This past weekend I traveled* to the OC to attend the Sackler Colloquium sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences entitled "In the Light of Evolution IV: The Human Condition."** It's a rather prestigious conference with a number of big deal speakers and a bit of an odd format. There's only one lecture hall, all of the speakers talk in it in succession, and you spend a serious amount of time listening to said talks: eighteen 50 minute talks over two days, with some coffee breaks and lunches and dinners sprinkled inbetween. The topics are all over the map, though at least in principle centered around evolution and the human condition. Long days and a ton of interesting information, though there are some interesting dynamics going on that I'll try to capture here.
* - You will recall that I had a flight delayed by three plus hours and was inserted into a dream world of gorillas, Suns girls and Grant Hill. I wasn't lying:
See? I *told* you the cheer outfits were absurd. Though, as Beck will tell you, nowhere near as absurd as the one we witnessed on lovely 24th street in Phoenix lately. Sheesh. That one is definitely NOT making an appearance in the Ballad.
** - "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" is a rather famous and oft-referenced quote / series of essays by Theodosius Dobzhansky, a sort of grandfather of evolutionary biology and the "modern synthesis" aka neo-Darwinism (or whatever the least offensive term is these days). He's known as "Doby" to his close friends and/or the kind of people who casually drop such tidbits in their lectures. I, ftr, do not know him as "Doby." Having read a whole lot of biology over the last few years, though, I'm going to have to agree. :) I mean, seriously, your genome is something like 30% mobile elements, pointless little sequences that do nothing much more than wreck other genes. Something like 1.2 million of them have been copied and copied and copied over the millenia. And your genome is also largely composed of remnant pseudogenes, no longer functioning sequences with all components of genes that are rendered inactive by accumulated mutations / errors / etc. So, um, show me a car that has a ton of the same random part strewn about it occasionally causing other parts to break, show me a bunch of other parts that would have worked in older models but no longer do, explain to me why an engineer would do that, and then we can start talking about intelligent design. Sound good?
The most obvious thing is that it's a non-specialty conference - you've got paleontologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, biochemists, primatologists, evolutionary psychologists, geneticists, and the list goes on and on, all as speakers, let alone the variety of people in the audience (see, um, biology-based ethicists aka Nyet Jones). So you've got power player speakers, all of whom come from decidedly different backgrounds, some disciplines which have beefs with one another - most notably evo bio and evo psych, but also social scientists and "hard" scientists generally. But you've also got decorated experts in all of the fields sprinkled throughout the audience. The overall effect? First, there was an extreme air of deference. I'd venture that 95% of the questions that were actually asked* were of the softball variety. No serious challenges to claims, concepts, underlying methodology, none of the stuff I hear on a daily basis at talks at school. This was cool, on the one hand, because the oneupsmanship that goes on elsewhere can get a little tired. But on the other, it seemed that a lot of ideas went down completely unchecked - I would have enjoyed some interdepartmental wrestling, though I can understand why they perhaps did not want to foster that. I also saw a whole lotta hat-tipping and cultish lust for all things science. I get that it's a science conference and I shouldn't really be surprised, but I could have a used a bit more articulation with humanistic notions of "The Human Condition" subtitle.
* - This was a problem - speakers were given 50 minutes, and while the conference as a whole was run exactly and admirably on time, most of the speakers ran over by a minute or so and permitted little to no time for questions. I don't know if this was by design (i.e. people didn't want to have to answer a lot of q's in that environment; that seems unlikely, though, as these were all dynamic speakers at ease in front of the crowd and see the above notes on deference) or if people were just taking the long talk format to riff as much as they wanted. It definitely did not foster a whole lot of give and take - I asked no questions, but I probably would have chimed in on two of the talks in particular had there been more opportunity. Anyways, weird format, not to mention a little long-winded at times, and I would have preferred maybe 35 minute talks with fifteen minutes for Q & A or extended jamming or something. As it was, you had to try to grab people in coffee breaks or at dinner, and especially with some of the big-time guys (e.g., Ayala), it's hard to break into a crowd of ten people to have a real conversation over a ten minute coffee break.
