3021701    การออกกำลังกายสำหรับบุคลกลุ่มพิเศษ    Exercise for Special Populations

การออกกำลังกายสำหรับผู้สูงอายุ ผู้เป็นโรคกระดูกบาง โรคข้อเสื่อม การออกกำลังกายในเด็ก การออกกำลังกายสำหรับผู้หญิงมีครรภ์และหลังคลอด การออกกำลังกายสำหรับผู้ป่วยด้วยโรคหัวใจ โรคปอด โรคมะเร็ง โรคเบาหวาน และโรคอ้วน การออกกำลังกายสำหรับคนพิการประเภทต่าง ๆ ได้แก่ ผู้ป่วยอัมพาตครึ่งท่อน ผู้ป่วยแขนขาขาด ผู้ป่วยอัมพาตครึ่งซีก และผู้ป่วยสมองพิการ

(Exercise prescription for geriatrics, osteoporosis, degenerative joint disease, chronic diseases, disables, obesity, children, pregnancy and postpartum.)

(3021701 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

25 November.

The view from my office windows surveys Chanel/Gucci/MiuMiu/Ralph Lauren/Louis Vuitton/Gaultier/Dior, give or take. On walking into a coworker’s office to pass him some papers, I noticed his view. This is not a statement on preferential office outlooks, but more on the dualistic nature of all of Hong Kong’s neighborhoods. 200 meters from the most ridiculously ostentatious shopping possible are several blocks of apartments that look like this.

Every time I look at these buildings I am struck, inti tally,  by the visual patterns. But then the social scientist in me just starts to wonder… what is behind all those windows aside from hundreds upon hundreds of people? What is it like? And now I wonder if they like their view of my office building.

Whenever the concept of memes comes up it seems that people get really incensed. I’m baffled by this reaction. What is it about this concept that gets folks so worked up? I certainly understand the point that meme theory is underdeveloped, but this is a call for theoretical elaboration and development, not outright rejection. I get the sense that memes get some worked up for one of two reasons. On the one hand, I sometimes sense that hostility to the concept of memes is really driven by disciplinary territory disputes. Here you have the upstarts like Dawkins and Dennett come along, spout the word “memes”, and suddenly everyone yahoo that knows nothing about social theory or the broad and deep discipline of semiotics gets all excited. I wonder whether there isn’t a little of resentment and envy at work here. On the other hand, I get the sense that some associate memes with socio- and psychobiology (more on this in a moment).

From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, I find meme theory extremely attractive precisely because meme theory treats memes as real objects or actors in the world. Here, more specifically, are the reasons that I find memes attractive:

1) Far from falling into vulgar socio- and psychobiology, meme theory allows us to tell a far more complex story about human beings and behavior. The central thesis of meme theory is that at some point in human biological history a new type of replicator emerged in contrast to gene replicators. Genes are replicators in the sense that they are units of some sort that get copied or replicated through reproduction. Under Dawkin’s formulation, at least, the “aim” of genes is not the advantage of the organism, but to get themselves copied through reproduction. In this respect, genes construct vehicles (bodies, organisms) as strategies for getting themselves replicated.

Just as we do not act primarily for the welfare of our cars but use cars for our own aims, genes aren’t primarily “interested” in the welfare of bodies or organisms. This comes out with special clarity in the case of the preying mantis, but also my favorite animal, the octopus. In the case of the preying mantis, of course, the female devours the male preying mantis’s head after mating with him. In contributing half his genes the male has done his work. His sole value after mating consists in contributing nutrients to the impregnated preying mantis. Moreover, were the male to go his happy way after mating he might mate with other females, generating dangerous competitors to the offspring of his first mate. Cruel world. The case is similar with the octopus. After the female octopus is impregnated she finds a well protected cave or pipe and lays her eggs around the mouth of the cave opening. For the next few weeks after laying her eggs she never again leaves the cave, but rather spends all of her time jetting water over the egg sacks hanging from the cave opening and cleaning the eggs with her tentacles. Once the eggs hatch the female octopus is free to leave the cave, but at this point she is so weakened from lack of food (she hasn’t hunted during this whole time) and is very quickly, and somewhat ironically, devoured by the fish and crabs that she previously feasted upon. Once again, the genes of the female octopus were not acting on her behalf, but rather she was a vehicle or strategy for getting her genes replicated. When that replication is complete her job is done. Cruel world.

read on!

With the emergence of memes a new replicator enters the world, very different from genes. Memes or cultural ideas, symbols, and practices, are like genes in that they aim to get themselves replicated, however as unique replicators they do not act at the behest of genes. In other words, we now get what could be called a “conflict of the replicators”. Genes can struggle with memes. Memes can struggle with genes. Memes and genes can collaborate with one another. However, like all alliances, a collaboration of memes and genes is a temporary strategy to advance the replication of genes and the replication of the memes that can be dissolved when this relationship no longer advances one or the other. It is even feasible that memes, at some point, could dispense with genes altogether if they find new and more effective ways to replicate themselves, no longer requiring organic bodies like brains to be passed along. This, for example, is what is depicted in films like Terminator or The Matrix where the machines (and machines are memes) have been liberated from human bodies and strive to replicate themselves apart from humans.

The key point is that with memes new relationships to the world and biology emerge. Thus when a soldier dies in battle while storming the beach at Normandy, this soldier has died so that certain memes might be replicated, not for the sake of his genes. When someone practices abstinence before marriage, they are acting on behalf of memes, not genes. These new objects or actors, memes, fundamentally change how we relate to ourselves, our biology, and memes. Indeed, in a theorization worthy of Lacan or Freud, Dennett compares memes to foreign and alien entities that come to infest our brains, creating persons, where persons are what emerge as a sort of conflict between our biology or genes and these units of culture. It is not difficult to discern something akin to Lacan’s parasitic and alien signifiers that so transform our relation to our bodies and the world in this concept of memes.

The problem with so much socio- and psychobiology is that it is greedily reductive. Not only do these explanations all too often seek a biological explanation of every and any human behavior, but these sorts of explanations also often make an illicit move from the “is” to the “ought”, jumping from the observation that because our genes promote a certain behavior we ought to engage in that sort of behavior. The silliness of this argument can be discerned when we talk about things like poor eyesight. Does anyone dispute that because some people are near-sighted they ought not correct their vision through a memetic technology like eyeglasses, contacts, or corrective surgery? Because memes are autonomous replicators, they introduce all sorts of things into human behavior that cannot be reduced to biology or given a biological explanation. In short, the concept of memes curbs the worst excesses of socio- and psychobiology while nonetheless allowing us to think the intersection of biology and these units of cultural meaning without rejecting one or the other as so often happens in positions driven by the nature/culture divide (i.e., where we’re required to choose either nature or culture, rather than thinking the complex relations between these terms in a collective).

2. Memes, by adding the mechanism of natural selection to the mix, give us the means to think cultural evolution or the invention of new memes. For a number of years I was obsessed with semiotics and semiology, as well as structural linguistics. One thing I always had difficulty understanding– and it’s a tremendously important issue for me –is how change takes place in systems of signs or in structures of signifiers. I simply never encountered what I took to be a plausible account of why change takes place in culture or language. Meme theory provides a nice working hypothesis for the genesis of change by introducing the concept of natural selection. It’s worth remembering that natural selection is a relational concept involving a relation between random variations, units, heredity, and an environment. You need these four elements for the algorithms of natural selection to get off the ground. Thus, for example, random variation produces certain differences. Some of these differences are advantageous and enhance the possibilities of surviving long enough to get reproduced, while others are not. The advantage is determined by a relation to an environment. Thus, having white hair is an advantage for a bear in an arctic environment with lots of snow, but probably isn’t much of an advantage in a Brazilian rain forest. It is less likely that the gene for white hair would be passed on in the rain forest because prey would more easily see the bear, would be more likely to run away, the bear would thus get less food and would therefore be less healthy and likely to mate. Just the reverse in an arctic environment. The point is that what counts as an advantageous difference is relational or a function of the relation between the organism and its environment.

The problem with structuralist linguistics, for example, is that it brackets anything outside of language when analyzing language and therefore is denied any sort of mechanism that could explain either 1) where random variations in language come from, and 2) how different variations are selected for. Meme theory does not have this problem. Recall that for memes, like genes, the “aim” is not the welfare of the person using or thinking the meme, but rather the replication of itself. Some memes are downright detrimental to us, but get replicated nonetheless for whatever reason. Other memes are irritating and don’t really have any use, but are very good at getting replicated. Here I think of Bobby McFerrin’s song Don’t Worry, Be Happy:

Back when this song was first released I remember that my first reaction was a sense of euphoric pleasure that was then accompanied by a sort of horror or profound irritation. Why? Despite being “catchy” (note the word “catchy”), once you heard the song a couple of times you just couldn’t get the damned thing out of your head. You were infected with it and found it running through your mind over and over again, trapping you in its grip. McFerrin’s song was an exceptionally good replicator, highly adept at getting itself copied and passed on. But why?

There are more or less four relevant environments that play a role in the selective processes of memes. First, so far, of course, the primary environment of memes is the brain. To date, the successful reproduction of a meme requires that the meme be consistent with the “architecture” of the brain. If certain memes are particularly “catchy”, then this is because they have evolved in such a way that they are congenial to the structure of the brain. Something about the rhythm of McFerrin’s song stimulates pleasure and memory aspects of the brain. Beer brands and cars often use sex to sell their product, stimulating the hypothalamus and whatnot. Nationalism is a pernicious meme that uses narcissism, resentment, and our desire for superiority to get itself replicated. My three year old daughter has entire Dr. Seuss stories like Green Eggs and Ham memorized. No doubt the reason these memes or stories have lodged themselves so deeply in her mind has to do with their rhythmic, poetic quality and their plot structure. It is easier to remember something with a rhythm than a complex geometrical proof, and it is easier to remember something with a plot and characters than all the details of Husserl’s Logical Investigation. In this respect, we can think of memes as strategies for seducing brains. Some memes get themselves replicated by being useful for the organisms that host them. Others get themselves replicated by playing on the architecture of our brains in rhythmic and imagistic terms. Yet others get themselves replicated by playing on our worst characteristics such as envy, hatred, narcissism, and so on.

