The Biological Spandrel

In 1979, Stephen J. Gould and Richard C. Lewontin saw a growing problem in the field of biology. To combat and bring attention to the problem they saw they co-authored the paper entitled, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" which is now a classic and somewhat controversial paper in the field of biology.  Gould points out in I Have Landed that, that paper is his second most referenced paper behind only his paper with Eldredge on punctuated equilibrium.

The problem Gould and Lewontin saw was that every part of an animal's anatomy was being broken up and explained as having an evolutionary purpose. The tyrannosaur's small arms were to help it get up from sleeping and the female hyena's masculinized genitalia created aggressive/larger hyena. Those types of explanations typified the attitudes of much of the scientific community, which could be described as being extremely adaptationist. Each piece or feature of an animal was broken up and weighed; if something existed it existed for a Darwinian reason. The animal as a collective whole was never thought about.  Noses were created to hold glasses and ears to fit earplugs.

Yet, no matter how ideal the reconstruction of the purpose is, it remains a narrative created to explain something that doesn't always have such a simple, fitting, or, most importantly, purposeful explanation. There are numerous reasons why a feature of an animal might be the way it currently is and being a positive adaptation for increased fitness is only one of those reasons.

Lewontin and Gould point this out by way of the dome in St. Marks Cathedral in Venice, and by picking out this non-biological example they have created a platonic form for what a  perfect spandrel is, more perfect and clean than any biological example could be.  It is perfect because the dome was created, as many other domes were, with the four arches holding it up and the spandrels existing between those arches. Only years after construction did the spandrels get put to use and thus become meaningful/functional in themselves.

The architectural spandrel, in this instance, is a space created only because it was necessary as part of the gap between the arch and the dome. More generally they refer to an architectural constraint that is not part of the design, but instead a by-product of what is necessary from the design. Gould and Lewontin give the example also of a set of stairs with the bi-product or spandrel being space between the steps.

The example works beautifully with the biological idea, because something that can start out as a by-product of something else can still later develop an important function as happened in San Marco. This makes it clear that an adaptive narrative isn't the only way to explain how something came to be, even something that now has an important function.

A good example of this happening is the famous domestication of the Silver Fox in Russia. The only feature that was selected for in those foxes was tameness. This made tameness the adaptive feature being selected for and all other traits that changed with it would be spandrels, or features that just happened to be by-products of the result of one thing being selected for. These changes included the fox's becoming spotted, coming into heat every 6 months and becoming more 'dog-like.'

This seems to show the existence of spandrels as pretty clear-cut, but the most interesting part of spandrels may be hidden in an article written later by Gould, "The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype." Near the end of that article, Gould makes the open-ended statement that,


"The human brain may have reached its current size by ordinary adaptive processes keyed to specific benefits of more complex mentalities for our hunter-gatherer ancestors on the African savannahs. But the implicit spandrels in an organ of such complexity must exceed the overt functional reasons for its origin. (Just consider the obvious analogy to much less powerful computers. I may buy my home computer only for word processing and keeping the family spread sheet, but the machine, by virtue of its requisite internal complexity, can also perform computational tasks exceeding by orders of magnitude the items of my original intentions—the primary adaptations, if you will—in purchasing the device)."               

It seems that as a brain becomes more powerful, it does a more than just what is required for base evolutionary fitness. The examples of those types of spandrels have been argued to include everything from music or even language. I think an interesting area to apply the idea of a spandrel to ethics; the things people feel passionately are right and wrong, but for what reason? It could also fill in a lot of gaps in what is ethical, but can't be evolutionarily accounted for and that is what my thesis is on, so you can look forward to quite a few more posts on this topic in the future.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

3 Stories from Nature: Don't look to Nature for Morality

Well, I think that my last post was the most widely read post that I've written to date, so to capitalize on that momentum I've waited a few weeks and made sure the previous interest has waned.  Now it is often said that humanity shows a truly unique notion of cruelty and evil; this is true. There is no animal equivalent to holocaust or genocide, and animals aren't able to possess  the 'guilty mind' that makes up part of a crime, yet the roots, even of such 'unnatural' behavior, can be been from the acts of different animals.

At this point a brief disclaimer is necessary, because despite what I just said in the previous sentence some people may accuse me of anthropomorphism. I am of the opinion that American Law got it right when they expressed that an animal cannot be charged with a crime, for the reason I stated above. The quick brown fox that jumps over the lazy dog to kill a mouse isn't doing so out of malice.

This leads many people to say that animals kill only out of necessity, and don't show anything that would be described at immoral behavior. These beliefs are like that of the noble savage that lives at one with nature and other people, they exist only in a romantic dream, not in reality. Nature is not where morality can be found like a rare fruit in the upper branches of a tree, it is where the roots of both moral and immoral acts can be seen.