The second effect, though, was a bit more disappointing. For the most part, the talks stuck to pretty surface level, survey course style accounts of research. I think people knew they were delivering talks to a broad audience - which they were - but as a consequence, some of the stuff presented amounted to summaries of a disciplinary approach or a life's body of work, and if you were familiar with the speaker's work already, it came off as a whole lot of stuff you already knew. Which, if you've flown far, spent several days alone in a hotel room etc. to hear, can be a bit irksome. Not that this held back the conference - I heard a lot of really cool stuff and learned a lot from the people I didn't know - but the people I specifically went to hear largely failed to deliver something that I hadn't already gleaned from reading their publications. Ah, well.
So, aside from my usual negative Nelly intro - long talks, surface talks, too much nicety to really hear what's going with scientific takes on the human condition, too much sitting in a single room* - the conference was quite nice. I had to cab it to and from the hotel, but otherwise, all transportation was taken care of - buses to and from the hotel (which was the shwanky Newport Beach Marriott) to the very posh Beckman center. We were served two excellent breakfasts and dinners and a wine-drenched banquet dinner as well as lots of gourmet coffee and snacks throughout both days. No complaints at all about the amenities; they were quite ridiculously good.
* - Holy footnotes Batman - but it's worth noting that I had Vietnam-style flashbacks to med school this past weekend, what with the single lecture hall, the power points, the fifty minute lectures, the occasional nodding off at a too-monotone discussion ...
There was time to chat over meals with various people, though as noted, with all the people there who already knew one another, it was sometimes a little tough to grab a table with a person you might want to talk to. I definitely would like to go to the next conference with someone I know - I was all by my lonesome, and while I'm okay at striking up conversations with strangers, it's a lot easier to join conversations in progress. The best chats I had were with groups of other students / professors at meals who all knew one another - I tracked down some of the interesting philosophy people in attendance, and it helped a ton to have them already engaged in various conversations and just slide in with a comment rather than doing the usual game of I'm so-and-so and what do you study? So that was cool - I met some UC Irvine people doing various things with monkeys and morality, people I might be interested in thinking back and forth with over the coming years. But man, in the other conversations - there were a whole lot of highly specialized scientists there, and let's just say that there isn't a whole hell of a lot for a guppy biogeographer and an ethicist to talk about. At one point I listened to a twenty-plus minute speech on a student's beetle dispersion statistical analysis, and while it was highly impassioned and clearly the awesomest thing in the world to that guy, I felt very out of place. Like a guppy out of appropriate biogeographical evolutionary niche, if you will. Still, I said "ethics" and generally got enthusiastic responses - seems a conference on the human condition grabbed people who were at least seemingly interested in how biology and evolution can speak to ethics. On occasion, of course, I said ethicist and either got sort of "Oh, a philosopher" type reactions or people who felt ready to comment on the entirety of my discipline based on a book they had read one time. I always find that wacky - like I would challenge a genomics expert on his area of study because I took a genetics course once? Seriously, somebody was trying to tell me, "well, morality is all based on fulfilling hardwired desires, so that's really already figured out." Oh, okay. Thanks. I'll go tell the postmodernists. Vague insults aside (one prof tried to ask me what my experimental design was going to be, and I'm still not sure if he badly understood me explanation of my interests or if he was being a colossal empiricist dick), people were generally welcoming and friendly. A good time, despite my inherent distaste for those type of "let's network" environs.
The last thing to add before jotting down a bullet summary of the talks is to note that I do not like traveling by myself. Most people probably don't, but there's something quite lonely about the empty dark hotel room, no matter how Marriottish it is. There was a mall nearby, so I walked around there quite a bit (in the pouring rain - 50 degrees and wet all weekend, thanks a lot southern cali!) during the little down time that I had (Thursday night and after 4 on Saturday), but otherwise it was a lot of hotel room hanging out, reading and watching TV / DVDs. (I did catch the ESPN 30 for 30 on "The U," which was quite awesome. I now realize why I spike on the Ultimate field - I'm a 'Cane at heart!). Anyhoo, I was very glad to be back with the Beck and the dogs come Sunday. We (minus the S/W) grabbed some dinner and football with D/C and had a great time - good to be home.
Okay, point by point, lecture by lecture - I can't believe you're still reading!
- E.O. Wilson - who is as rock star evo biologist as they get - gave a talk called The Four Great Books of Darwin. I've heard so much of this stuff in my HPS course lately that I wasn't thrilled at the topic, but he did an admirable job. He did give a little dig - told this joke about how mathematicians achieve their peak in their teens, physicists in the 20s, chemists in their 30s, biologists in their 40s-50s and philosophers never. Well, Mr. Wilson, I believe after all these years, you're still all wet. So there. Phbbbt. :)
- All of you high power scientist career breakers, that previous comment was a light-hearted joke. Please don't end me.
