The End of Gene-Culture Evolution and What it Means for Education

http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/stories/culture-the-newest-evolutionary-force

        E. O. Wilson’s Consilience offers sweeping, large-scale reflections on the stuff of human nature and the importance of both scientific and metaphorical thinking. It aims to reconcile the sciences and the humanities, and this broader goal deserves thoughtful reflection, but I am presently transfixed by one particular passage in his chapter on gene-culture coevolution.
        In it, Wilson argues that our genes predispose us to certain cultural behaviors, but that cultural behavior also creates social norms which then select for specific genes. In this way, nature and nurture participate in an ongoing discourse.
        But this ongoing discourse gets tricky when culture begins to accelerate, when technology (starting with agricultural tools, farming, etc...) enables swift growth of civilizations. The speed of genetics is notoriously slow; except in moments of mass convulsions (plague, planetary catastrophe, etc.), it requires centuries to select for certain genes. The result, therefore, when culture accelerates is a growing gap between our cultural behavior and our genetic disposition. We may believe that we have genetically advanced beyond our “less civilized” ancestors, but Wilson would say that this is a mistake. He describes this in this way:

The swiftness of cultural evolution in historic times may by itself seem to imply that humanity has slipped its genetic instructions, or somehow suppressed them. But that is an illusion... For most of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens and its antecedent species... cultural evolution was slow enough to remain tightly coupled to genetic evolution. Both culture and the genes underlying human nature were probably genetically fit throughout that time... There was time enough, as one millennium passed into another, for the genes and epigenetic rules to evolve in concert with culture. By Upper Paleolithic times, however, from about 40,000 to 10,000 years before the present, the tempo of cultural evolution quickened. During the ensuing Neolithic agricultural advance, the pace accelerated dramatically. According to the theory of population genetics, most of the change was far too fast to be tracked closely by genetic evolution. But there is no evidence that the Paleolithic genes simply disappeared during this “creative revolution.” They stayed in place and continued to prescribe the foundational rules of human nature. If they could not keep up with culture, neither could culture expunge them. For better of worse, they carried human nature into the chaos of modern history. (182)

        This affirms some thoughts I’d had a number of years ago, but it also has some dramatic implications for the role and importance of education.
        If our genetic evolution is not aligned with our present culture, then our present culture must nurture and select behaviors that enable our present culture to accelerate and grow stably and responsibly. There are two places where our present culture is well-suited to nurture and select sustainable behaviors: school and family. And this signals the importance of education.
        How can we reconcile our genetic dispositions with the seduction of contemporary culture? The question addresses the intersection between biological impulses, social norms and pressures, and individual values. If, as Wilson proposes, our biological impulses (our genetic evolution) are not in sync with our social norms and pressures, then our individual values and behaviors must sustainably moderate between them.
        Whether this means we need a moral component to our educational system, or whether an educational program that includes critical awareness, self-control and foresight provides the essential skills to discern and develop a healthy, social-morally balanced culture, I don’t have a definitive answer, but I tend towards the latter.

        This is all heady stuff, and a thorough entry would include exploration of a number of other related points: healthy and happy families as another source for learning sustainable values, further exploration into what makes up a moral education, and, of course, some examples to make all of this a little more concrete. Until then: Wow--take a look at E. O. Wilson’s Consilience.

