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Literary Darwinism

There's an interesting article on literary Darwinism in this Sunday's Times Magazine. I'm sure those of you who know my general fascination with evolutionary psychology and consilience would assume that I'm a literary Darwinist as well, but the truth is I have some doubts about the project, which I've been following on and off for the past few years. I wrote a little about this in the introduction to Mind Wide Open, but my general concern is that, almost by definition, the Darwinian insights that literary critics can use are the least interesting thing about evolutionary thinking. Because ev psych is concerned with human universals, most of the behavior it describes is the stuff of cliché: women are attracted to high-status men, people tend to value the lives of their near-relatives over the lives of strangers, and so on. What's fascinating in ev psych is not usually the behavior it documents, but rather the way it explains the evolutionary roots of that behavior. (I know many of you out there think those explanations are merely just-so stories, but whether you buy them or not, they're the intellectually meaty part of the model.) And it seems to me that literature doesn't really bring anything new to that part of the story. It's true that you can find plenty of examples of status-seeking and kin preference and incest taboo in the canon, but you can also find plenty of examples of characters dutifully obeying the laws of gravity as well -- and that's not going to tell you anything interesting about physics, right?

The Literary Darwinists that I've read tend to talk about the way great works of literature shine light on the human universals described by the ev pysch canon. But I think the more interesting application would be to shine the light in the other direction: if we know something about human universals from the sciences, then we can use that knowledge to gain a better appreciation of the achievements of culture. We can point to the historical places, or the elements of our own society, where we've ventured the furthest from our biological inclinations. And what better place to look for those wanderings than in the canon of world literature?

That said, this review by the excellent Denis Dutton makes me wonder if there's more to it than I've perceived so far.

Battle Of The Sexes, cont.

Another way of thinking about the Summers male/female brain debate: someone somewhere in the past few days mentioned the ratio of male to female prisoners in this country. As of 2003, a man was fifteen times more likely to be incarcerated than a woman. For anyone contesting simply the possibility that men might be, on average, slightly more likely to be brilliant mathematicians than women, think about those different incarceration rates. The most likely explanation of this 15-to-1 ratio is that men's brains are more prone to violent behavior than women's -- or at least that there is among men a wider statistical distribution of violent/nonviolent attitudes, which results in more unusually violent men, and thus more prisoners. So if we accept that a significant difference exists in the way that each sex deals with violence, why shouldn't there be the possibility of a much smaller difference in the processing of math?

Of course, if you think that this 15-to-1 ratio of male prisoners to female ones is purely the work of social bias, then I think you have to ask: who, then, are the primary victims of sexism in this culture? Sure, it's a shame that women aren't making as much on the dollar as men, and aren't getting tenure often enough. But if society is, for totally arbitrary reasons, putting fifteen times as many men in prison as it is women, I think that's a more grievous offense.

Obviously, there's a common answer in both the academic context and the penal one: both genetic and social factors are responsible for the disparity. Men start with a stronger tendency towards violence and society amplifies that tendency over time. But the fact that more men are in prison isn't by itself a sign that we live in a society that discriminates against men. The same logic applies for the number of tenured mathematicians at Harvard.

P.S. And don't bother objecting that, by this logic, the high rates of African-Americans in prisons means that there's an innate capacity for violence among that group. The genetic differences between the sexes are hundreds of times more significant than the differences between the races. You can't look an fMRI of someone and say, "That's an African-American brain, or a Caucasian brain." But you can differentiate between a male and female brain.

Battle Of The Sexes

I had a few quick thoughts on the Larry Summers flap. First, it goes without saying that there has been -- and continues to be -- sex discrimination in heavily male-dominated fields like science and engineering. The question is whether bias alone can account for all of the huge gap that separates the sexes in these fields. (This seems to be the question Summers was posing at the conference.) Second, this idea that the average woman might in fact be better at the average man at math, but more math geniuses are men; in other words, there's a wider distribution of talents among men than among women. That sounds like an implicit dig at women, but there's a flipside to it that we don't acknowledge enough: by this logic, there are also far more dullards among men than among women. So if you're trying to evaluate someone's math prowess purely on the basis of their sex, a male candidate is just as likely to be a complete incompetent with numbers as he is likely to be a math wiz.

Finally, I think it's more accurate (and also more palatable) to describe the differences here in a slightly modified language: not that women are innately worse at math or engineering than men, but rather that they're innately less interested in math or engineering than men. That lack of interest starts early -- boys tend to engage more with inanimate objects, girls with people and animals -- and ultimately spirals into larger differences in skills and experiences, which no doubt get amplified by social bias. But it's not that women are challenged by these subjects; it's that they don't find them stimulating. I found this quote from the social scientist Patti Hausman:

The question of why more women don't choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer: because they don't want to. Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works...