- Bernard Wood, paleontologist, gave a great talk on the evolution of hominids. The primary point was that it is very difficult to take a fossil specimen and place it in the evolutionary tree appropriately - it's hard to be sure if any given species is in direct human lineage or is an offshoot of one of the branches.
- Kristen Hawkes, anthropologist, talked about human longevity and the evolution of post-menopausal life. It's 1, not a recent development, and 2, something we don't share at all with the apes.
- Juan Luis Arsuaga spoke on human ape-relatedness and effective uniformity in the fossil record
- Douglas Wallace gave an interesting talk about energy as the fundamental concept of human life, talking extensively on the evolution of mitochondria and how, among other things. lack of mitochondrial ox-phos uncoupling for thermal purposes accounts partially for why Kenyans are so good at marathons. Lively speaker.
- Anna DiRienzo spoke on genetic variation and its service to evolution in the presence of local environmental factors.
- Sarah Tishkoff gave a very cool talk on tracking human genomic lineage in Africa.
- Mark Baxter spoke on the above-mentioned mobile elements and their historical dynamics in the human genome.
- Carlos Bustamante gave a statistically technical talk on personalized medicine and the human genome - lots of cool stuff on being able to track human migration over the millenia via genomes.
- Morris Goodman, another rock star, gave a general talk on evolutionary evidence in human lineage
- John Avise gave the banquet lecture entitled Non-intelligent Design: Inside the Human Genome. 'Twas a general refutation of the notion of the design (also referenced above) in the human genome given all the mayhem and utter failure that is evident within it. His argument was well-supported, but I wonder about his audience - who's going to be swayed by this who isn't already swayed by, say, back pain? He also closed with a rather wacky notion (shared by Ayala, I gather) that evolutionary theory is actually a gift to religion, as now reli doesn't have to account for many forms of human misery as it falls under the domain of science. "They" can focus on meaning and spirituality and morality/ethics and all that stuff. I have alluded before to the chapter 7 phenomenon - where the science writer delivers a perfectly cogent argument and that tacks on some bizarre, ungrounded humanities oriented commentary at the end. This was it par excellence - it implies that you could completely undermine the metaphysics of a religion and leave it largely intact for those "types of things science can't do." Which is, in a word, dubious - you're basically asking for a tacit admission of a God of the gaps who can only cover non-empirical ground. I think that's a bit dismissive of the role of religious narratives in the belief structure - anyways, not to go all hypercritical on this, but I just thought that was a weird tag on to an otherwise finely put point, that the genome is riddled with evolutionary evidence that makes no sense if viewed from an intelligent design perspective.
- Saturday morning opened with a fantastic talk from Nina Jablonski called The Skin That Makes Us Human, an account of melanin evolution in different climates. This was probably up there for the best talks of the weekend (for me) - just really drove home the point that skin tone is a magnificently malleable trait, and the interplay between UV protection and Vitamin D synthesis dictates not just skin color but hair color, distribution, etc. The *malleable* point was huge - there have been numerous independent evolutionary events that have changed population's skin colors, which indicates that relative to a lot of traits, skin color, aka one of the primary determinants of race, is actually one of the more fleeting characteristics of peoples when considered on evolutionary time scales. If one were to start with an ethical premise that treatment of others not be arbitrary - and then note based on scientific evidence that one of the main things we use to differentiate peoples is that highly "temporary" trait - I think one has something resembling an logico-empirical stance that racism is idiotic. I'll need to come up with a more eloquent way of phrasing that at some point, but it was quite a lovely point in a conference that occasionally wandered off the "Human Condition" topic.
- Ajit Varki gave a very detailed, fascinating talk on unique patterns of sialic acid biology (i.e. cell surface sugars / potential antigens) and the evo histories of certain ones that appear in humans but not other species (and their impact on disease). Science-detail heavy, but quite sharp stuff.
- Peter Richerson gave a largely apologetic talk on how culture evolution studies are some 75 years behind bio ones. He alleged that variable climate seemed to spark human cultural development. Dubious? Maybe. This was essentially a claim that cultures follow Darwinian rules, which always treads a bit in meme territory for me - is it the cultures undergoing evolution, or the people who practice them? Unclear.