Laughing Out Loud

        Our IM/text message abbreviations (lol, rofl, etc...) and our emoticons ( :) :o ;P etc.) reflect the artificiality of synchronous textual communication. Maybe artificiality is too strong a word. Maybe remoteness is accurate enough, even if it doesn’t capture the effects of the physical separation: the lack of visual cues, intonation, chemical sensitivity and exchange. These are the real sacrifice.
        Absent the physical and chemical signals of intention and pleasure, we use abbreviations and smileys to share a little of the missing human element in our digital communication, a little of what makes our text conversations more than a Turing test. But my realization is that these signals that we send are often inaccurate. How often are we actually laughing out loud when we write “lol”? Or rolling on the floor laughing? How often are we physically smiling when we type the pervasive colon-parentheses? More often, we send these as cues so that the person on the other end of the message can better understand us. We, more likely, are sitting before a screen or standing with thumbs dancing across a phone.
        But this robs us of the physical experience that goes along with a funny conversation, or a serious one, or a sad one, etc. In the physical presence of conversation partners, we might actually laugh, or frown, or wink, or even roll on the floor laughing. Without this physical act, our emotional experiences are disconnected from our physical lives. Facebook posts and pictures, text messages and chat windows, all trigger the chemical floods that make up our emotional feeling, but, sedentary before a keyboard and screen or paused somewhere with thumbs skating across our phones, we process our lives increasingly in our brain alone.
        Is this good or bad? Who can say? The manifestation of emotion in physical act seems to be an enlarging, cathartic experience. It is how we process that chemical rush, the endorphins, the serotonin, or epinephrine, etc. Our physical acts--our smiles, our laughs, our crying, our leaping in excitement--they increase our activity, they cause the physical circulation and processing of the chemicals that drive our feeling, they move us forward into new states of mind, processing and moving on from the old. Diminishing this part of our human experience seems costly on a fundamental level.
        But this is not a diatribe against technology-aided connectedness. The gains of digital communication far outweigh the losses. But what seems important to me is that we try to recoup those losses. It seems important to me that we allow ourselves the freedom to actually laugh out loud when we’re by ourselves or online, to jump when we’re excited, to frown if we’re sad, or simply to go for a walk after or while we’re communicating. Keeping movement attached to feeling seems an essential element not only of a healthy body, but also a healthy mind.
        This might make us feel a little self-conscious: our laughing voices echoing in our apartments or rooms, our dancing when no one is watching, our frowns of disappointment. Our awareness of these solitary actions might make us feel oddly, physically alone. But maybe remembering that isn’t such a bad thing.

The Death of the Desktop?

        When the iPad was first released, I asked a friend how it stored files. So new was iOS, with its scrolling pages of apps, and so ingrained was the concept of a desktop, with its windows and file icons, that the idea that files could be stored within the apps themselves took some getting used to.
        Suddenly, it seemed to me, the death of the desktop was nigh.
        No more documents strewn across that backdrop picture of your family or best friends. No more leftover .dmg or .dll files scattered like the junk surrounding a construction site. Suddenly the user interface seemed so clean. We can’t be trusted, it seems, to keep our digital offices in order.
        But no, I thought, we rely too much on our desktops to change them. We need them as creative spaces. They’re where we have room to spread out, to lay out our messes so we can mash and mix them up. Can our creativity survive in cursor-less, un-arrangeable spaces?

        Now, several years and a major operating system upgrade later, we have Apple’s Lion. And, lo and behold, when we pinch our three fingers with our thumbs, up pops LaunchPad, that familiar gridded screen of Apps. And I wonder now: is this the integration of the desktop and iOS? Or, is this the beginning of a shift, a shift from the desktop playpen that we have known for three decades to the personal computer operating system of the future: an adapted iOS?
        Steve Jobs and Apple are notorious for knowing what we need--and what we don’t need--before we do. We disbelieved the absence of the 3.5 inch drive when the iMac was shipped with only a CD tray. We started again when the MacBook Air shipped with only wifi and USB ports. (We even bought the Superdrive to be safe, expecting we’d need it, only to return it, still in its shrinkwrap, days later.)
        Is an inaccessible desktop the next fast one?

        I visited a Mac help forum once to find out how I could retrieve a feature that had been removed in the Lion upgrade. At the bottom of the comment thread--after an array of helpful solutions--the last comment noted, as if in summary: “If Steve Jobs thinks you don’t need the feature, you probably don’t.”
        Now, only several weeks later, I can’t even remember the feature I was looking for.

        And so, do we need our desktops? Or will we look back and wonder why they lasted so long? Is this the writing on the wall for their demise? The race is already on to make browsers the new desktop--they run “web apps” after all. Is a clean, local, scrolling app list all we really need to connect our desktop machines to our cloud-based lives?

        Or, really, is this just the warm-up for something a little further down the line: the total integration of touch, voice, and three-dimensional projection--a user interface that connects our desktops made of atoms to our information made of bytes?

A Timeline of Musical and Literary Forms

        Part of the course of study for becoming a music major at Middlebury College, when I was a student there, was a year long sequence of music history courses. It began with plainchant, in which multiple voices sing in unison (imagine the monks in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and early forms of musical notation. It moved through the development of Baroque, Classical, and Romantic music. It carried us all the way through twentieth century experimentation in the classical world, but also into jazz and other modern genres.
        In the development of music over time, we learned about evolutions in harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, and theory. We saw how the larger forms of music--the genres--changed, but also how the mechanics of music changed. The history of music became one complex narrative in which individual pieces became indicative of an unfolding web of styles. The strict rules of Baroque music (think of the formality of Bach) gave way over time to increasing melodic indulgence in the Classical and Romantic periods. Harmonies thickened and got messy. The rules of early order relented until, in some cases, jazz seemed to hold sway even in the classical paradigm. But the mid-20th century composers sought to reclaim music from entropy’s grasp; they played mathematical games and applied new rules for the purpose of experimentation.
        Each period responded to the previous, growing in complexity, swinging the pendulum further or backwards, driven by technologies (the piano, the phonograph, the electric guitar) and theories (tonality, tone rows). By the end, I remember having an understanding of the difference between a Baroque melody and a modern melody, between classical harmonies and jazz harmonies, between march rhythms and funk rhythms. I could place most pieces in time by hearing not only an excerpt of a piece, but even one part of a piece, one instrument, or one voice--even played on a different instrument.