Notice that the principle of parity or reversibility works here as well. It is not simply that memes must adapt to the brain as an environment, but it is highly likely that in the 200,000 years or so that homo sapiens have been around our biology has, in fact, been modified as a result of memes. Insofar as memes are selective pressures in the environment of genes, it is likely that some genes are better fitted to life with memes than others. Here a word about “adaptation” is in order. When Van Haute, in his study of Lacan’s “Subversion of the Subject” and 5th and 6th seminar entitles his book Against Adaptation, he seems to be working on the premise that adaptation means “well fitted to an environment”. This ignores the fact that 1) environments are ever shifting, and 2) that organisms are strategies (wagers) for navigating a particular environment premised on the stability of how time is structured. The point here is that no organism is entirely fitted to its environment and that every relationship between an organism and its environment is fraught. This is especially the case with the relationship between genes and memes. This relationship is hardly peaceful or congenial, is riven by conflict and competition, and is always an uneasy alliance. In emphasizing that memes are autonomous replicators in their own right, in undermining the socio- and psychobiological thesis that everything we do is at the behest of our genes or biology, meme theory sheds light on this fraught relationship in a way, I believe, that any Lacanian can wholeheartedly endorse. It really doesn’t take much work to port Lacanian psychoanalysis into meme theory or meme theory into Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Brains also play a significant role in the random variations undergone by memes. Where genes tend to more or less maintain their structure across time, brains have the curious ability to combine memes in a sort of alchemy or chemism that produces changes very quickly. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland combines units of language in all sorts of surprising ways that create entirely new terms or memes. Upon encountering spray perfume bottles the inventor of the fuel injected engine gets the bright idea of using a mechanism similar to the perfume spray bottle to spray gasoline in a controlled manner, and so on. Consequently, like the game of telephone, the meme undergoes greater or lesser variations with each exchange.

But brains alone are not the sole environment of memes. Technology, which is itself a meme, plays a crucial role in which memes have an advantage and which memes do not. It is difficult, for example, for memes like physics, chemistry, philosophy, high order mathematics, and so on to get a foothold in a culture that lacks writing. Here we get at what McLuhan might have had in mind when he declared that “the medium is the message”. The medium– in this case the technology through which memes are transmitted –plays an important role in what memes have a real chance of getting passed on and what memes have a highly diminished chance of getting passed on. It is very difficult to keep a dialogue like Plato’s Sophist or a series of lectures like Aristotle’s Metaphysics in ones mind, but not at all daunting to memorize all of the Illiad. For most of us the idea of memorizing all the details of Euclid’s Elements or Newton’s Principia is unthinkable. Consequently, the technology by which memes are transmitted is not simply a passive tool or vehicle but actually changes selection pressures on memes or units of culture meaning. Not only can technologies intensify the rate at which memes are transmitted in the case of having good highways allowing people to travel and therefore exchange memes or in the case of the internet, but the medium itself contributes to the sorts of memes that are possible or not possible. For example, contemporary computers are today rendering forms of mathematics possible that were unthinkable prior to the advent of the computer.

Third, the natural environment is also a selective mechanism. Thus if a group of people live in an extremely remote area of the world such as Southwest Alaska, it is likely that “memetic drift” or change will be very slow. In a large city with lots of ports, memetic drift is highly accelerated.

Finally fourth, just as organisms are selective pressures for other organisms, other memes are selective pressures for new memes. Memes belong to the environment of other memes. Thus memes can form vast symbiotic webs of interdependency like natural ecosystems where memes rely on one another in systems or networks to persist. This is the case with interdependencies of various technologies, or the manner in which our current world is largely structured by the dynamics of capital which reaches into every aspect of our lives, structuring it in a variety of highly durable ways. Similarly, the memes of one semiotic ecosystem or semiosphere can create a highly inhospitable place for other memes just as the Brazilian rain forest isn’t particularly hospitable for the polar bear. This would be the case with the memes for socialism in the United States. And indeed, among the various symbiots that inhabit the semiosphere, there are all sorts of forms of “meme warfare” where certain networks of memes strive to neutralize other networks of memes.

3. Meme theory renders memes “geographical”. In its emphasis on replication, copying, or iteration meme theory draws attention to the epidemiology of memes through a population of brains. Just as you can’t run Word for Windows on your Atari, people need to be hosts for memes in order to have certain ideas, engage in certain practices, and so on. Let us call the error of ignoring memetic epidemiology “The Bush Administration Fallacy”. The Bush administration had the idea that everyone innately and naturally has certain ideas and that it is sufficient simply to remove certain obstacles to actualize these ideas in a population. But like the Atari that can’t run Word for Windows, it is very difficult for populations of people to enact certain practices if they don’t have certain memes.

Generally when we think of meaning we think of it as something that doesn’t have a geography or that isn’t located in time and space. No doubt this error emerges as a result of certain confusions surrounding the iterability of memes giving the illusion that memes aren’t localized in space and time. But insofar as memes must spread, insofar as they must be copied, memes have a geography or a geographical distribution which is, in principle, mappable. Indeed, this is part of what the ethnographer does implicitly when she does field work, investigating the unique practices, technologies, laws, morals, cosmologies, economies, etc., of a particular group of people.

By de-emphasizing– but by no means dismissing or ignoring –the content of memes and drawing attention to the geographical distribution of memes, memetic theory suggests an ethics of repetition. You might think that you have no new ideas, that you are simply repeating what others are saying, and perhaps you are. But in refusing to repeat because you have nothing new to say you are forgetting the dimension of epidemiology or the spread of memes throughout a population. While you might have nothing new to say you can nonetheless play a role in the spread of ideas and practices worth fighting for and sharing. Moreover, as I have already suggested, memes have a strange alchemy that leads them to combine in surprising ways with other memes when they enter your brain and the brains of other people. So repeat a little. Value repetition a bit more. Transmit.

3902304    การออกกำลังกายสำหรับบุคคลกลุ่มพิเศษ    Exercise Prescription for Special Populations

หลักในการออกกำลังกายสำหรับคนพิการประเภทต่างๆ (อัมพาตครึ่งท่อน แขนขาขาด สมองพิการ ตาบอด หูหนวก) หลักในการออกกำลังกายสำหรับผู้ป่วยโรคหัวใจ ความดันโลหิตสูง โรคปอดอุดกั้นเรื้อรัง โรคเบาหวาน โรคอ้วน โรคข้ออักเสบ การเปลี่ยนแปลงทางสรีรวิทยาและการออกกำลังกายในระหว่างตั้งครรภ์

(Principles of exercise prescription for disables; principles of exercise prescription for patients with cardiac diseases, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes mellitus (DM), obesity and arthritis; physiologic changes and exercise during pregnancy.)

(3902304 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

3906308    นันทนาการเพื่อกลุ่มบุคคลพิเศษ    Recreation for Special Populations

ลักษณะและความต้องการของกลุ่มบุคคลพิเศษ การให้บริการนันทนาการแก่กลุ่มบุคคลพิเศษนี้ซึ่งรวมถึงกลุ่มพิการทางร่างกาย พิการทางสมอง การจัดประสบการรณ์การเรียนรู้ การศึกษานอกสถานที่ และประสบการรณ์นั่งรถเข็นสำหรับคนพิการ

(Characteristics and needs of special populations; recreation services for special populations including physically disabled, developmentally disabled; learning experience, field trips and wheelchair experiences.)

(3906308 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

5100501    ประชากรวิทยาเบื้องต้น    Introduction to Populations Studies

การเปลี่ยนแปลงขนาดของประชากร องค์ประกอบของประชากร ภาวะเจริญพันธุ์ ภาวะสมรส การเพิ่มประชากร ภาวะการตาย การย้ายถิ่น และการกระจายตัวของประชากรปฏิสัมพันธ์ระหว่างปรากฎการณ์ทางประชากรกับปัจจัยทางเศรษฐกิจ สังคม และสิ่งแวดล้อม

(Changes in population size, population composition, fertility, nuptiality, population growth, mortality, migration and population distribution; interactions between demographic phenomena and socio-economic and environmental factors.)

(5100501 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

An experiemntal/optimal/approximate solution to the Partition Problem
using the theory of Natural Selection


I have tried to solve the Partition Problem using the theory of natural selection.
The solution is approximate and optimal, not the correct answer always, but to a
larger extent. The solution uses the genetic methods of crossover and selective
iterations. A few parameters like the number of iterations, selective percentage,
crossover-ratio, etc are defined as constants and can be varied and experimented
to best suite for a particular species and raw population.

What is Partition Problem:
Partition problem From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computer science, the partition problem is an NP-complete problem.
The problem is to decide whether a given multiset of integers can be
partitioned into two "halves" that have the same sum. More precisely,
given a multiset S of integers, is there a way to partition S into two
subsets S1 and S2 such that the sum of the numbers in S1 equals the sum
of the numbers in S2? The subsets S1 and S2 must form a partition in the
sense that they are disjoint and they cover S. The optimization version asks
for the "best" partition, and can be stated as: Find a partition into two
subsets S1,S2 such that max(sum(S_1), sum(S_2)) is minimized (sometimes with
the additional constraint that the sizes of the two sets in the partition must
be equal, or differ by at most 1).

The partition problem is equivalent to the following special case of the subset
sum problem: given a set S of integers, is there a subset S1 of S that sums to
exactly t /2 where t is the sum of all elements of S? (The equivalence can be seen
by defining S2 to be the difference S − S1.) Therefore, the pseudo-polynomial time
dynamic programming solution to subset sum applies to the partition problem as well.

Although the partition problem is NP-complete, there are heuristics that solve the
problem in many instances, either optimally or approximately. For this reason, it
has been called the "The Easiest Hard Problem" by Brian Hayes.

Edit:  Latest version of code can be found at: ASPN

Constructive comments, feedback and criticism will be highly appreciated.

The power of education in fostering a better and effective response to HIV and AIDS is undeniable.

Education promotes knowledge and with knowledge about HIV and AIDS, individuals, families and communities have the ability to make informed choices about their behavior.

However, governments and international donor organizations often underplay this important intervention, particularly in the emergency phase of the cycle of displacement, says a report recently issued by UNHCR and UNESCO on the importance of education to populations that find themselves victims of displacement due to conflict, disaster or other emergencies.

Education can play a key role in helping refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) cope with the negative excesses of their circumstances, such as ignorance, exploitation, violence and the risk of HIV infection.

Many factors combine to put IDPs and refugees at the risk of HIV infection, including loss of livelihoods, lack of access to basic services, poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, and violence.

According to the report, internal displacement also increases sexual violence against women and girls, including the use of rape as a weapon of war, and breaks down social networks and institutions that usually provide support and regulate behavior.

“The additional disruption to health and education services reduces access to HIV prevention commodities, information and HIV-related treatment and care during conflict and flight,” the report acknowledges.

The institutional disintegration that characterizes internally displaced communities poses a huge challenge to developing interventions to prevent HIV transmission and provide sexual and reproductive health services.

“For example, both the general socioeconomic situation of refugees and the specific provision of formal and non-formal education are quite different from elsewhere,” states the UNESCO/UNHCR report, which is aimed at influencing policy-makers and implementers in ministries of education, civil society organizations and funding organizations involved in emergency, reconstruction and development responses.

