Quick followups

The woman who accused a man of threatening her life in Central Park: FIRED.

By the way, the victim of that accusation was Christian Cooper.

Cooper has written stories for Marvel Comics Presents, which often feature Ghost Rider and Vengeance. He has also edited a number of X-Men collections ,and introduced the first gay male character, Yoshi Mishima, in a Star Trek comic. Previously he was president of the Harvard Ornithological Club, in the 1980s, and is currently a senior biomedical editor at Health Science Communications.

Sounds like the kind of guy — you know, Harvard graduate, bird-watcher, writer for comic books, science editor — who would wander the parks terrorizing innocent white women.

The cops who participated in the murder of a man on the Minneapolis streets: FIRED. Four of ’em.

The Minneapolis mayor had a few words to say.

“Being black in America should not be a death sentence,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in a Tuesday press conference. “For five minutes, we watched a white officer press his knee into a black man’s neck. Five minutes. When you hear someone calling for help, you’re supposed to help. This officer failed in the most basic, human sense. What happened on Chicago and 38th last night is awful. It was traumatic. It serves as a reminder of how far we have to go.”

ACAB. Always ACAB.

Don’t watch this video if you’d rather not see a cop slowly murder a man. Minneapolis police responded to a “forgery in progress”, whatever that is, although it sounds like a non-violent crime to me; they found a man sitting in a car, “under the influence”, and we’re still in non-violent territory; the cops then escalated everything, getting him into handcuffs and on the ground. Then, while he’s helpless and handcuffed, surrounded by at least 3 cops, one of Minneapolis’s Finest puts his knee on the man’s neck and pins him there.

I guess they expected to be overpowered by a bound drunk man.

The cop kept pressure on the man’s neck while he moaned and repeatedly said he was in pain and that he couldn’t breathe. He gradually stops moving, apparently stops breathing, and is later declared dead. That cop just kept crushing his neck, even as it was obvious there could be no further resistance.

Our men in blue! Fire ’em all. None of them even suggested to the cop kneeling on the man’s neck that maybe he could lighten up a little.

The one bright spot in this horrific incident are the Minneapolis citizens who record and vocally protest the police violence as it happens. Everyone is still cowed by the armed cops, but as their moral authority continues to erode, as they become nothing but thugs in uniforms, that will change, as long as they continue to think they are above the mere citizenry.

It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was “policeman.” If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.
Terry Pratchett

Two of the cops have been put on paid leave.

But Amy Cooper is a racist

You’ve probably already heard this story of a woman in Central Park who was letting her dog run off-leash and called the cops on a black man recording her behavior.

“I’m taking a picture and calling the cops,” Amy Cooper is heard saying in the video. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”

That’s become mundane and ordinary. Beckys and Karens expressing their dismay at black people just living ordinary lives is common, it seems.

But this is extraordinary: she offers her excuse.

“I’m not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way,” she said, adding that she also didn’t mean any harm to the African American community.

Wait a minute. That’s patently false. There’s a huge disconnect between what she did, what she says, and how she now rationalizes it.

She explicitly called the police to tell them a black man was threatening her life (he wasn’t). If she wasn’t racist, why even mention that he was black? Because she assumed just the existence of a black man was threatening. She did intend to do him harm; telling the police that someone was threatening your life is requesting the authorities to step in and question and detain and possibly arrest them. That’s doing harm, no question. Using the color of his skin to feed the stereotype of dangerous black people is harming their community.

That’s just as racist and harmful as what Carolyn Bryant did. It’s curious to see how stupidly she denies it.

Psychologists don’t really believe that, do they?

They really need to get out more, dissect a frog brain or something, if they’re still clinging to that triune brain nonsense. According to Salon, some psychologists still think that’s valid. The author summarizes an article that…

…addresses (and debunks) one of the most commonly-used metaphors in evolutionary psychology, the idea that the human brain evolved from lower life forms and hence has evolutionary remnants from those animals — akin to an onion with layers.

If you’ve ever heard someone speak of you possessing a “lizard brain” or “fish brain” that operates on some subconscious, primal level, you’ve heard this metaphor in action. This is called the triune-brain theory; as the authors write, the basic crux of it is that “as new vertebrate species arose, evolutionarily newer complex brain structures were laid on top of evolutionarily older simpler structures; that is, that an older core dealing with emotions and instinctive behaviors (the ‘reptilian brain’ consisting of the basal ganglia and limbic system) lies within a newer brain capable of language, action planning, and so on.”