        I wonder if the same can be done in language? Could I distinguish a sentence from a 19th century novel and a sentence from a 21st? Could I identify an unfamiliar sentence by a writer simply by looking at the way it’s put together?
        What are the grammatical rules or patterns that define the 16th century? The 17th century? the 20th century? What are the stylistic decisions that dominate each era? What was the evolution in form? Could I draw a map of the essential elements of literature for the past 500 years? Does it start defined by poetry and the essay? Does the evolution grow through styles at first, moving through prose and fiction? Then does grammar loosen in language just as harmony did in music? Does literature’s cutting and pasting of random passages correspond in development to music’s mechanical tone patterning?
        What would a visualization of this look like? Could I create a timeline in which “thee” and “thy” enter and exit the popular lexicon? When did popular writing shift from verse to prose? Was the birth of the novel contemporary with the birth of the symphony? What about sentence structure? Is Hemingway/DeLillo minimalism similar to Phillip Glass or Steve Reich? And what about non-fiction? In what ways is a sentence by Bacon or Galileo distinguishable from a sentence by E. O. Wilson or Carl Sagan?
        Anybody out there have the time or inclination? A visual history of literature in English would be a fascinating resource.

Executive Summary of Walter Isaacson's "Steve Jobs"

Executive summary of Isaacson's "Steve Jobs":

- Remove everything that is unnecessary.

- Be ruthless about building an A team.

- Make stuff you believe in.

- Collaborate often through vigorous discussion.

- Push yourself and others to do the impossible now.

- Make great experiences by simplifying.

- Own your work and protect it.

- Live at intersection of intellect and intuition.

But read the book. In the same way that you understand a proverb much more after you've had a life a experience that demonstrates it, these will mean much, much more when you see them in the context of Steve Jobs' life.

Plus, you'll also discover Jobs' equally as compelling character traits: from his idealism to his irascibility.

How to Sell Teachers on the iPad

        I love the iPad, but I don’t have one, and I (and most other teachers—English teachers in particular) won’t use one in class until it, or any other tablet, has three characteristics:
        First, it must be able to lie flat on the table—which the iPad does. Traditional laptops in classes are nightmares of distraction and unproductivity. The vertical screen is a wall behind which adolescents are helpless victims to their attentions and social impulses. It is the same screen through which for hours they chat with friends and browse pictures and profiles. The temptation is too great. For the sake of transparency of attention, which is different from control, the tablet must be able to lie flat on the table, like binders, folders, and spiral notebooks.
        Second, it must have a stylus. I know, I know--Steve Jobs famously said, "If you have to use a stylus on a tablet, you've already lost." But hear me out: While the iPad offers a wonderful tactile experience, the tip of the finger isn’t precise enough for annotation, for underlining, circling, drawing exclamation marks, writing questions or comments, or simply scribbling down a thought… or a scribble. A stylus allows teachers and students not only to annotate ebook texts, but also to annotate student writing—which leads to number three.
        Third, the tablet must allow handwriting in word processing documents. With a stylus, I can do what I currently do: handwrite in-text notes and then type up my final comment. Handwriting in documents provides two things: first, it provides ease. Though I’m a keyboard shortcut aficionado, keystrokes and comments can’t match the ease of circling a sentence and drawing a line to an adjacent paragraph, or of drawing a squiggly underline underneath a phrase and writing a comment over it. Perhaps Apple will outdo my imagination on this, but I don’t believe that the tip of a finger will be able to match the precision of the point of a pen.
        Further, while the stylus may be anathema to the iPad, I think that it, at least in the context of technology in the classroom, reclaims some of what technology has chased out of the classroom: humanity. Fonts and track changes can’t communicate like a simple check mark over a phrase or paragraph, like the smile or exclamation mark drawn in the margin, like the bracketing of a whole paragraph, or like the vigorously underlined word. (How would you vigorously underline something in Pages or Word? Double underline? Increase the thickness? Try it out...) Education will always require a human touch, and in the area of texts and textbooks (which the iPad will likely replace), and in the area of documents in particular, humanity means handwriting, however messy it may be.