In a time of crisis, education can offer structure, stability and hope as well as promote the acquisition of skills for life and support conflict resolution and peace-building. With increased knowledge, IDPs and refugees can acquire the necessary skills that can significantly help them to prevent HIV and cope with AIDS. Policymakers can improve the lives and livelihoods of IDPs and refugees by directing resources towards the education of displaced populations.

“It is critical that efforts be made to ensure that refugees and IDPs, particularly children and young people, have access to educational opportunities as education provides the knowledge and skills essential for the prevention of HIV, and protects individuals, families and communities from the impact of AIDS,” says the report.

In addition, education can foster understanding and tolerance that can contribute to reduced stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV.

According to UNESCO and UNHCR, the needs of refugees and IDPs should be an element of national education sector policies on HIV and AIDS in affected countries. In other words, governments need to allocate funds in national budgets to cater to the educational needs of displaced populations.

But to ensure success, the affected communities should be involved in the design and implementation of programs. “Educational programs developed through consultation and consensus with the displaced and local host communities have a better chance of success than those imported and implemented directly,” the report recommends.

Ignoring the needs of displaced populations will only impact negatively on the efforts of governments to develop a comprehensive response to HIV and AIDS. “Failure to address HIV-related needs of refugees not only denies refugees their rights, but undermines the effectiveness of HIV prevention and care efforts for surrounding communities,” the report concludes.

defeated option

Alarming as the climb in unemployment is, the growing duration of joblessness is more worrying still.

Americas army of long-term unemployed ” those without work for six months or more ” swelled to 5.4 million, according to todays figures.This is roughly equal to the combined populations of Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento.

Source:
http://blogs.reuters.com/columns/2009/10/02/the-perils-of-long-term-unemployment/

Here is the filled-in version of the Population Dynamics note that had lots of fill-in-the-blanks.  Lots of concepts here.  POPULATION DYNAMICS

Here are the answers to that handout that we only took up the first half of:  Limits To Populations

This is a sort of summary note:  POPULATION DYNAMICS

And here are a couple of animations to show that it’s a dynamic process.  Play with them!  Population Ecology animation      population pred-prey

From the regulation and reproduction in bacteria colonies (Bassler, 2002) to complex smell and taste systems of humans (Van Toller & Dodd, 1988), the ability of sensing chemical stimuli, known as chemosensation, is believed to be the most basic and ubiquitous of senses (Bhutta, 2007). One strain of thought places chemosensation as merely an evolved ability to detect dangerous and volatile substances – such as putrefied food (see Bhutta, 2007). Still, the notion that this ability to detect chemical stimuli, particularly in the domain of smell, serves a purpose in communication is not necessarily a contemporary concept (Wyatt, 2009).

The ancient Greeks, for instance, observed that the attraction in male dogs was influenced by secretions of female dogs in heat (ibid). Meanwhile Charles Darwin (1871), in reference to crustaceans, noted “[…]the increased number of the smelling-threads has probably been acquired through sexual selection, by the better provided males having been the more successful in finding partners and in producing offspring.” (chapter 9, online). More recently, an increasing amount of evidence suggests olfactory systems in animals are a key sensory component in mate selection; playing a fundamental role in evolution (Bhutta, 2007).

A widely studied and much discussed aspect of chemosensation in animals is the idea of pheromones (ibid). Derived from the Greek phererin (to transfer) and hormōn (to excite), pheromone was originally coined by Peter Karlson and Martin Lüscher (Wyatt, 2009) to describe “[…] substances which are secreted to the outside by an individual of the same species, in which they release a specific reaction, for example, a definite behaviour or a developmental process.” (pg. 262).

Using pheromones as a communication tool is widely observed across many animal species, particularly those showing a high degree of sociality (Bhutta, 2007). For instance, laboratory mice show many instances of pheromonal responses (ibid), including: changes in the menstrual cycles of female mice in response to the presence (Whitten, 1959) or absence (Van der lee & Boot, 1955) of males; termination of a pregnancy if a female is housed with a fertile male who is not the father (Bruce, 1960); and, female mice undergo puberty at an earlier age when housed with a male (Vanderbergh et al., 1975).

Even though we know humans produce pheromones, what about the detection of these chemical secretions?

On the basis of the animal studies, the vomeronasal organ (VNO) is the primary place of pheromone detection (Bhutto, 2007). However, some studies (Doty, 2001; Rodriguez & Mombaerts, 2002; Liman & Innan, 2003; Savic et al., 2009) argue the VNO, and associated genes, are essentially non-functional, whilst another group of studies (Monti-Bloch et al., 1998; Smith et al., 1998; Grosser et al., 2000; Grammer et al., 2005) claim the opposite; that VNO responds to pheromones in a sex-specific manner (Grammer et al., 2005). More recently though, the discovery of a pheromone receptor gene (VN1R1), transcripts of which are found in human olfactory mucosa (Bhutta, 2007), strengthens the assertion that signals from some pheromones (specifically EST) are mediated by the main olfactory bulb (MOB) (Savic et al., 2009).

Further evidence for the MOB subserving pheromone detection is from investigations into patients with Kallman’s syndrome (Dodé & Hardelin, 2009). Patients suffering from this disorder have an underdeveloped olfactory bulb and tracts alongside hypogonadism (gonad defects) and anosmia (lack of smell) (ibid). Hardelin & Dodé (2008) investigate the underlying genetic network of Kallman’s syndrome, finding the hypogonadism is due to gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) deficiency, which they argue “[…] results from a failure of the embryonic migration of neuroendocrine GnRH cells from the olfactory epithelium to the forebrain.” (pg. 181). In addition to these findings, Grammer et al. reported that “[…] preliminary research indicates that [patients with Kallman’s syndrome] show no response to pheromones.” (2005, pg. 136).

Some understanding of the underlying neurological processing in olfactory social perception is beginning to emerge. In a PET study by Lundström et al. (2008), female subjects were exposed to both body and non-body odours in an attempt to identify their respective neural activations. The primary processing differences between the two stimuli were that “[…] body odours activated a circuit including more non-olfactory than olfactory brain regions… [also] The familiarity of body odours (i.e. personal odour, odour of a friend, odour of a stranger) induced further topographical differentiation” (Brancucci et al., 2009). These findings, alongside many other studies (see Brancucci et al., 2009 for a review) suggest the overarching emphasis of pheromone processing appears to be its asymmetrical pattern of lateralisation, which is strongly dependent on sex: males demonstrate a strong right hemispheric lateralisation, whilst in females it is less pronounced (ibid).

Even though the contention surrounding our ability to detect and produce pheromones has subsided somewhat, the evolutionary benefit of such a system needs to be addressed. Of course, one suggestion is that this ability is a superfluous relic of our mammalian evolutionary heritage (Bhutto, 2007), with humans mostly being microsmatic (poor smellers) who rely more on other sensory modalities (verbal and visual, for instance) in mate selection and sexual behaviour (Grammer et al., 2005). Countering these claims are a growing number of experiments into the role of olfaction in contemporary human societies.

Much of these experiments stem from Russell (1976) and Wallace’s (1977) early discoveries that individuals are able to determine the sex of another person just through their odour (Bhutto, 2007). A common method of gathering odours from the axilla was to collect t-shirts worn for several days by the subjects providing samples (ibid). Another study by Preti et al. (2005) provide data that male axillary extracts causes “[…] neuroendocrine and mood alterations in women.” (pg. 2110). Furthermore, these extracts advance the release of a luteinizing hormone, which causes the women subjects to ovulate (ibid). This discovery perhaps explains the findings of Cutler et al. (1986), where axillary extracts encourage more regular ovulatory cycles, and Ellis & Garber’s (2000) claim that girls in homes with step-fathers experienced a faster onset of puberty than girls in single-mother homes.

MHC and Mate Selection

In mate selection, one possible purpose for olfactory communication, particularly in contemporary human societies, is to signal good genes (Grammer et al., 2005). In particular, signalling immunocompetence (Folstad & Karter, 1992) is a way in which sexual selection allows females to obtain complementary genes from males to pass on to their offspring – conferring them with an immune advantage (Grammer et al., 2005). In vertebrates, the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) is a set of protein products that play a central role in immune processes, with MHC-associated genes demonstrating “[…] extremely high intrapopulational polymorphism… and dozens of evolutionary theorists, population geneticists, immunologists and behavioral ecologists have attempted to elucidate the evolutionary pressures that have shaped it.” (Havlicek & Roberts, 2008).

Although there are many hypotheses attempting to explain the degree of MHC polymorphism (see Havlicek & Roberts, 2008), one hypothesis stresses the role of sexual selection in shaping disassortative mating preferences (ibid). That is, individuals prefer their partners to possess dissimilar MHC genotypes (ibid). The importance of a dissimilar genotype is based on the assertion of some studies (Penn et al., 2002; Piertney & Oliver, 2006) that MHC-heterozygosity is advantageous in the development of the immune system (Havlicek & Roberts, 2008).

MHC-correlated mate choice is found in many species, from sticklebacks (Reusch et al., 2001) to lemurs (Schwensow et al., 2008). However, the initial discoveries were made in the studies of mice by Yamazaki and colleagues (1976), which made the claim that MHC-associated mate choice was made on the basis of odour cues. Since these initial studies, it appears mice do not choose their mates (and avoid inbreeding) on the basis of the MHC-type, rather mice use MUP (major urinary proteins) as indicators of mate selection (Sherborne et al., 2007). Nonetheless, that MUPs are non-polymorphic in humans, whereas they are highly polymorphic in mice (ibid), is perhaps one reason not to negate the studies discussed below.

In humans, MHC is commonly termed HLA (human leuckocyte antigen), and like the various studies of animals, there appears to be evidence for MHC-correlated odour preferences (Havlicek & Roberts, 2008). Wedekind et al. (1995) provides the basis for many investigations into MHC mate preference in humans (also see: Jacob et al., 2002; Thornhill et al., 2003; Roberts et al., 2008). Essentially, women are asked to smell and then rate T-shirts worn by men for a number of nights. In Wedekind et al.’s initial study, women were divided into two groups: those using hormonal contraceptives (n=18) and those not using hormonal contraceptives (n=31). They found that “[…] On average, women not using the contraceptive pill rated as more pleasant the odors of men with MHC antigens that were dissimilar to their own.” (Havlicek & Roberts, 2008, pg. 3).

The results of Wedekind et al.’s study suggest women may have a preference for the body odour of men with MHC-dissimilar antigens, although subsequent results in repeated experiments (e.g. Roberts et al., 2008) failed to find a significant correlation, it does not necessarily mean this ability is applied when choosing a potential mate. For instance, recent studies found facial preferences correlates with both MHC-similarity (Roberts et al., 2005) and MHC heterozygosity (Lie et al., 2008). That facial preferences demonstrate opposite findings to the generally disassortative odour preferences is one instance where mate choice may rely on one modality over another in mate choice (ibid). Alternatively, neither modality may play a significant role or, as suggested by Havlicek & Roberts (2008), these two preferences, “[…] on average, might be a way of achieving an intermediate rather than maximal level of genetic variability in a preferred mate, since they could work in tandem to screen out the extreme.” (pg. 10).