Whoa. That’s silly. Of course, I have an edge: my early career in graduate school was spent studying the neuroanatomy and physiology of fish, and yes, they have a hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain — all the pieces are there, they develop to different degrees in different lineages, and there aren’t linear ‘steps’ in evolution where, all of a sudden, there are jumps to whole new brain architectures appearing. Even before that, as an undergraduate taking neuroscience from Johnny Palka, I recall how insistent he was that we had to regard the brain of Drosophila as both existing and capable of sophisticated processing. (It’s true, some people think insects don’t have brains. They’re wrong.)

I wonder if this is another consequence of the belief in Haeckel’s erroneous ideas. I’ve skimmed through Dr Spock’s Baby Book, and was surprised to see how much rekapitulationstheorie saturates that book. The creationists love to claim that introductory biology texts teach it as fact, when my experience is that they explain how it’s wrong; they should look into the child psychology texts if they want better examples of a bad idea being promoted today.

So I had to look into the paper described in the Salon article. It’s titled “Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside”, which is excellent. It gets right down to addressing the misconception from the very first words. The abstract is also succinct and clear.

A widespread misconception in much of psychology is that (a) as vertebrate animals evolved, “newer” brain structures were added over existing “older” brain structures, and (b) these newer, more complex structures endowed animals with newer and more complex psychological functions, behavioral flexibility, and language. This belief, although widely shared in introductory psychology textbooks, has long been discredited among neurobiologists and stands in contrast to the clear and unanimous agreement on these issues among those studying nervous-system evolution. We bring psychologists up to date on this issue by describing the more accurate model of neural evolution, and we provide examples of how this inaccurate view may have impeded progress in psychology. We urge psychologists to abandon this mistaken view of human brains.

Then Cesario, Johnson, and Eisthen name names. They show that this misbegotten misconception is a real issue by going through the literature and introductory textbooks.

Within psychology, a broad understanding of the mind contrasts emotional, animalistic drives located in older anatomical structures with rational, more complex psychological processes located in newer anatomical structures. The most widely used introductory textbook in psychology states that

in primitive animals, such as sharks, a not-so-complex brain primarily regulates basic survival functions. . . . In lower mammals, such as rodents, a more complex brain enables emotion and greater memory. . . . In advanced mammals, such as humans, a brain that processes more information enables increased foresight as well. . . . The brain’s increasing complexity arises from new brain systems built on top of the old, much as the Earth’s landscape covers the old with the new. Digging down, one discovers the fossil remnants of the past. (Myers & Dewall, 2018, p. 68) [no relation –pzm]

To investigate the scope of the problem, we sampled 20 introductory psychology textbooks published between 2009 and 2017. Of the 14 that mention brain evolution, 86% contained at least one inaccuracy along the lines described above. Said differently, only 2 of the field’s current introductory textbooks describe brain evolution in a way that represents the consensus shared among comparative neurobiologists. (See https://osf.io/r6jw4/ for details.)

Not to blame only psychologists, they also point out that Carl Sagan popularized the idea further in The Dragons of Eden. I hate to puncture the warm happy glow Sagan’s name brings to many of us, me included, but that was a bad book. Don’t ask an astronomer to explain brain evolution and consciousness, ever. I’m looking at you, Neil.

The authors illustrate the misconception well. It’s a combination of errors: the idea that evolution is linear rather than branching, that humans are the pinnacle of a long process of perfecting the brain, and that we possess unique cerebral substrates to produce human capabilities. It isn’t, we aren’t, we don’t.

Incorrect views (a, b) and correct views (c, d) of human evolution. Incorrect views are based on the belief that earlier species lacked outer, more recent brain structures. Just as species did not evolve linearly (a), neither did neural structures (b). Although psychologists understand that the view shown in (a) is incorrect, the corresponding neural view (b) is still widely endorsed. The evolutionary tree (c) illustrates the correct view that animals do not linearly increase in complexity but evolve from common ancestors. The corresponding view of brain evolution (d) illustrates that all vertebrates possess the same basic brain regions, here divided into the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. Coloring is arbitrary but illustrates that the same brain regions evolve in form; large divisions have not been added over the course of vertebrate evolution.

I’m kind of disappointed that this obvious flawed thinking has to be pointed out, but I’m glad someone is explaining it clearly to psychologists. Can we get this garbage removed from the textbooks soon? Or at least relegated to a historical note in a sidebar, where the error is explained?

Water: scary stuff

It doesn’t look like much at the beginning, but this dam failure in Michigan led to thousands of people being evacuated, destruction of bridges and homes downstream, and some houses were flooded to a depth of 9 feet. All it took was a little rain. OK, a lot of rain.

Here’s an analysis of the failure. There was something more going on.