Review: The Gift of Stones

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/6896?shelf=read

Waiting for Applause

        When Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin walked on stage at the start of a production of “Waiting for Godot” by the Roundabout Theatre Company, the crowd burst into applause. Later, when John Goodman and John Glover entered as the comic duo Pozzo and Lucky, the crowd similarly gushed. But when Matthew Schechter, the boy playing the aptly named role of Boy, entered, the crowd watched silently.
        I suspect the crowd didn't know what to do, and so it listened.
        “Waiting for Godot,” like other mid-century plays by Becket and others, is frustratingly untethered to what we know. Dialog is intellectual trackwork for a train that has left recognizable human experiences somewhere offstage. Familiarity has disappeared. It is nearly impossible, therefore, to make sense of the play in one sitting, and so, to engage the crowd, the actors must entertain.
        The result is that drama dies behind the disappearing chug of intellectual experimentation; acting turns to camp, and the play becomes a parade. Poignancy mostly vanishes, and we mostly fail to recognize the helplessness of Estragon and Vladimir’s situation because Gogo and Didi are flailing around so much—and isn’t Nathan Lane so funny when he makes that wounded pouty face?
        In my memory, Lane, Irwin, Goodman, and Glover risked no emotional vulnerability in their roles. They were alternately loud, caustic, risible, lonely, cowed, selfish, voluble, mocking, and more—and their performances offered easy recognition instead of depth. Even the loneliness, most of the time, seemed to evoke chuckles rather than sympathy. This makes for good fun, surely--and I enjoyed watching--but it misses the point of the play. It makes parody of satire.
        And so, we were taken for a joy ride. We give ourselves to the actors, because they are stars and we love them, and they make us laugh, even if we never completely understand their wandering and bickering. It reminds me of a passage from Don DeLillo’s 1992 novel “Mao II” in which Yasser Arafat meets with the press and public:

There was a film crew and some men who looked like government officials and fifty or sixty people just passing by and Scott went over there and saw a man on the top step who wore a khaki field jacket and checkered headscarf, a short guy with a scratchy beard, and it was Yasir Arafat and he was waving at the people on the sidewalk. When a hotel guest came out the door, Arafat smiled and nodded and people in the crowd smiled in response. Then Arafat said something to an official and the man laughed and everyone on the sidewalk smiled some more. Scott realized he was smiling broadly. He could feel the smile stretching across his face and he looked at the people around him and they looked back smiling and it was clearly agreed they all felt good together. And Arafat smiled again, talking to officials, overgesturing for the camera, pointing toward the entrance and then moving that way. Everyone applauded now. Someone shook Arafat’s hand and there was more applause. He lets a stranger shake his hand. Scott smiled and applauded, he saw the men on the steps applaud. When Arafat went inside, the people on the sidewalk smiled and clapped one last time. They wanted to make him happy.

The audience at “Waiting for Godot” was predisposed to enjoy the four main actors. Perhaps, like the crowd above, we even sought to please the performers. We cheered at the actors' arrival, laughed easily at their prancing, and swelled at their curtain calls.
        The boy, however, received no such treatment, and yet his performance generated the most genuine drama of the show—even if it was drama of different kind. The crowd hushed when he spoke. We craned our necks to see and hear him. Young as he was, the boy might have forgotten a line or grown anxious before the crowd. His small voice seemed a whisper next to Goodman’s booming baritone and Lane’s piercing tenor. We held our breath as he tread onstage next to the stars of our day, and we smiled for him when he departed without having missed a beat. Then we leaned back into our seats, our pulses returning to normal, and we waited for the next crack of Pozzo’s whip or whimper from poor old Didi so we could cheer the great figures performing a work whose title we still mispronounce and whose subject matter may be ripe for study but whose production, in order for it to be engaging, breezed over the very stuff that makes it rich.

Going Green

Heading back to places
Where folks hold you in good graces
And countryside of green
Keeps your lungs and spirit clean
Beats living in a town
Where the walls and weather keep you down.