As already discussed in the MHC-studies, olfaction is likely to interact with other modalities in influencing sexual behaviours and mate selection. Although assessing the degree to which olfaction interacts with or is negated by other sensory modalities is considerably difficult.

First, measuring the influence of chemical stimuli is far more tentative, unlike vision (wavelength) and audition (frequency), as there is no equivalent metric for olfaction; except for a recently generated multidimensional odour metric (Haddad et al., 2008). Second, we are still very much at the beginning in our understanding of the interaction between semiochemical (substances eliciting a conscious perception) and pheromones (substances eliciting unconscious perception) (Sbarbati & Osculati, 2006). Furthermore, there are vasana chemical signals, which “[…] are neither classifiable as odours nor as pheromones, that are not consciously detectable as odours, and do affect psychological state yet not triggering a unique set of behavioural, neural or endocrine responses.” (Brancucci et al., 2009, pg. 904).

Despite these inherent difficulties, there is neurological evidence suggesting some cross-modal integration of information processed by chemosensory, visual and auditory systems (ibid). For instance, olfactory inputs leading from the MOS/VNO are not only processed by the ipsilateral primary olfactory cortex, but subsequently at the amygdala, which plays “[…] a major role in the learning and recognition of social chemosignals as well as being a hub for visual and acoustic emotion-related information.” (ibid, pg. 904).

These neural correlates in cross-modal processing may explain some results, especially where the processing of male pheromones during the ovulation induces a stronger preference in women for symmetrical male faces (Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999). A more recent study by Havlicek and colleagues (2008) also shows how sensory reliance differs on the basis of sex: women tend to rely more on olfactory cues, and men on visual cues, in both partner choice and sexual arousal. In an interesting aside, women generally (i.e. non-sexual contexts) tended to value olfactory cues significantly more than did men (ibid).

Not only do women place more emphasis on the olfaction modality, there is further evidence to suggest it affects their behaviour and influences mate choice. One study (Wyart et al., 2007) observed that after smelling pure androstradienone, a molecule present in the sweat of men, women produced significantly higher levels of cortisol; and suggests “[…] that, like rodents, humans can influence the hormonal balance of conspecifics through chemosignals.” (pg. 1261).

Another consideration in determining the role of body odour in mate choice is to investigate the differences in olfaction between homo- and hetero-sexual individuals (Sergeant et al., 2006). One study by Sergeant et al. (2006) found heterosexual women preferred homosexual males’ scent than that of heterosexuals. Also, the brain activity and functional connectivity of homosexual individuals when exposed to pheromone-like substances shows almost a reversal of results found in heterosexuals: heterosexual men and lesbian women show larger right hemispheres, whereas homosexual men and heterosexual women show a more symmetrical hemispheric distribution (Brancucci et al., 2009).

Another consideration raised by the Havlicek et al. (2008) paper, and in the earlier section on MHC, is the role of social and cultural practices in shaping mate choice. Generally, it is reasonable to suggest that different cultures may place a greater emphasis on one aspect involved in mate choice than, say, another culture. For instance, is appears Czech high school students rate body odours (or at least the samples used) more positively than did US university students (ibid). Conversely, US university students tend to be more visually oriented in mate-choice contexts (ibid).

Modern cultural practices impinge on the relative influence of olfaction in both direct and indirect ways. Contemporary western societies use perfumes and deodorants are generally seen as methods of disguising body odour (Bhutto, 2007), which is arguably a conscious (direct) attempt to influence olfaction. However, as mentioned earlier, a study by Milinski & Wedekind (2001) found a significant correlation between HLA and scent scoring of perfumes/aftershaves for themselves (but importantly, not for others); suggesting people select perfumes on the basis of their pleasantness (conscious) and to enhance their own body odours (unconscious).

Contraceptives are another example of a cultural practice that may indirectly influence olfaction and mate choice. When compared to women with normal menstrual cycles, women using hormonal contraceptives are on average more likely to prefer the odours of MHC-similar men (Wedekind and Füri, 1997). Additional studies investigating the impact of contraceptives on mate preferences and sexual behaviour (Jones et al., 2005) support the assertions of the MHC-related findings, suggesting “[…] that pill use could change behavior towards that normally characteristic of pregnancy” (Havlicek & Roberts, 2008, pg. 12).

Differences between social structures and cultures at the population level may also account for various findings across studies into mate choice. MHC studies, for example, are often performed in western population – and in these instances, spouses tend to support the findings from odour studies, in that their respective MHCs are generally dissimilar (Raphaëlle Chaix et al., 2008; but see Graver-Apgar et al., 2006). In contrast, a study into African (Yoruba) populations show no correlation between MHC and spouses (Raphaëlle Chaix et al., 2008). Actually, the significant find Raphaëlle Chaix et al reported for Africans was that spouses tended to show genome-wide similarity. The authors suggest this observation is because Yoruban spouses are more constrained by their population structure (e.g. social hierarchies) than are Europeans (ibid).

In examining the biology and evolution of olfaction, we know olfactory communication in animals is capable of advertising an individual’s identity and their potential mate quality – all of which is honest in its presentation (Johansson & Jones, 2007). As for humans, our ability to detect and produce pheromones is gathering an ever-increasing amount of evidence (see, Grammer, 2005), but whether these abilities translate into having a practical effect on sexual behaviour and mate choice is for future studies to elucidate upon.

Despite the short-comings of our current knowledge, there are hints as to where the field is going. For instance, one challenge will be to discern the role of MHC in mate choice, which is surely on the horizon given the increasing capabilities of genetic sequencing technologies (Havlicek & Roberts, 2008). A related strand of investigation involves the potential for molecular, genetic, behavioural biology and psychological disciplines to offer a multi-discipline approach in linking together the various layers involved in olfactory communication.

If there is one clear conclusion to take away from this review, then it is this: the notion of humans being primarily optical creatures is no longer tenable.

Main References
Bhutta, M. (2007). Sex and the nose: human pheromonal responses Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 100 (6), 268-274 DOI: 10.1258/jrsm.100.6.268

Havlicek, J., & Roberts, S. (2009). MHC-correlated mate choice in humans: A review Psychoneuroendocrinology, 34 (4), 497-512 DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2008.10.007

Where I walk in the mornings...

Home. Burlington and UVM feel like home now. I thought it’d take another few months, but no.  On the bus ride back on Monday, everything—the bus system, the campus, the sunflowers along my route home, the bustle of the library, the innumerable hours of studying–felt, well, normal. Like I’d been here for ages. And I love it!

***

This week marked the end of our two-week course Intro to Clinical Decision Making, which meant that we had the exam portion of our final on Friday. So the classes were a little lighter to give us more time to study. 

For our MSLG class on Tuesday, we were each asked to bring a photo of our family. The weather was gorgeous—not too hot, but not cool either—so Dr. Feldman, my group’s coordinator, took us outside to sit on the green and share our pictures. That was lovely. Some of us brought framed photos. Some of us brought wallet photos or albums that they/we carry with us all the time. And some of us, of course, showed photos from Facebook.

(I confess that I’m afraid of writing the next three paragraphs, because I can envision a lot of nasty, thoughtless or illiterate comments generated at their very topics, but I simply must write them. Note that I am not expressing my personal views, but articulating what we discussed.) 

Then we discussed two papers we were asked to read for this week. One was an AMA position paper articulating that if a same-sex couple adopts a child, both should be allowed to be co-parents. (Currently, only one is allowed to be the parent.) The other was a Newsweek opinion piece about the problems with saying people of certain races are prone to certain diseases.

Race, we were taught, is merely a social construct with no biological basis. Populations are a different story. But if we classified people based off of the populations they were a part of, how many different classifications would we have? Too many, it seems. These points were reiterated on Wednesday, when we watched a film which went over the history of the eugenics movement and discussed the scientific basis for similarity.

This has to do with mitochondrial DNA, a form of DNA that can only be transmitted from the mother. So if you compared your mitochondrial DNA with someone else’s, could you get a sense of where you came from? One of the memorable scenes in the film had a Caucasian teenager analyze his mitochondrial DNA and learn he was most similar to people both in the Balkans and in a part of Africa. (If I am misremembering that, please correct me). Furthermore, when another African American teenager compared his mitochondrial DNA to the others in his class, he found he was most similar to one of his Caucasian classmates instead of the other African American in the group. 

(Ok. Out of the hotbed.)

Our other classes were on birth defects, non-Mendelian genetics, the state of genetics at the moment, and behaving professionally as a doctor and as a student.

***

Now about that exam. We had it on Friday morning, scheduled from 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM. We were assured that most students only took an hour and a half to complete it.

So we get to the exam. About an hour and twenty minutes into the exam, one student exits the room. I finish at the hour and thirty minute mark, but decide to spend time carefully double-checking everything. At this point, one other student leaves the exam room. The two hour mark rolls around, and about five students leave the room. Two hour and thirty minutes, and about twenty students had left the room.

Needless to say, people felt the exam was hard. A few were even talking about getting wasted afterward. And it was only noon! I’m confident we all did well.

I go home and try to get a Vermont driver’s license and register my vehicle. After a lot of running around, neither of those things happened. But I now know what I’ll need so I can get them next time.

 ***

Highlight of the Week: Sherlock Holmes Meets the CDC

On Wednesday, we read a scientific paper about a bacteria outbreak in a hospital. The researchers used a case-control study and the methods we’d learned about—stratification, multivariate statistical analysis— to narrow down a list of suspects and find the person who was almost certainly responsible for the outbreak. (Once he left, no new infections arose.)

To paraphrase one of my fellow students, it was like solving a mystery, but in a scientific paper! Whatdayaknow, sometimes what you think is work is actually play.

Here’s some stuff I’ve been reading over the last month or so:

• Babel’s Dawn discusses Michael Arbib’s paper, Invention and Community in the Emergence of Language: Insights from New Sign Languages.
• Over at Neurophilosophy there is an overview of a fascinating paper on the Universal Grammar of birdsong (also check out my comment, it’s the first one under JW).
• John Hawks talks about some of my favourite topics: learning, population size, and modern human behaviour.
• The recent resurgence of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Lera Boroditsky are the topics of discussion over at Mind Hacks.
• Deric Bownds’ MindBlog mentions the “origins of altruism toward one’s own social group and the emergence of cultural complexity“.
• Evolution can occur in less than 10 years… In guppy fish.
• Researchers at Brown find: “A front portion of the brain that handles tasks like decision-making also helps decipher different phonetic sounds“.
• And lastly, Dienekes’ anthropology blog discusses a paper that investigates the role of drift and selection in the shaping of human skulls, concluding “that neutral processes have been much more important than climate in shaping the human cranium”.