- Francisco Ayala, another fretboard burner rockstar biologist, gave the weirdest talk of the weekend (again, for me). It was called The Difference of Being Human, but focused entirely on the biology of ethics. The claim was that ethics can be split into two concepts - the capacity / proclivity to judge right and wrong, and the actual instantiation of what determines to be right and wrong. Ayala claimed the former is biologically / evolutionarily determined (the capacity for abstract thought, anticipation of action outcomes, the ability to contemplate and choose possible alternatives) and the latter, the particularities of what is right and wrong, is largely culturally determined. It's a distinction between capacity and code. (Ayala further claimed that he could make a similarly structured argument for many human cultural practices - aesthetics, religion, etc.). To be honest, the first part was unremarkable - it was supported by top notch biology, to be sure, but it was just a typical "humans are unique animals" type argument that alleged that this was key to our moral foundations. He also alleged that our bipedal gait permits tool development which drives brain development which drives more tool development, etc., which results in our big, abstract thought conceiving brains. The second part was simply bizarre - after a brief run through the history of ethics, he alleged that our ethical beliefs are largely cultural, and that the successful ones are determined by natural selection. This was essentially an argument that moral peoples will be more evolutionarily successful than non-moral ones (or maybe cooperative groups will outdo non cooperative ones) without a specification of what being moral means. The obvious question here is how this articulates with an endorsement of moral relativism, since it seems to boil down to a rule that survival will trump other concerns. I wanted to ask this, but didn't get a chance as some other grad student made an ill-advised challenge to Ayala's criteria for moral capacity (the student made a fair point, but got shot down in front of everyone for being unable to properly articulate it). Anyways, I'd be interested in reading Ayala's books - he is a former Dominican priest, so one imagines he has some moral philosophy / theological chops, even if it didn't come across in this lecture too much. In short, I found this very superficial and reeking of chapter 7-ness, though I am also confident that Ayala has probably outlined the idea better in other venues.
- Leda Cosmides gave an utterly boring talk called Whence Intelligence that didn't seem to have much to do with intelligence but rather a "mental module" of cheater detection. I should qualify that - it was boring because it was a *survey* on cheater detection, the literature of which I am already profoundly familiar and find problematic for a whole truckload of reasons. So perhaps for people unfamiliar with her work it was interesting; I can't speak to that, because all I heard were arguments and evidence that have been in play for some fifteen years. She was one of the people I was most excited to see because I am fairly familiar with the back and forth that she and anti-evo psychologists have undergone, so I wanted to hear something of a response to the challenges or a take on how this affects our conception of the human condition. I got neither, so her talk was something of a letdown.
- Terrence Deacon gave an overly long talk called Whence Language, and I will pay you handsomely if you can explain how this said much about human language. It was a lot of stuff on birdsong, to be sure, but again missed the larger point of things for me.
- And finally, Steve Pinker closed with a talk on the Evolution of the Mind. Pinker was the show closer, the guy I had come to see, and he gave a somewhat demure performance and more or less rehashed some of the things from his popular works on language and the blank slate of the mind. He was stunningly non-assertive - of all the people there, he seemed the most keenly aware of the differing theories from his own present in the room that afternoon. I doubt he was nervous, but he was a lot less lively than in, say, his Colbert Report appearances. The talk included thoughts on the intelligence measure G and our lack of ability to pinpoint its genetic underpinnings and our pervasive use of metaphor in language which he points at as evidence of a generalized preference for abstraction. He specifically made a point that though a large percentage of our mental association is sensory driven a la Proust, there is a certain percentage that comes about via this metaphoric, structural brain associations. He also argued that while skin colorations and other specific biological traits are important for explaining our multiple niche compatibilities, our mind is largely the thing that permits our varied dominance of earth's nooks and crannies. He made a slew of other Pinker-typical, interesting points, too. It was odd that he read his lecture from notes and again, gave a very soft-spoken presentation of ideas. He was also the only person who got challenged (really) in the Q&A afterwards - people griped with the specifics of his notions of intelligence inheritance. All in all good stuff, but again, the survey nature of the talk was disappointing - I'm glad I got the chance to hear such a pop scientist celebrity talk, but I was genuinely surprised by the low key feel of it.
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