On Helicopter Tours

        Don’t let network fear squads keep you down: helicopter tours are safe and fun!
        As part of an Adieu-to-New York City weekend back in June, I took a tour with Liberty Helicopters (yes, the same company involved in the midair collision), and it was spectacular. From liftoff (the transition from being drawn down by gravity to being borne up by suction) to cruising (gently vibrating around Manhattan—1,000 feet in the air!) to sharp turning (centrifugal force and non-horizontal horizons) to landing (the mundane return to friction-filled footfalls), the experience was enlightening.
        I only wish I had taken the camera away from my eyes and simply enjoyed the sensation a little more. As it was, I took many pictures. Here is a brief pictorial tour:

Liftoff!

Non-horizontal horizons

Cruising over downtown/Wall Street

Cruising past the 20s

A view through Times Square

George Washington Bridge and all points North

Yankee Stadiums, old and new

George Washington Bridge and all points West

Lady Liberty through the ceiling window of a heavily banking helicopter

Governors Island and Lower Manhattan, on the return to landing

Bartlett Falls

(photo source: http://www.northeastwaterfalls.com/)

        Just outside of Bristol, VT, the New Haven River has carved out a stone pool as clean as any quarry. The result is a perfect swimming hole. In college, we knew it as Bristol Falls, and it sports a fifteen-foot waterfall and several dozen cliff-jumping points. Earlier this summer, my wife and I visited, leapt from various heights, swam in the frigid (but crystal clear) waters, and settled on a rock atop the falls for a picnic lunch.
        By the time we had put down the macaroni salad, several dozen young local visitors had arrived and begun launching themselves from every horizontal surface surrounding the falls. They leapt from the twenty foot high ledge just next to the rushing cascade, they threw themselves from the ridges on either side of the swimming hole, they did back flips and swan dives, some climbed to a point at least forty feet above the water and, with running leaps, cast themselves into the air, splashing down full seconds after jumping.


        Populated primarily by boys ranging in age from five to the early twenties, the swimming hole offered a glimpse of growing up in rural Vermont. There was the group of devil-may-care senior boys who brazenly vaulted from any ledge at any speed and in any direction—frontwards or backwards. They took physically demanding leaps and executed them with deliberateness and sometimes, to our surprise, with a grace and choreography that suggested an appreciation of the beauty in a jump. Once, four of them performed simultaneous backward swan dives from four different points.
        There were also the freshmen-looking boys, just into their adolescence, exploring and assessing the different jumping points. They conferred with each other before leaping, sharing jokes to offset their awkwardness and sometimes cautiously talking themselves down off of ledges that the seniors, while affecting an air of nonchalance, seemed to pirouette from quite seriously.


        There were also the girls, anxiously stopping and starting, giggling and shrieking, looking for support from their friends and attention from their peers. They huddled together and then took off bravely, one by one.
        There were the overweight boys, too, three or four in number. They interacted little with the others. They swam more in the water and jumped occasionally, but more often they worked their way behind the falls and dove in, bobbing under the crashing cascade to resurface a few feet past the foam. A younger one with goggles like a carpenter’s mask sat in pools on one side, splashing around, watching the jumpers, clapping and encouraging anyone who felt intimidated by the height.


        Slightly further away, families coerced their young, single-digit aged children to leap from precipices low and high. Little boys with swimming trunks nearly half their own height catapulted themselves fearfully at first and then with vigor later on. Some parents jumped in as well, including an older man with spandex shoes, and a larger woman who took a handful of leaps from one side.
        The groups interacted little with each other, but there remained a safe, communal feel to the place. Divers from every point seemed aware of who was in the water where and when. Swimmers communicated between groups about imminent dives. Boys and girls waited patiently while one or another debated hurling him or herself from a ledge. Some shouted kind encouragement. Everyone stopped to watch and applaud particularly bold leaps. No one was rushed or jeered.
        I imagine this to be typical of hot days in Addison County: find the nearest swimming hole, test the limits of your bravery, and admire the daring of others. Every time we gaped at the launching point of the next jumper and shook our heads, we would say to each other, "No way!" and the leaper, likely as interested in the attention as the art, would catch our eyes and say, crisply and with a confident grin, "Oh yeah"--then fly over the falls like a leaf catching the breeze before floating downstream.

There and Back Again

• New York City (four years), New England Boarding School
• The Jury Box (two and a half weeks), Working Life
• The Altar (perfect day!), The Home
• New Brunswick and Nova Scotia (two weeks), The US of A
• Truck Rental Companies (250+ miles), Snowball
• Pullouts and Couches (two months), Our Own Abode
• Blog Absenteeism (too long), Blogger

Wedding Planning

Oy. It's been over a month. It may be over another month until the next one. I'm in full wedding planning mode... apologies for the radio silence!

Review: Better

http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6896