Okay, so that brings you up to date with my reading from May through to July. Next round up will cover August. How fascinating :-/

The debate concerning the origin of our minds stems back to the diverging opinions of Darwin (1871) and Wallace (1870). When Charles Darwin first discussed the evolution of our seemingly unique cognitive faculties, he proposed that there is “no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” (Darwin, 1871, pg. 66). Conversely, Wallace was suspicious of whether natural selection alone could have shaped the human mind, writing:  “[...] that the same law which appears to have sufficed for the development of animals, has been alone the cause of man’s superior mental nature, [...] will, I have no doubt, be overruled and explained away. But I venture to think they will nevertheless maintain their ground, and that they can only be met by the discovery of new facts or new laws, of a nature very different from any yet known to us.” In the intervening years, the debate surrounding the degree of continuity between animal and human minds still rages on in contemporary discussions (Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009; Penn, Holyoak & Povinelli, 2009).

The notion that we can identify a sequence of adaptations accounting for the evolution of minds in animals stems from research into social cognition, particularly surrounding Premack & Woodruff’s (1978) concept of a Theory of Mind. Not only has this research focused on species closely related to humans, such as chimpanzees, but it also touches upon cognition in birds, dogs, fish and many other animals (Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009). This approach frequently elicits interesting findings, and in some instances suggests applying a strictly evolutionary approach to cognition may not yield the most relevant results (Topál, in press).

Another major stepping stone is found in approaches to the emergence of human cognition. Pioneering insights by the likes of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1997) have certainly shaped the direction of research, with them suggesting our mind is massively modular and evolved as a direct result of selective pressures during the Stone Age. As we shall see, this approach is not only very difficult to investigate, but potentially it ignores other explanations for shaping our cognition that argues our mind may be better adapted to contemporary society than previously thought (Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009).

Lodged in-between these explanations are possible solutions and potential directions for future research, particularly in the realms of comparative social cognition (Emery & Clayton, 2009) and models linking genes, neurobiology and social behaviour (Robinson, Fernald & Clayton, 2008).

Adaptive Minds: Genes, Neurobiology, and Social Behaviour

Even though there are differing degrees of behavioural complexity across various animal domains, can a sequence of adaptations be established? Although challenging, Robinson, Fernald & Clayton (2008) provide a useful organisational heuristic outlining two vectors of influence for understanding social behaviour in the context of genes and neurobiology: “Vector 1 describes how social information leads to changes in brain gene expression, brain function, and social behaviour, and Vector 2 describes how genetic variation between individuals leads to variation in social behaviour.” (pg. 896).

Highly relevant to social behaviour influencing brain gene expression is a gene known as egr1 (ibid). Found to play a role in many social species, including zebra finch (Mello, 2005), cichlid fish (Burmeister, Jarvis & Fernald, 2005) and prarie voles (Donaldson & Young, 2008), egr1 is a transcription factor-encoding gene that remains responsive throughout the lifetime of an organism (Robinson, Fernald & Clayton, 2008). In male zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), for example, “[…] the singing of another male bird induces egr1 expression in a specific subregion of the auditory forebrain devoted to hearing.” (ibid, pg. 896).

Offering an even more relevant example for the role of genes in social animals are cichlid fish (Astatotilapia burtoni), where dominance hierarchies govern most social interactions (ibid). Here, rank is determined through both male competitive fighting and observations of these fights, suggesting these fish are capable of transitive inference (Grosenick, Clement & Fernald, 2007). When an alpha male is no longer part of the group of which he is dominant, a subordinate male will begin to display dominant-like behaviour. Interesting, the onset of this behaviour results in changes in body colouration, triggering egr1, “[…] specifically in the hypothalamic anterior preoptic area in neurons containing gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), a peptide critical for reproduction.” (Robinson, Fernald & Clayton, 2008, pg. 897).

The relevance of GnRH in cichlid fish is that dominants are biologically more fertile than subordinates, and therefore enjoy a greater reproductive success (ibid). Furthermore, egr1 is just one of many genes known to be expressed due to changes in behaviour, which in itself is caused through the wider context of social information (ibid). As Robinson et al. (2008) state, “[…] it is now clear that responses to social stimuli can be massive, involving hundreds or thousands of genes and perhaps many different brain regions at once.” (pg. 897).

"Complex relationships connect genes, the brain, and social behavior. These relationships operate over three time scales: (i) physiological time via effects on brain activity (solid lines), (ii) developmental time via slower effects on brain development and genome modification (dotted lines), and (iii) evolutionary time via the processes of natural selection (dashed line). Arrow colors refer to Figs. 2 and 3 (pink, Fig. 2; blue, Fig. 3), which provide details about the nature of these interactions. Images depict some of the animals and genes featured in this review, clockwise from top: zebra finch (T. guttata), cichlid fish (A. burtoni), honey bee (A. mellifera), fruit fly (D. melanogaster), prairie vole (M. ochrogaster), rat (R. norvegicus), and fire ant (S. invicta)." (pg. 897)

Other social influences include heritable epigenetic effects, adding to the complexity of potential influences on brain gene expression (ibid). Maternal behaviour in rats is one such instance, where licking and grooming “[…] regulate the development of endocrine, emotional and cognitive responses to stress.” (Champagne et al., 2003, pg. 329). In addition, these effects of social information must also account for individual genetic variation, which can also lead to differences in the social behaviour and cognitive functioning within a group or species (Robinson, Fernald & Clayton, 2008).

As already mentioned, the second vector accounts for what is essentially the reverse situation, where genes influence the behaviour of a particular species. A prominent case is that of foxp2, a regulatory gene that is implicated in numerous social roles across vertebrates (ibid), including human speech (Enard et al., 2002), song learning/production in zebra finch (Haesler et al., 2007), echolocation in bats (Li et al., 2007), and more broadly, sensory-motor coordination (ibid). According to Robinson et al. (2008), accounting for the link between genes like foxp2 and social behaviours is understood through an evolutionary approach: “Through selection, genes may evolve according to their effects on a social behavior, even if their mechanistic roles in the neural expression of that behavior are subtle and indirect.” (pg. 899).

Humans: Modern skulls, stone age minds?

Although significant advances in understanding animal cognition have been made in the last few decades, there is still considerable debate over the capabilities animals possess. Looking at animal competencies appears to reveal they are mostly restricted to a single goal, in contrast to the numerous goals subserved by human cognition (Premack, 2007). Even if there is not an apparent continuity between human and animal minds, both behaviourally and biologically (ibid), it is highly relevant to consider the selective processes underlying the development of our human minds.

Under the assumption of some researchers (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997; Pinker, 2002), our minds are very much like organs, in that they consist of a collection of functionally specialised circuitry. Like our hearts and livers, which evolved to pump blood and detoxify blood respectively (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997), our brain contains neural circuitry specialised for a whole host of specific processes, including but not limited to vision, hearing, and sexual attraction (ibid). One set of dedicated circuitry is often known as a module (ibid).

Indeed, there is little argument over the minds of humans and animals being separated into distinct processing pathways and regions for aspects like vision and hearing (Skoyles, 2009). However, the debate gets more controversial when cognitive functions formerly believed to be underpinned by general purpose processing, such as learning, reasoning, and decision making, are argued to be of a modular basis (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997). As these arguments are made under an evolutionary adaptive framework, our modules are “[…] calibrated to the environments in which they evolved, and they embody information about the stably recurring properties of these ancestral worlds.” (ibid, principle 4).

If natural selection is the driving process behind shaping our brain, then the circuitry which evolved on the human lineage is not adapted to our modern environment, rather it is evolved for a small and nomadic hunter-gather society (ibid). This reasoning is on the basis of natural selection being conventionally thought of as a slow process, taking tens of thousands of years to make even the smallest of changes (ibid). Our species has only developed agriculture in the last 10,000 years, with most of our hunter-gather pre-history consuming approximately 99% of humanity’s time on the planet (ibid). In the words of Stephen Jay Gould, “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” (Cochran & Harpending, 2009, pg. 1).

The proposition of humans having modern skulls that house a Stone Age mind (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997) has been thoroughly explored in the past two decades, with adaptive modules being attributed to numerous forms of processing (Adolphs, 2009). Face processing (Kanwisher & Yovel, 2006), kinship perception (Lieberman et al., 2007), and cheat-detection (Trivers, 1971; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992) are all cases where these modules are evolutionary adapted to process social information (Adolphs, 2009). Another recent proposal suggests that common sets of specialisations, sometimes known as supermodules, exist to deal with broader sets of related behaviours (Penn et al., 2008), such as language (Clark, 2006) and Theory of Mind (Brüne & Brüne-Cohrs, 2005).

Despite the strong case for modular processing, the contentious issue surrounding whether or not cognition is shaped by natural selection (Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009) allows for a relatively specific question to be asked: are modules evolutionary adaptive responses to ancestral environments?

First, the commonly held assumption of adaptive responses taking a long time to emerge is not necessarily correct for the human lineage. In a paper by Hawks et al. (2007) they demonstrate how vastly increasing populations over the past 50,000 years have led to significantly more new adaptive mutations. Looking at the HapMap datasets, the group argue recent selection has occurred at an increasing rate during recent history, stating: “To the extent that new adaptive alleles continued to reflect demographic growth, the Neolithic and later periods would have experienced a rate of adaptive evolution more than 100 times higher than characterized [by] most of human evolution.” (ibid, pg. 3).

Although demography is paramount in driving adaptive evolution, human populations were interacting with cultural and ecological changes (ibid). Some recent evolutionary changes include: skeleton morphology (Larsen, 1995), skin pigmentation (Ding et al., 2002), and disease resistance (Wang et al., 2006) among many others. Also, counter to Gould’s assertion of no biological change taking place in the last 50,000 years (see above), the authors claim some of the most radical adaptations emerged subsequent to the inception of agriculture (Hawks et al., 2007). For instance, selection on the lactase gene is the result of selective pressures from recent subsistence and dietary changes (Bersaglieri et al., 2004).

Of course, all of these examples of recent adaptive evolution are unrelated to cognition. There are examples of cognition-related genes believed to be undergoing natural selection (Sabeti et al., 2006; but see Fuli Yu et al., 2007), such as the derived haplotypes of ASPM and microcephalin (Dediu, 2008). More recently, a mutated version of a gene (DAB1) involved in organising brain cells, particularly those found in areas that utilise higher cognitive functions, appears to have undergone selection in Chinese populations (Williamson, 2007). Still, we know little about the role of these intensely studied genes, and by extension their adaptive advantage remains elusive.