The Not-So-Tangled Web

If you thought anecdotes about my kids were bad, how about anecdotes about spiders?

I wrote a book about ants, but I know nothing about spiders. And indeed for the thirteen years I spent Manhattan, I don't think I saw a single spider in the two apartments I lived in. (One of the rarely-mentioned side benefits of urban living -- aside from all the walking -- is the lack of bugs, assuming you don't have cockroaches. I go to visit my parents in suburban Washington during the summer and I feel like I'm in a rain forest.) But here in the wilds of Brooklyn, we have spiders, mostly in our garden, but occasionally in the house itself.

This is the second September we've spent in this house, and I've now noticed a very interesting pattern. Right around September 15, a spider will reliably start building a web between the two rails on the little smoking balcony that leads to the stairs down to our garden. You can knock the web down; you can kill the spider; you can have a heavy rain wash it all away -- whatever you do, the next morning, a spider will have spun another web in the same spot.

Now, I can see that this is an ideal location for bug catching -- it's elevated about fifteen feet above ground, with few obstructions around it, and the two railings supply a perfect frame for the web itself. I can see the merits of the location, but I'm, you know, smart. How does the spider know? Do spiders do scouting missions? Can they assess a location before building the web? This is clearly not a swarm intelligence thing -- like ants optimizing routes to a food source -- because there's just one spider doing the analysis. All you arachnophiliacs out there, please explain what's going on...

My shuttle question answered, four months later

To those of you who dismissed my speculations about a potential rescue strategy for the Columbia shuttle earlier this year: think again! Here's this from the NY Times:

If NASA had known immediately that the Columbia was damaged on liftoff, it might have sent the shuttle Atlantis on a rescue mission, the chairman of the board investigating the accident said today. But he would not characterize the chance of success.

At the time of the Columbia's 16-day mission, which ended with its breakup on re-entry on Feb. 1, the Atlantis was in the Vehicle Assembly Building near the launching pad at the Kennedy Space Center. Workers were mating the solid rocket boosters for the Atlantis's next mission to the external tank but had not attached the orbiter.

By skipping preflight checks and accelerating various processes, NASA could have launched the Atlantis and reached the Columbia before the seven astronauts suffocated, said Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., chairman of the investigation board.

Can you imagine what kind of media event that would have been? An interstellar (or would it be interlunar?) rescue mission, with a ticking clock and enough time for the networks to assemble a full coverage team? It would have made Apollo 13 look like, well, like Apollo 10.

Columbia: The unanswered question

Here's what I want to know about the Columbia explosion. Maybe I've missed this somewhere, but it seems to me the really interesting question is this: if, ten days ago, they had determined beyond the shadow of a doubt that the debris impact had damaged the craft on launch, such that a return trip through the atmosphere was inevitably going to end in tragedy, what would NASA have done? I've seen a couple of reports that begin to pose that question, and always end with someone saying, "But there's sadly no way to repair the insulation tiles, so there was nothing we could have done."

But presumably, repairing the insulation tiles isn't the only potential option, right? I mean, I saw Apollo 13. If they were absolutely convinced that returning in the shuttle would be a death sentence, I can't believe NASA would have just said, "Folks, sorry about this. Enjoy your last few weeks." They've got other working shuttles, and a space station -- couldn't they have attempted some kind of rescue?

I'm sure this scenario has been explored somewhere online -- suggested reading is welcome...

Updated Feb. 5, 12:24 PM: Space.com has an FAQ that partially addresses rescue options. The space station was definitely out of reach, as a number of you have pointed out, but perhaps there was another possibility: "Could another shuttle have been sent up? Shuttle Atlantis might have been rushed into service, and if normal testing were skipped, it might have been in space in a week or so. The Columbia crew had enough supplies to last through Wednesday, Feb. 5 and might have been able to stretch those supplies a few more days."

You thought the sniper was bad.

If you've spent any time in the suburban stretches of the Northeast, this New York Times article -- "Out Of Control, Deer Send Ecosystem Into Chaos" -- won't come as a total surprise. But check out this line: "[Deer] are struck by cars, trucks and motorcycles more than a million times a year, with the accidents killing more than 100 people annually and causing more than $1 billion in damage. The human toll makes deer deadlier than sharks, alligators, bears and rattlesnakes combined." Bambi vs. Godzilla isn't looking so one-sided anymore.