Story 1 - The Necrophiliac Mallard

Natural law proclaims that things have a purpose and should only be used for that expressed purpose. This is the foundation for calling homosexual acts 'unnatural'. Now it has been shown that this unnatural act happens in many different types of animals, making humans no special case, but that's not really interesting and doesn't really have the feeling that comes with an act that is considered immoral behavior.  However, there is one case that I know of that does.

In 2001, the first case was described of homosexual necrophilia in Mallard Ducks. In June of 1995, there was a loud bang. The sound was that of a duck crashing into a window, but when C.W. Moeliker went to see what it was he saw two ducks not one. Next to the dead duck that had just crashed into the window was a male duck and from the title of this first story there will be no prizes for guessing what happened next.

"He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head."

C.W. then watch as the rape continued for 75 minutes, with two short breaks. It was only broken up when C.W. approached to within 5 meters of the ducks and even then the other male didn't fly away, but walked a few meters away.

This may sound like a unheard of event, but 2-19% of ducks are in homosexual couples and there have been descriptions of heterosexual necrophilia in ducks, so while it may seem too strange to be true, it's really just a matter of probability that the two actions be observed together eventually.

That said, clearly even depraved sexual actions take place in nature and animals don't live in the the heterosexual harmony that most assume. The birds might wait until the bees get stunned and fly over to mate with them in their death....bringing a whole different meaning to the birds and the bees.  

Story 2 - A Killer on the Loose

In the Essay, "The Horn of Triton" Stephen J. Gould reflects on the power of different individuals to change the history of a local population by way of two rather chilling stories from the animal kingdom.

The first killers were two Chimpanzees from Jane Goodall's studies named Passion and her Daughter Pom.  In 1975 Passion began to kill and eat newborn babies of the other females in her band, but she could not easily steal the babies from their mothers watch, but Passion didn't have to work alone. Pom would work with Passion to steal, kill (biting the infants through the skull), and eat the infants of other community members.

This immoral act was seen by observes three times, and may have happened an additional 7 times, as over a four year period only one mother was able to keep her offspring safe.

This again isn't an isolated event, our closest animal relatives may be more inclined to kill that Gould and Goodall first though as new descriptions of this type of occurrence have been detailed since then.  Live Science has an article that describes infanticidal attacks by female chumpanzee's.  It describes an event where,

"Alerted to the killings by sounds of chimpanzee screams, last year Townsend and his colleagues directly witnessed one infanticide, where a bleeding mother with a one-week-old child in tow was pursued by six females, five of which had clinging infants themselves. After a 10-minute struggle, the infant was taken and killed with a bite."

They also found evidence for two more killings of this type as dead chimpanzee infants were found with bite marks in the skull.

These killings don't happen out of necessity, or defense, they are murders on community members and while done without the knowledge of being a crime are enough to show that the term murder wouldn't be completely out of context within nature.




Story 3 - Dog Days of Summer

The second story from "The Horn of Triton" essay by Stephen J. Gould takes place in New Zealand where Micheal Taborsky was studying brown kiwi's. The kiwi's had a population of 800-1000 members and Micheal had managed to tag 24 birds with radio transmitters.

August the 24, a dead female kiwi with a radio transmitter was found dead, and by September 27, over half of the tagged birds had been killed. The birds were mostly found burred and missing feathers in different areas. 10 other birds without transmitters were found the say way, running the death toll up to 23.

The culprit of this culling was not a new migrant species or even a group of animals. It was a single German shepherd. Distinctive footprints were found along with dog droppings of a single type and size, and on September 30th that single female German shepherd was shot and the killings abruptly stopped.

Now 23 birds may not seem like a big deal, but the sample is skewed, for there is no reason to think that the birds with transmitters were special. The percentage of there deaths probably provide a more accurate understanding of the true scope of the killing performed by that single dog.  The actual total wouldn't be 23, and Taborsky estimates the real number to be 500-800 of the birds who had a total population of 1000.

He gives 3 reasons for this seemingly high estimate, "First, given the remote chance of finding a buried, untagged carcass, the ten actually located during the interval of killing must represent the tiny pinnacle of a large iceberg. Second, other evidence supports a dramatic fall in total population: Taborsky and colleagues noted a major drop in calling rates for these ordinarily noisy birds; a dog trained to find, but not to kill, kiwis could not locate a single live individual (although she found two carcasses) in a formally well-inhabited section of the forest. Third, kiwis, having evolved without natural enemies and possessing no means of escape, could not be easier prey."

This leaves Gould to conclude that the romantic notion that animals kill only for food or defense is a complete misconception and this German Shepard was following the killing pattern of many animals.

These three stories from nature have shown the roots of behavior in indiscriminate killing of other species, perverse sexual acts, and even within the group group murder. Man and woman are only special in the regard of truly being able to appreciate the consequences of their actions. We are not special in being unique in committing the acts themselves, as they are only natural.