This video is going to be a classic in the teaching of geotechnical failures, but it also clarifies the events that led to the Edenville Dam failure. It would have been simple to ascribe this to a simple overtopping event that occurred when the capacity of the spillway was exceeded. But in reality the events are are more worrying than that – the dam appears to have undergone a slope failure; a failure of its integrity. This should never occur, and to me it suggests that the problems at the Edenville Dam went further than known issues with the spillway.

So not just rain, but also negligence by whoever had responsibility for the dam. It turns out that this dam was privately owned, by absentee landlords with a criminal history who neglected it, refused to do necessary repairs and expansion, and had their federal license to run the dam revoked for their greedy refusal to do what was needed. I guess it is unsurprising that Lee Mueller is a Randian Trumpkin who lives in Las Vegas.

America’s crumbling infrastructure isn’t helped by the parasites and rentiers who’ve taken it over.

At least I’m not the oldest and fartiest old fart around

This philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has a remarkably pessimistic view of the future of academia. He has written a requiem for the students — as if they’re all dead now — because we’re using online teaching.

As we foresaw they would, university lessons next year will be held online [in English]. What was evident to careful observers — namely, that the so-called pandemic would be used as a pretext for the increasingly pervasive diffusion of digital technologies — is being duly realized.

We are not so much interested here in the consequent transformation of teaching, in which the element of physical presence (always so important in the relationship between students and teachers) disappears definitively, as we are in the disappearance of group discussion in seminars, which was the liveliest part of instruction. Part of the technological barbarism that we are currently living through is the cancellation from life of any experience of the senses as well as the loss of the gaze, permanently imprisoned in a spectral screen.

Actually, I don’t yet know how university classes will be held next year. We’re tentatively hoping that we’ll have some measure of normality restored, and are planning as if we’ll have students on campus in the fall, but we also have contingency plans in the works in case we’re only partially open, or have to close the campus after starting, or who knows what. This is also not a “so-called pandemic”, it’s an actual pandemic. We have to respond appropriately to a serious disease, because what’s most important is the health and safety of our students. Most of us aren’t particularly interested in having these young men and women sit at our feet and worship our words of wisdom, especially when it puts their lives at risk.

I’d rather go back to the old, comfortable, in-person methods of teaching, and it’s true that we’ve lost something when we have to do everything online. But he’s wrong about some things: I didn’t find that group discussion suffered particularly. The hard part for me was the asynchronous lecturing — losing the immediate feedback from having an audience, and not being able to punctuate an explanation with an opportunity to put students to work applying the methods. It took me a few weeks to get into the swing of it all, but near the end I was getting some very good group discussions going on Zoom. You just have to learn to use the medium. You, the teacher, have to adapt and change. I read Giorgio’s whine, and he sounds like a guy who doesn’t want to learn anything new, and is very good at inventing pompous excuses.

Some things are highly unsatisfactory when translated to the screen — lab work in particular is pretty much impossible to do well. I want to see that restored as soon as possible, but other bits don’t suffer much at all. Philosophy, for instance, ought to be eminently teachable through a “spectral screen”. Bodies are just another kind of meat robot holding the brains we want to reach, after all.

At first, Giorgio just sounds like a cranky old person who doesn’t want to do anything new. But reading further, I had to conclude he’s just a loon. His conclusion is stunningly out of touch.

1. Professors who agree — as they are doing en masse — to submit to the new dictatorship of telematics and to hold their courses only online are the perfect equivalent of the university teachers who in 1931 swore allegiance to the Fascist regime. As happened then, it is likely that only fifteen out of a thousand will refuse, but their names will surely be remembered alongside those of the fifteen who did not take the oath.

Whoa. Reluctantly accepting constraints on our familiar methodology for the sake of our students’ health is the equivalent of fascism? We’ve got students who want to learn, and compromising in our approach is not surrendering to the dictatorship of the ‘spectral screen’. It’s persevering in the face of adversity to do everything we can to educate people.

But then, this is a guy who thinks the pandemic is “so-called” and is a bit out of touch with reality. Does he need a few students to die before he wakes up to the cost of his intransigence?

2. Students who truly love to study will have to refuse to enroll in universities transformed in this way, and, as in the beginning, constitute themselves in new universitates, only within which, in the face of technological barbarism, the word of the past might remain alive and something like a new culture be born — if it will be born.

It’s not “technological barbarism”, it’s a tool for communication. That’s what teaching is about.

I don’t think that encouraging students to gather in large groups to give old farts the ability to engage with them in the traditional way is safe or sensible. We’re all looking forward to the day medical treatments restore our universities to their familiar modes of operation, but until then, respect the health of our communities and fire up the damned Zoom thingie. Make do. Try new approaches. Show a little flexibility.

What? The History Channel is showing history?