Even if populations are still adapting, this may bolster the case for adaptive modules to modern social pressures. One possible case is the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), a brain specialisation that is “[…] essential to rapid reading ability because it enhances perception of words by becoming specifically tuned to recurring properties of a writing system.” (McCandliss et al., 2003, pg. 293). Like arguments for adaptive modular face processing in the Fusiform Face Area (see Adolphs, 2009), the same logic can be extended and applied to the VWFA. As McCandliss and colleagues (2003) note, this finding “[…] poses a challenge for evolutionary accounts involving innate mechanisms for functional brain organization.” (pg. 293).

Accounting for the existence of the VWFA, and cognitive modules in general, may instead be more rooted in developmental than evolutionary explanations (Skoyles, 2009; Bolhuis & Wynne, 2009). Bolhuis & Wynne (2009), for example, argue the gene-constructivist approach adopted by the likes of Cosmides & Tooby (1997) overlooks cultural processes in shaping complex cognition. Supporting this notion are discoveries concerning the role of neuro plasticity (cf. Skoyles, 2009), which “[…] refers to the capacity of neural circuits to shift from one information processing operation to another to which it may, or may not, be related but to which it is distinct” (ibid, pg. 8).

Still, an amnesty between Darwin’s and Wallace’s views may be reachable: humans minds cannot be accounted for solely by biological evolution, but rather they are the products of biological and cultural evolution. However, expanding on this notion must wait until the next post in this series.

Major References

Robinson, G., Fernald, R., & Clayton, D. (2008). Genes and Social Behavior Science, 322 (5903), 896-900 DOI: 10.1126/science.1159277

Hawks, J., Wang, E., Cochran, G., Harpending, H., & Moyzis, R. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (52), 20753-20758 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707650104

Bolhuis, J., & Wynne, C. (2009). Can evolution explain how minds work? Nature, 458 (7240), 832-833 DOI: 10.1038/458832a

John Skoyles (2009). The paleoanthropological implications of neural plasticity CogPrints: http://cogprints.org/6357/

The world needs the help of all communities as it is a dying planet. Like a child it needs nurturance, respect and engagement to bring about all that would preserve and protect all that remains. It would be in the minority of individuals who do not realise the fragile state of its ecosystems. For the last twenty years many environmental scientists in Australia have warned and published the consequences the ozone layer depletion.  Obviously, the world’s population and leaders made nothing of it as remedial efforts were not embarked on. Wars continued to be waged with serious budgets, trees felled with impunity to line the pockets of many from Asia to the Americas, oceans and reefs were abused to points of no return and species of all known genera slaughtered without conscience, boosted by local poverty and international demands.

Like the multitude of environmental publications the author provides timely revelations of the current impact of businesses and local communities throughout the world. The unseen growing world environmental movement continues to call on all to join in the effort to turn the world away from wars, climatic catastrophes and environmental disasters by only contributing a portion of their time and resources. Each organisation need not provide their maximum effort but merely join in solving for pattern. Individuals most importantly, can never do too much to protect the environment.  The list of indigenous people deprived of their basic rights on their lands and access to their traditional lifestyles is astounding. As are the organisations connected in one way or another to the socially damaging activities affecting the lives of the natives. In more ways than one, native people worldwide have fallen victim and unfairly paid the price that come with much touted national progress and economic prosperity including pollution, prostitution, diseases and crime.  Direct environmental pollution issues often ignore or miss the cumulative costs sustained by individuals who accomodate areas adjacent to environmental catastrophes or gradual environmental despoliations. 

Businesses used to hiding behind the facade of value adding to the economy can no longer evade the issue of external costs inflicted on communities for generations and may be on the verge of joining the movement to be labelled as eco-intelligent.  Markets compete for financial capital on unfair grounds and resources are allocated without proper feedback except marginalization of inefficient investment activities. Natural and social capital are ignored. Citizen empowerment and consumer pressure combined with market regulating laws are badly needed to provide a voice for the localized poor, primary forests and ecosystems. Many economists today demand services and schools for the poor, workers’ rights protection, land reforms, less regressive taxes and promotion of small businesses to achieve the goals of equitable development worldwide. Economic integration even the World Bank and IMF are given lead roles need to emphasize the needs of the poor, middle class, owners and landless.

WTO needs to reconcile its goal of business and growth protection with indigenous cultures, self determination and democracy. It needs to understand objections to its subsumation are actually calls for globalization from below. Corporations cannot hope to extend themselves by merely focusing on capital growth in the long run without searching for balance for communities and cultures. As corporations tighten their grips on governments and economies, the loss of community and culture could spell the earlier demise of civilization when fast changes sweep away forever identities.  The time frame of governance is also ignored by WTO. As evident in the fates of failed business giants, Enron, Tyco, Unocal and Worldcom, businesses without proper governance will result in criminal perversity of all unimaginable proportions destroying not only investments and savings but stressing existing resources. Markets as tools must be able to cushion the impact of exploding population demands on pressured ecosystems.

In response to my post on individuals, Ian Bogost writes:

Perhaps I’m being naive, but I’m not sure the concept of the replicator is even necessary? Can’t the relations between type and instance, or instance and instance remain, or not, and still be explained via the same approach to relation that one would adopt for relations between yogurt tub and spoon, or alligator and television camera? It seems that there is a strong philosophical (as well as rhetorical) reason to avoid special cases.

An object like “soccer mom” is an object produced through what we might call “memesis” rather than “mimesis.” But once extent in a particular context, can’t its existence can remain flat without trouble? Again, perhaps I’m being dense here.

Incidentally, one of the reasons I use the word “unit” is because it avoids this whole business of explaining away the difference between real and incorporeal objects.

In a similar vein, Asher Kay writes:

LS – I understand now, but I’m not sure I agree. Mathematically, an identity could be viewed as referring to the same individual, so that saying “A=A” would be the same thing as saying “Bruno Latour = Bruno Latour”. This practice introduces some conceptual difficulties, but the formal systems still work fine.

On the other hand, the entities being identified could be seen as conceptual generalizations of the same sort as “soccer mom”. When I say “1″ mathematically, I could be referring only to a property that has no object attached to it. Cognitively, our minds are built to subtract out aspects of things just like we add things when we stick a horn on a horse to make a unicorn.

This is the area of OOO’s realism that is most difficult for me to grasp. Mathematics is a conceptual domain – meaning that it is restricted to certain obscure and dark corners of the material world. OOO seems to speak of concepts (including mathematical ones) as having the same sort of reality as what we’d call “physical objects”. I agree with this, but really only insofar as concepts are physical objects that happen to be very confusing to perceive.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t see how mathematics is any more special ontologically than soccer moms.

I’m still working through these issues myself, so I don’t have any hard and fast position as of yet. I suppose one way of articulating what I’m trying to get at is by contrasting the position I’m experimenting with with that of Plato’s. In Plato, when speaking of things like numbers it’s necessary to distinguish three things. On the one hand there is the number itself. For example, there is the number “2″. On the other hand, there are inscriptions or signs standing for the number itself such as an inscription of the number 2 on a piece of paper, in the sand, on a neon sign, in a computer, in a speech-act, or in someone’s thought while doing mathematics. Finally there are things that are counted by the number itself. For example, I have two cats. Someone can eat two french fries. A group can celebrate two days a year. And so on. Drawing on Peirce’s triadic notion of the sign, we can thus distinguish between the sign-vehicle or number as inscribed on a piece of paper or as spoken in speech, the “interpretant” of the sign which is roughly analogous to Saussure’s signified and which in this case would be the number 2 itself, and finally the semiotic-object which is roughly analogous to the referent of the sign and which, in this case, would be the counted.

read on!

The number itself, the inscription of the number, and the counted, under this Platonic model, differ from one another. For the Platonist, there is only one number 2 in the entire universe and this number 2 is eternal and unchanging. Suppose all countable objects, whether physical or imagined, ceased to exist. The number 2 itself would still exist exactly as it is. Moreover, even if there were no one to inscribe the number 2 on a piece of paper or think about the number two, the number 2 would still be the number two. In short, the number 2 is neither what it counts, nor is the number 2 identical to its inscription. On the one hand, the number two differs from what it counts in that the things that the number two counts differ from one another. I can count two kiwis or two knives. The two kiwis differ from one another, just as the two knives differ from one another. Moreover, the kiwis and knives differ from one another. Were the number two identical to what it counts, then the number two would cease to be identical to itself and would therefore cease to be the number two. On the other hand, if the number two differs from its inscription, then this is because no two inscriptions of the number two are alike and, moreover, we can write the number two as “2″, “II”, “ii”, “zwei”, and so on while still remaining the same number two.

While one need not be a Platonist about signs or numbers, signs are nonetheless generally treated as having this threefold character. The “interpretant” of a sign is treated as a type like “the number 2 itself”, that is distinguished from the sign-vehicle or “representamen” through which the sign is thought, conveyed in writing or speech or zeros and ones, and finally we have the semiotic-object which is roughly the referent of the sign.

In experimenting with the idea of treating signs as replicators, I am basically pushing signs in the direction of a reduction to sign-vehicles and semiotic-objects, getting rid of the interpretant that treats the signs as a type over and above instances of the sign. I am having a great deal of difficulty articulating this hypothesis, so hopefully others will bear with me as I try to pin down what I have in mind. Reference to evolutionary theory helps to give a sense of just what I’m trying to get at. Despite the fact that evolutionary theory is a theory of speciation, it paradoxically does away with the category of species. Where prior to evolutionary theory– and I’m generalizing here –the species was treated as a type analogous to the number 2 discussed above, with evolutionary theory types of this sort disappear and are instead replaced by replicators.

What we have after evolutionary theory is instead organisms that have the capacity to replicate themselves individually either asexually or sexually, producing other individuals. Each replication differs slightly from the organisms of which it is a replicant. There is no eternal species or type standing above and indifferent to the individual organisms. Rather, what modern biologists call a “species” is, 1) a set of statistical similarities between individual organisms, and 2) a population located geographically in time and space. This second point, especially, is a substantial departure from the prior way of understanding the relationship between individual organisms and species. Under the prior model the species was outside of time and space and independent of the world and organisms. Under the post-evolutionary thought, species names a population composed of heterogeneous individuals that are more or less similar to one another and which is geographically located in time and space. When Gould refers to species as individuals, his thesis is entirely different from that of Plato. It is not that the species is always identical to itself in the way that the 2 itself is always identical to itself, rather it is that there is a real population composed of heterogeneous individuals there in the world. Gould’s point is that selection takes place not only at the level of individual organisms or at the level of genes, but that selection can take place at the level of species as well. For example, there can be a natural disaster that wipes out a species. Under the Platonic model, this sort of selection is not possible. Even if all individual organisms of a species cease to exist, under the Platonic model the species itself continues to exist just as the number 2 itself continues to exist regardless of whether anyone is about to think it and regardless of whether or not there are any physical entities to be counted.