Nature isn't a place of ideals and morality, it is a reflection of the causes that created us as killers, rapists, and altruistic cooperators. Nature may be able give us a framework to tell us why we are who we are, but it can't tell us how we should act in the future or who we should be; Nature is no ethical guide.

Thanks for reading, 

-themoralskeptic

A Showcase of Egoism

Thanks for those who commented on my last post. I'm taking a step back from the outside world, and I'm going to talk about a personal pet peeve, two types of statements that get under my skin. I'll try to convey what those statements are, and why they bother me and try propose a solution. Now, to anticipate future criticism, I know these statements are often used unthinkingly, and I don't expect to run into them any less often. I'll probably have settle for just being able to vent and maybe it might make you think the next time you hear one muttered. 

The first type of statement I've often seen talked about before, but I'm going to take it in a different direction than skeptics usually take it.

1. The arrogance of cause and effect - The example I will use could be picked from the hundreds I've doubtlessly heard throughout my years, but one sticks out as it is the one I heard most recently and was the inspiration for this post.

A lady told me that everything happened for a reason, as is often the beginning or end to a wild claim being made, and proceeded to tell me that not having room in a vehicle to take someone on a ride happened because that person would later become sick. Now this seemingly everyday chance occurrence may seem pretty trivial, but to her it was proof of everything happening for a reason. (Now it may look like I'm being ungenerous and blowing her statement's intention out of proportion, which is true in a way, but she makes these types of statements numerous times a day as a proof of life's plan. This was truly how the statement was meant to be interrupted)

Now when most skeptics or atheists look at that kind of statement they charge the person with making the error in assumption that the universe works according to a plan, which is a very good way of dealing with the question if you are talking to someone who wants to look at the comment logically. There is no evidence to the universal planning, or if it is a plan it has been so insidiously created that it doesn't look like a plan at all, good people get hurt and die, people are born with all sort of different ailments and even our existence seems to come from a number of steps built on chance.

As. someone I'm proud to share my name with, Stephen J. Gould would say, “History includes too much chaos, or extremely sensitive dependence on minute and unmeasurable differences in initial conditions, leading to massively divergent outcomes based on tiny and unknowable disparities in starting points. And history includes too much contingency, or shaping of present results by long chains of unpredictable antecedent states, rather than immediate determination by timeless laws of nature. Homo sapiens did not appear on the earth, just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts such an outcome based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. Humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.”

Yet, I don't think that, that type of comment, as intelligible as it is, would do a lick of good for anyone who was willing to make a comment about life having a plan. They have seen the plan in everything around them, so I'd argue with them on there own grounds, and accept their view of a plan.

Even if life does have a plan and everything happens for a reason to fulfill that plan, how could it be that anyone would be so arrogant as to say that, "This is what the divine plan is and this is the absolute reason this particular thing happened!" after all, God is said to work in mysterious ways. I don't think that anyone would stand up and claim that, they indeed know the plan for life, and if they do good for them. They weren't worth arguing with in the first place.

It does avoid the root of the problem, a lack of critical thinking, but it will at least start the person on the path of thinking about how hard it might be to determine the reasons for somethings cause.

2. The self-centered universe - While my first peeve surrounded the issue of someone having the arrogance to claim that they know what I can only describe as 'god's mind', the second issue is one where people clearly don't see the forest for the trees. 

This happens when people say something to the effect of, "Thank god for helping me win", or "Thank god they are alright." Now the second one may seem like a non-issue except, again, for the problem of knowing it was indeed God that saved them, but it has another huge issue when used in times of a tragedy.

Recently, for anyone who is allergic to any news, there was an 9.0 magnitude earthquake that moved Japan two feet lower towards sea level, and expected to have a death toll of more than 10 000. A couple of relatives of mine were actually visiting Japan at the time, which caused a fair bit of anxiety and also a comment that I still regret hearing. It was the comment stated above, "Thank god they are alright."

Now obviously this was good news to receive, but given the situation I think the sentiment could have been far better expressed with different words. To attribute those two individuals safety to God and then not have anything to say about God's designing a world that causes such destruction, or his/her/it's inability to save those other 10 000 people, to which there was no relation, is simply to show a complete disregard to the devastation of others, whether it was intended that way or not.

If God is to bestowed thanks for helping save some people in that type of situation God should also be responsible for the blame of not helping the thousands of others, this isn't a dog that could only drag one family to shore, it's a omnipotent being that created the world after all. To 'Thank God' in that situation is to show a perplexing double standard that I can't even began to understand, and an egoism that I would never want to condone. There seems to be an implicit understanding behind the statement that they were worthy of God's help while the thousands of others weren't.

Now  I know that this is a common term and I often fail to even catch myself from saying 'god dammit', but I do think that even as so it does show both an egoism and ignorance to the plight of others.

I'm in no way endorsing any kind of limit on free speech to solve any problem that slightly bothers someone, but I do think that if those types of statements were really thought about they would be made a heck of a lot less often.

Thanks for reading,
-the moral skeptic