired.

I recognize that the arts have movements, too, times in history when everyone seems to be doing the same thing, that it's not all about individuals, and famous personalities.  Juggling continues to get more spectacular, based on the work of even nameless jugglers who came before.  But Houdini wasn't just another escape artist.  There are specific things that a magician can learn from Houdini in order to become a better escape artist, but a biologist can do good biology without ever reading Darwin.  Certainly one can draw energy from thinking about how the greats like Darwin, Einstein, Shakespeare or Beethoven saw so deeply compared to their peers.  (Indeed, Alex Ross recently wrote a fine New Yorker piece about Beethoven standing high above composers who came before him and even after him.)  But that's not necessarily the same as insightful inspiration.

Bob Dylan; Wikipedia

So, is it the difference between being inspired by ideas rather than by the people who have the ideas? Perhaps in a way, but artists are inspired by ideas, too.  Penn said that when he was young his heroes were superhuman.  Like Bob Dylan, and they inspired him to grow up and do the best he could.  Now his heroes are just human, like Bob Dylan, and they inspire him to keep going.

I love good science, but I don't revere the people who do it, and never did.  Inspiration?  Excitement?  Yes, but that can come from the work of the non-famous as well as the well-known.  Maybe it's about finding our place in the context of our work, and however we manage to do that, with heroes or without, works for us.

As remarkable as science, and as unremarkable as most science

Last Saturday we went to the opera---well, to the Met's live broadcast to local movie theaters.  It was Puccini's La Boheme, an amazing, remarkable feat, the match of anything in science.  But there was even more.

With something like 4 hours' notice, Kristine Opolais, an up and coming Latvian singer, who had sung the lead in Puccini's Madama Buttefly the night before, and got no sleep, got a message early in the morning asking if she'd sing the lead role, Mimi, in La Boheme at that day's matinee, because the expected lead was ill with the flu.  For some insane reason, she agreed.  In front of a full Met House and estimated 300,000 worldwide viewers, with closeup camera scrutiny, she delivered an essentially flawless, gorgeously moving performance.  It was doubly or trebly moving because of the feat of switching roles, remembering all the musical words and cues and notes, and learning the staging with almost no notice.

Ms. Opolais and Vittorio Grigolo in the Metropolitan Opera's broadcast of Puccini's “La Bohème” on Saturday. CreditMarty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera .

Whatever might be mitigating circumstances (she's sung Mimi in other houses in recent years), this tour de force reinforced our respect for the nonSTEM aspects of human life.  Nothing we have seen in decades of science matched what we saw, for skill, technique, and all the learned aspects of high levels of human achievement.  This reflects the reasons we think universities should stop backing away from training anyone but scientists.

And then….  We are in Washington this week for a science meeting, but had some spare time and went to the National Art Gallery.  A big ad boasted that a new Van Gogh painting had been acquired and was on display.  Naturally, we went to see it, rushing past some other magnificent French impressionist paintings.  And what did we see?  Well, art is subjective, but this was under-whelming.  A blob of typical Van Gogh slap-dash.  We are sure the Gallery paid more for that than most of us earn in a lifetime.

Van Gogh, "Green Wheat Fields," Auvers, 1890

Yes, an investment in 'art', and maybe relevant to understanding a major artist's life.  But to us, as we quipped to each other, like a famous scientist's papers in a grade-B journal.  Not a masterpiece.  Yet, the worship of the Established leads to that purchase, much as too many journals and too many 'science' reporters, tout the every work of someone with a prominent reputation or job in a university near to Big City.

We, personally, have the utmost respect, or even awe, for any great human achievement, and the work and skill that are responsible.  The same is true for an art performance, a novel, a historical analysis, or, yes, even a scientific discovery.  But it is also true that most work in most fields is ordinary, yet we give it bloated treatment if it may show that we hob-nob with the famous.

Inspired works of human endeavor are deeply moving, in any field.  Science is among them, but brilliance is not restricted to science, and the experience of brilliance is something that should be open to everyone; the more who are educated to appreciate it, the more whose lives will be edified by the experience.