When I propose to treat signs as replicators and individuals, it is something akin to this evolutionary model that I have in mind. First, what I am suggesting is that there is no type over and above instances of a sign in the world. Just as there is no species over and above individual organisms, but just individual organisms, there would here only be individual signs. Second, just as organisms replicate themselves by producing other organisms either asexually or sexually, signs proliferate through the world by being replicated or copied. Signs under this model would be closer to descendants of a lineage more or less resembling instances that came before, than tokens of a type. Just as organisms are one type of object, signs would be another sort of object.

At this point my brain fizzles out and I’m not sure where to go. To be quite honest, I find this way of thinking about signs, concepts, etc., rather horrifying and monstrous, but nonetheless I think it hits on something important with respect to questions of ethics as well as social and political thought. Because we often think of signs as types that stand for something else, we are content with establishing the truth of some proposition or grounding some ethical or political order. But if signs are like organisms in the sense that they must be replicated and in the sense that they are situated in time and space, then this is not nearly enough. It is not enough simply to have the right ideas or sound ethical principles. The rubber really hits the road with respect to the question of how signs, like organisms, replicate themselves or get themselves copied. Why is it that some signs circulate far and wide like viruses that suddenly appear everywhere? Why is it that other signs, while being really great ideas, are as rare as highly adapted underwater cave organisms that exist only in the underground systems beneath Death Valley?

When these questions are raised, the focus of inquiry shifts. It is no longer simply an issue of establishing the truth of a proposition or the rightness of an ethical judgment, though this activity certainly isn’t excluded. But now the question shifts to the dynamics of replication, how it takes place, what mechanisms increase the likelihood of replication, and what strategies can be devised both to diminish the replication of certain sign-complexes and introduce the replication of other sign-complexes. Badiou seems to understand this point well. When Badiou speaks of truth-procedures and subjects of truth, what he appears to have in mind are subjects that seed the social world with certain sign-complexes, gradually undermining the existing structure of signs and introducing a new semiotic regime or organization. Surprisingly, given Badiou’s hostility to sociologists of all sorts, Latour seems to understand this point as well. When Latour analyzes the new rhetoric invented by the scientist Boyle and the way in which he turned nonhuman objects into actors through his air pump, the emphasis is not so much on the experiment itself and how it allegedly demonstrated that space is a void, but rather on the replication of the experiment through the testimony of “respected gentlemen” and the repetition of the experiment as a sort of party game throughout Europe. The truth of the experimental findings is not enough, but rather it must be replicated throughout the world, creating an army of allies that testify to his observations.

This sort of replication takes place in every social assemblage from moment to moment and with the birth of every new child that must become a carrier for certain sign-relations. It is also among the mechanisms through which social assemblages are made to change. Finally, these strange objects enter into assemblages with all sorts of non-semiotic objects that both influence the success of certain sign-complexes and which influence these non-semiotic objects. For example, it is likely that the common appearance of sign-complexes surrounding vegetarianism in India and certain Asian countries has a lot to do with the manner in which much of the land was used for the production of rice. Rice, by virtue of its ability to yield multiple harvests a year and the ability to feed many more people than wheat. Additionally, as a result of aquatic farming techniques that constantly brought water in to fertilize the soil, there was far less need to cultivate the highlands and the mountains with livestock to produce manure for fertilizer. Where rice functioned as the staple food, the likelihood of sign-complexes surrounding vegetarianism rises. The point here is not that rice determines the presence of this sign-complex, but rather that non-semiotic objects like rice exist in an assemblage or imbroglio with certain semiotic complexes that increases the likelihood of the appearance of certain sign-complexes.

In developing onticology or object-oriented ontology, one of the things I’ve been aiming at is what I call, following DeLanda, though developed in a different way, a flat ontology. A flat ontology is, to use a term my good friend Jerry the Anthropologist recently shared with me, a lumpy ontology. In referring to such an ontology as “lumpy”, I intend an ontology that is composed of a heterogeneity of different entities. As such, heterogenesis is one of the central questions of onticology. Heterogenesis is the question of how the disparate, the heterogeneous, enters into relations or imbroglios with one another to form a collective and a common. These imbroglios or collectives can be thought as logoi. Rather than a single logos for the world, we instead get islands of logoi where the organization governing these imbroglios are emergent results of ongoing heterogenesis.

The idea of a flat ontology can be fruitfully understood in contrast to materialisms. Where materialism posits a single type of entity– whatever that type might be –out of which all other entities are composed, a flat ontology is pluralistic, positing an infinite variety of different types of entities. Flat ontology does not reject the existence of material entities like quarks, atoms, and trees, but merely asserts that these aren’t the only types of entities that exist. Consequently, when onticology claims that “to be is to be an object”, this thesis is not equivalent to claiming that “to be is to be material”. A city is an object. Indeed, it is an object that contains a variety of other objects and that depends on a variety of other objects both in terms of its own endo-relational structure and its exo-relations to things outside its membrane. Nonetheless, were we to take an inventory of all the material objects included in the city we would not have the “city-ness of the city”. For all intents and purposes, nearly all the matter composing New Orleans remained after Hurricane Katrina, but it was a very different city after this event and its continued existence still remains in doubt.

read on!

Onticology thus opens up a domain where it becomes possible to speak of material objects without reducing them to relations in a correlate between mind and world, and in this way departs from the various idealisms that predominate during the last century. It rejects anything like the notion of a “fundamental ontology” as understood by Heidegger where humans are placed at the center of being or where any object is implicitly understood as being correlated with some variant of the human in the form of history, tradition, language, signs, social forces, economy, mind, or whatever else one might like to put on the human side of the correlation. Ontology is not the investigation of being qua human, nor being qua language, society, history, social forces, and so on. Ontology is the investigation of being qua being. Humans, language, societies, history, social forces, signs, power, and all the rest are counted within being, but are not at the center of being and posses no privileged or exemplary place within being such that all ontological questioning must first proceed on the basis of this relation.

Instead, what we get in a flat ontology are imbroglios of objects on a flat plane where objects vie with one another in a variety of ways. Where a vertical ontology might treat the human as something that is, as it were, outside the world by virtue of a special transcendence that marks its discontinuity with nature, flat ontology sees humans as caught in imbroglios with other objects that never cease to surprise us and such that we are unable to determine where our agency beings or ends or whether agency comes from nonhuman objects or from ourselves. The factory, for example, is not simply the result of mute matter formed in the image of the engineers mind for social purposes like producing aircraft for war, but is itself a nonhuman object that introduces unanticipated agencies and affordances into the world far afield from the intentions of its designers. During WWII the factory is designed to produce aircraft, tanks, and a variety of other devices of war, but as women come to operate the factory as gears in the war machine, the factory also becomes a site of emancipation, introducing a new set of social relations that pave the way for the women’s movement in the next two decades. Climate change owes a great deal to the emission of greenhouse gases, but it mobilizes a set of objects or actors that are nonhuman, that generate new storm and weather patterns, that wreck havoc on farming and fishing, the unleash new and strange microbes, and so on.

These are imbroglios, where humans and nonhumans are bound up with one another in complex networks without any particular actor or object standing above the rest. And this, in the end, is what immanence or flat ontology means: a single world characterized by imbroglios, where no actor or object stands outside the others. Perhaps there are gods and spirits, but if there are then they do not stand apart from being or outside of the world, but are caught in imbroglios like all other objects. Like the strange gods of Epicurus and Lucretius, the gods would here exist but are constrained in their ability to act in the same way as any other entity. Zeus too would need an Archemedian lever to move the world.

In my own work with object-oriented ontology I have been particularly keen to reconceptualize social and cultural theory in terms of onticology. Philosophical movements have a bad habit of going too far in the opposite direction, throwing out the valuable insights of previous traditions in their zeal to correct the excesses of these traditions. The last century was characterized by profound advances in our understanding of social phenomena. These advances should not be thrown out. However, what is required is a reformulation of social phenomena in terms consistent with onticology.

Just as all other objects find themselves caught up in imbroglios with other objects, this requires first that signs, for example, are caught up in imbroglios with non-semiotic objects rather than circulating throughout the world in a smooth space without resistance or encounters with density. If I have been attracted to the concept of memes, then this is because the concept of memes approaches this dimension of imbroglios with respect to signs. Many of us played the game of “telephone” in grade school. In the game of telephone one person whispers a message in the ear of the person next to them, which the next person then whispers to the person next to them. By the time the message gets to the end of the line it has been thoroughly transformed. What the concept of meme captures so nicely in a way too often overlooked by semiotic and hermeneutic approaches is the transmission of messages through a medium and the manner in which the medium (the technology of transmission), as McLuhan observed, transforms the message. Just as it is impossible to use a cell phone in those regions of the planet– say Antarctica –where there are no cell phone towers, the semiotic domain of the social is dependent on all sorts of mechanisms of transmission and exchange. Often the hermeneutic disciplines overlook the manner in which signs must be propagated to function. More importantly, the hermeneutic disciplines often end up working with idealizations of signs– signs carefully purified and distilled by the researcher, distinguished from noise –thereby losing attentiveness to the manner in which signs vary and change in being transmitted.

On the other hand, if signs are to be rendered consistent with onticology, then it follows that they too must be treated as objects or actors. A sign is not simply about something. Indeed, it is worth asking, as strange as it might sound, whether signs represent anything at all. Signs are not simply about something, but are something. They are actors or objects in their own right. Take the category of “Soccer Moms” that appeared as a crucial voting block during the 2004 United States presidential elections. Suddenly every on the news we began hearing about the political concerns of soccer moms and nascar dads.

A naive epistemological reading would treat the categories of “soccer mom” and “nascar dad” as representations of mothers that have children that play soccer and fathers that go to soccer games. Onticology has a rather different perspective. “Soccer Mom” and “Nascar Dad” (note the square quotes) are not representations of populations consisting of mothers who have children that play soccer and fathers that attend nascar events, but are objects in their own right. To put this point somewhat differently, a huge number of women who have children that play soccer have existed for quite some time. These women were and are all actors. However, in the 2004 election a new actor appeared on the scene: Soccer Moms. The category of Soccer Moms is a different actor than all these mothers that have children that play soccer. It is a distinct actor or object in its own right. If this “meme” is a distinct category, then this is because it is suddenly an entity that suddenly the media, politicians, and even those mothers who have children that play soccer must contend with. Where mothers that have children that play soccer are a multiplicity of different actors, “Soccer Mom” is a unified actor that “blackboxes” this multiplicity.