I haven’t watched the History Channel in years, since I have little interest in UFOs, Hitler, or pawn shops, but I may have to see if the tuner on my television works tonight. In celebration of Memorial Day, they’re showing a documentary on US Grant, based on the Chernow biography (which is very good), that is getting good reviews.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the Confederacy getting a good whuppin’. Again.

Buttons and threads, or how to achieve criticality in a non-linear fashion

I learned something a long, long time ago, first in studying the origin of life, and then in studying the relationships within networks of genes, and now when thinking about basic epidemiology. Nothing is linear. It’s an idea that’s been discussed since at least the 1980s, when Stuart Kauffman applied it to the logic of the emergence of life on Earth. Here he is talking about the appearance of autocatalytic sets, that is, collections of interlinked enzymes (or ribozymes) that generate emergent properties, like a metabolism.

Now, the next question is how hard is it to get such systems? Does it take a careful crafting of a chemist, or can it arise by chance? The body of theory I’ve been working on now for more than a decade suggests that it’s not hard.

You see this with an analogy: suppose you take 10,000 buttons and spread them out on a hardwood floor. You have a large spool of red thread. Now, what you do is you pick up a random pair of buttons and you tie them together with a piece of red thread. Put them down and pick up another random pair of buttons and tie them together with a red thread, and you just keep doing this. Every now and then lift up a button and see how many buttons you’ve lifted with your first button. A connective cluster of buttons is called a cluster or a component. When you have 10,000 buttons and only a few threads that tie them together, most of the times you’d pick up a button you’ll pick up a single button.

As the ratio of threads to buttons increases, you’re going to start to get larger clusters, three or four buttons tied together; then larger and larger clusters. At some point, you will have a number of intermediate clusters, and when you add a few more threads, you’ll have linked up the intermediate-sized clusters into one giant cluster.

So that if you plot on an axis, the ratio of threads to buttons: 10,000 buttons and no threads; 10,000 buttons and 5,000 threads; and so on, you’ll get a curve that is flat, and then all of a sudden it shoots up when you get this giant cluster. This steep curve is in fact evidence of a phase transition.

If there were an infinite number of threads and an infinite number of buttons and one just tuned the ratios, this would be a step function; it would come up in a sudden jump. So it’s a phase transition like ice freezing.

Now, the image you should take away from this is if you connect enough buttons all of a sudden they all go connected. To think about the origin of life, we have to think about the same thing.

The pattern should also affect how we think about genes. We’ve got about 20,000 genes; each gene influences the expression of some set of other genes. You may think you know exactly which genes are directly affected by a gene you are interested in — you can do experiments and work out the connections, a process called epistasis — but because each of those genes also have multiple connections, you in effect have to consider that every single gene in some way influences the activity of every other gene. Tug on one, and every other gene in the system is affected. Each of us is a supercluster of interacting genes, being tugged on in various ways by the environment.

I’m not an epidemiologist, but this also how I think about the pandemic. I am a button. I’ve been alone for months; if I had gotten the disease, I would have suffered alone but I’d also have been a dead-end for the virus. Now my wife is home, another button, and we are tied together with a red thread such that if I get the disease, she almost certainly will, and vice versa. But also, she was living with my daughter, her husband, and my granddaughter for a few months, she was part of a four-button cluster, which I’ve now joined. If one of us had the virus, it would have readily spread within that group. But it would have ended there.

Unless…what if I cheated? I decided to go out to a bar and chat with ten friends. I’ve basically connected a red thread to each of their clusters, and increased my connectivity greatly. Maybe you think it’s still a manageable number, but that’s only because you don’t see all the red threads outside of your immediate group. The point of Kauffman’s analogy is that the expansion of the network is not linear, as you might naively expect, but jumps rapidly as the number of connections increases, and can undergo a phase transition, where just going out to a bar can achieve criticality, and suddenly you are connected to everyone in the country, and the virus has avenues to reach everyone.

So think of yourself as a button. Every time you touch someone, lean in close and breathe their air, you are tying a red thread to them, linking your fate to some degree to them. You can safely build a little network with close family, and you’re still OK — the threads tangle together just your small family unit. But if your child has a playdate with a neighbor’s kid…they have made a new thread that encompasses everyone in your family, and everyone in the neighbor’s family, and you’ll have no idea how many threads connect you all. And if you decide to take the whole family to that newly opened beach and mingle with thousands of other people, forget about it — the number of connections have shot up exponentially. You’ve lost all control.

The problem is that people don’t grasp the idea of exponential increases intuitively. I don’t. I’ve worked with enough models that I know that these kind of phenomena can produce surprisingly large effects rapidly, though, and that our current situation is a perfect example of that kind of phenomenon, and damn, stay home and stop stitching all those buttons together.