How, then, are we to understand the relationship between the multiplicity of mothers that have children that play soccer and this new entity, “The Soccer Mom”. Here it becomes necessary to rethink the relationship of representation. Rather than treating a statistical category of “The Soccer Mom” as a sign that represents something for someone, instead we should think of the phenomenon of representation in political terms. In this connection, my thesis is that the phenomenon of political representation potentially reveals more about how signs function than the model of epistemological representation. Where epistemological representation raises the question of adequation between the representation and the represented, political representation raises the question of how it is possible for one person’s or group’s (the represented) to speak through another (the representative).

The merit of the category of political representation is that it preserves the sense in which both the represented and the representative are distinct actors. In other words, ontological reality is granted to both sides of the relation, such that there can be struggle and conflict between the represented and the representative. In this respect, the representative can have aims and functions very different from that of his representated. From the standpoint of the represented the aim is to capture the voice of the representative for their own aims. Since the category of the represented is itself heterogeneous composed of a variety of different competing actors, there is struggle among the represented as well. Likewise, the representative often acts on behalf of aims different from those that he represents, as can be discerned with those politicians that belong to the political group known as The Family. In order for the representative to successfully execute his aims, he must enlist the consent of the represented, he must convince them that he actually represents them, even when he is operating in a clandestine fashion at odds with their aims.

The situation is very similar in the case of signs. The sign is an actor in its own right that can take on a life of its own quite different from that which it purports to represent. The search for the Fountain of Youth can mobilize an entire army of other actors even though it refers to something that it doesn’t exist. The category of The Soccer Mom enlists the consent of mothers that have children that play soccer either through their silence in relation to the category or through their identification with the category. In other words, paradoxically, where the category presents itself as a representation of mothers that have children that play soccer, mothers that have children that play soccer can begin to form themselves in the image of The Soccer Mom through an identification with this category. Likewise, other mothers that have children that play soccer can contest the legitimacy of this new actor, decrying it as a spurious generalization or seeking to enlist it for their own ends. Thus, during the 2004 election, The Soccer Mom was generally presented as a group of women primarily concerned with issues pertaining to national security, terrorism, family values, and so on. In other words, the category was tailor fit to a rightwing agenda. In contesting The Soccer Mom, we can imagine groups of women getting together on the internet to form a group called “Soccer Mom’s for John Kerry”. In moments like this we encounter a disparity among actors or the fact that there are different actors at work in the relation between signs and what they purport to represent.

It will be objected that while the onticological theory of the sign– only outlined here –works well for reflexive signs pertaining to humans that can take up a stance with respect to the sign that purports to represent them, it makes no sense to speak of signs seeking to enlist other actors in the case of natural objects and nonhuman actors. What sense, one will object, does it make to suggest that quantum mechanics must enlist nonhuman actors to secure its position as a representative given that nonhuman actors are indifferent to the signs that we might affix them with. But even in the case of particle theory it is necessary to enlist other actors to establish the solidity of the sign. Just look at the debates surrounding grand unified theories (GUTs) in quantum mechanics. Entire armies of actors in the form of scientists, materials, engineers, and particles are currently being enlisted in the case of the Haldron Super-Collider to determine whether or not the Higgs Boson particle responsible for gravity actually exists. Will this represented actually speak when called upon? We do not yet know. If it does not, the strength of the “standard theory” will have been diminished as it will have been unable to establish the alliance it needs in order to establish itself as a legitimate representative. Like groups of the represented in social life that are always clamoring and filled with diverse voices, nature too is a rumble with all sorts of dissident voices at odds with its purported representatives.

Lately I have been rereading Stuart Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe as my bedtime reading which perhaps accounts for why I have been unable to sleep and am nearly psychotically tired as it is a rich book full of all sorts of fascinating ideas that keep me tossing and turning as my mind spins. Dealing specifically with issues of self-organization, Kauffman’s work strives to theorize the conditions under which we get self-sustaining and organized matter such as we see in the case of living systems. A number of his claims are generalizable to a wide variety of phenomena beyond cells and organisms. Similar principles, for example, would apply to ecosystems, economy, social systems, brain organization and so on. And indeed, Kauffman approaches organization at a high level of abstraction, focusing on self-sustaining or autocatalytic chemical processes while also providing a wealth of formalizations that refer to no specific material substrate in particular. I have made no secret of the fact that I am generally hostile to relational ontologies that reduce objects to their relations. While objects certainly enter into relations, onticology begins from the premise that objects are independent of their relations and can pass out of and enter into new relations. Thus, for example, while being sympathetic to the Saussurean conception of language as a system, onticology nonetheless refuses the thesis that anything is its relations. In short, onticology begins with the hypothesis that being is atomistic or composed of discrete, autonomous, and independent objects that can pass in and out of relations. Yes, there are systems or forms of organization, but these forms of organization are assemblages of objects that enter into certain relationships with one another.

The consequence of this thesis is that one of the central issues for onticology becomes the problem of entropy. Roughly, entropy is a tendency of systems to move from states of higher organization to states of lower degrees of organization, or, alternatively, to move from states of non-equilibrium to equilibrium. The video below illustrates this idea nicely:

At the beginning, the system is in a state of non-equilibrium in the sense that all of the particles are concentrated in a particular region of the chamber. With the passage of time– a mere ten seconds –the particles wander throughout the chamber such that you have an equal probability of finding particles in any particular region of the chamber. The big question for onticology then becomes if being is composed of discrete and autonomous objects, then how is it that certain objects form assemblages that resist this increase in entropy, instead maintaining an organized state across time? A while back I suggested that this is how we should pose questions about the nature of society. There the question was that of how it is that humans bodies just don’t fly off in entropic ways, but instead enter into organized relations that sustain themselves across time. Of course, in order for any system to maintain itself in an organized way work is required. No system maintains itself without work. So the real issue lies in discovering the sort of work through which this organization is re-produced across time. This really gets to one of the central problems with French inflected structuralism and Luhmannian systems theory. Both identify the organization of a social system, how it is put together and how its elements are related, but they remain at the level of social physiology, giving only the skeleton of social systems or how the “bones are put together”. What they don’t give us is the work by which this physiology is maintained. They tell us that these systems somehow resist entropy, but not how. Given that many of us are interested, above all, in the question of how change is possible, the issue of how a social system resists entropy becomes a crucial strategic issue for political engagement. However, even if one is not interested in these political questions of change, the question remains fascinating on its own terms.

read on!

Kauffman provides some interesting tools for thinking about how networks both arise and resist entropy. In a simple thought experiment he asks us to imagine buttons– say twenty –spread out across a table top. Begin attaching two buttons at a time to one another using bits of thread. At a certain point we find that a critical threshold is reached where if we lift one button, most of the other buttons come up as well. This threshold or phase transition is represented in the graph to the right. What we have here is the beginning of an interdependent system, where the elements composing the system, come to rely upon one another in a specific way. The system, as it were, has become “negentropic” or an assemblage. At around the fifty percent mark we see that there is a sharp rise in connectivity among the elements, such that probability random distributions decreases dramatically.

The full force of this thesis does not hit home very strongly in the case of buttons and threads, in that buttons and threads are very static things. Instead of fixed and static buttons, imagine that the buttons are processes– not unlike Leibniz’s famous monads and Whitehead’s “actual occasions” –and that processes are also occurring among these buttons as depicted in the image to the left. In a diagram not unlike those we find in mathematical category theory– no surprise here –we find a particularly clear example of such a system in the relationship between buttons nine and ten. On the one hand we have what the category theorists call “identity arrows” which consists of the curved arrow that points away from button 1 and then back to itself. This refers to the manner in which an object maintains itself across time. For example, in the case of a cell it would refer to the manner in which it maintains a particular organization or pattern of activity despite the fact that the matter that composes it is constantly changing. For living things, just as for signs, there’s a very real sense in which the being of the thing is incorporeal as it is the pattern that persists, not the matter. This is perhaps true even of non-living matter in that at the atomic level electrons and whatnot are constantly being exchanged. In the relationship between buttons nine and ten we notice arrows pointing to one another. This indicates the manner in which the two objects have come to depend on one another to sustain themselves. Thus ten draws on nine to maintain its identity or pattern across time and nine draws on ten in order to maintain its pattern or identity across time. Buttons one through eight depict a far more complex network of relationships where the relationship of dependence is more round-about. Interestingly the identity arrows do not appear for each button in this network, suggesting that the elements aren’t maintaining a patterned identity across time.

The point is that in entering into these relations a phase transition takes place in which the elements come to form a system, assemblage, or organization where the elements are dependent on one another to maintain a particular mode of existence. All of this is highly abstract, but it is readily applicable in a wide variety of different domains. The relationship between buttons nine and ten, for example, could be taken to illustrate Lacan’s understanding of dual imaginary relations between two subjects– a bad therapist and an unfortunate patient –where both subjects maintain a rigid and fixed imaginary identity, enter into antagonistic relations with one another, and draw on this antagonism as a way of perpetuating that particular specular identity. Alternatively, the relation between buttons nine and ten could be taken to represent the relationship between the South Side and North Side of Chicago where we have a fairly strict economic, ethnic, and class differentiation, but where each side of this relation depends on the other to maintain it: The North Side requiring the South Side to produce its goods, do its data entry, clean its bathrooms, and so on, the South Side requiring the flow of wages that come from the North Side. Yet again, buttons nine and ten could be treated as a highly formal diagram of what Bateson called “schismogenesis“, which we witness so often here in the theory blogosophere.

The complex network depicted in the relations among buttons one through eight could be taken as anything from the relations of interdependence in an ecosystem, to the interplay between warm water flows and cold water flows in the ocean “conveyor belts” that regulate weather patterns, to relations of production or infrastructure, superstructure, and economy in various social systems. Indeed, I am fairly convinced that Marx was engaging in a sort of “actor-network” analysis of social systems where we get an interplay between these various elements in the organization of a particular social system. All of this begs for a rewriting of the later books of Plato’s Republic, where he outlines the different types of social organization in contrast to the Republic, along the lines of network interdependencies and how they produce various forms of social organization. This would be a sort of “transcendental sociology” examining the “diagrams” of various network forms in such a way that influxes of energy (environmental conditions, food sources, energy sources) were analyzed in relation to communication networks (media of communication, roads, and so on) and the role they play in emergent distributions of human bodies.

The key point, however, is that when “buttons” enter into relations of dependency such as this, they become negentropic or resistant to interventions that disrupt these tendencies. Not unlike the emergent patterns in the Game of Life, you get, as it were, systems that can only evolve diachronically according to the synchronous relations of interdependence through which the elements of the social system reproduce themselves across time. The question then becomes that of how you introduce entropy into entropy-resistant systems to produce change. As Aleatorist likes to say, sometimes you have to shut down the highways for a protest to work.