Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in jeremy_m's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
1:55 am	Eastercon Doings An unusually autobiographical entry, as I'll log highlights of an SF Con here rather than tell people about it one at a time. ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 10th, 2007
8:19 pm	What I did in the holidays It was a strange time for a holiday, on the border between my old and new lives: my long plans to retire early came to fruition on the Friday afternoon, too late to resign before going away, so seven days to stress about it instead. ( Read more... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 26th, 2007
6:25 pm	Monogamy threatens human survival (film at 11) Here's a funny thing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6057734.stm, which at first sight is just a joke article for a soft-porn comic by an "expert" on evolution who hasn't caught up with our understanding of this field since it changed a bit in 1859. ( Read more... ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 5th, 2007
12:33 am	Cheating as a Winning Strategy Exercise for the reader: if you were a woman living after the invention of agriculture and operating entirely on inherited instincts honed by natural selection to be the optimal reproductive strategy, what lifestyle would you adopt? For bonus points, would this differ in any way from the one agricultural societies always choose as an apparently cultural effect? ( Read more... ) (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 8th, 2007
3:12 pm	I've Done Things You People Wouldn't Believe I rode with Gustavus Adolphus at Nordlingen, sailed for Midway with Yamamoto, raced to flank Guderian's panzers at Minsk and held ranks with Alexander's phalanx at Gaugamela. ( Read more... ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 12th, 2007
11:46 am	Genome++ One of the compelling arguments against Intelligent Design of biology is how badly designed genomes are, at least in the computer programming terms of clarity, maintainability and efficiency. Where I work, God would never get through the technical interview. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 15th, 2007
6:24 pm	Words, words, words, tripping down the years, tripping up the ears. I walked on dead men's words in the shadow of the Golden Gate, two hundred words graved in stone, spoken before the land was paved. Hints of Old World kin sounds, clues to the peopling of the Americas - precious now those first Beringians' bones lie deep down drowned - and links to thoughts as treasure-strange as Potlatch. Two hundred words saved, then their voices ploughed under, ridden down by pale riders on iron horses of the apocalypse. The true graveyard horrors are the silent dead: they do not haunt us whose words are written only on the wind, and we are diminished. ( Read more... ) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 14th, 2007
1:05 pm	Gladiators and the Will to Survive The problem with "Survival of the fittest", apart from it being tautologous in using "fittest" to mean "most able to survive", is that it sounds as though fitness is always a benefit for the survivor (beyond the benefit of survival). People expect fitness to include things like speed and strength and vision, but the counter-examples often tell us more about how we got here. ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 3rd, 2007
3:46 am	Mendelian Mythology Mathematical models of gene diffusion are all very well, but for something as important as the start of modern humans and the creation of creation myths, you really need a good creation myth. It starts on a beach in Persia, or India, or somewhere now under water on the long walk to Australia, sixty thousand years ago, give or take a dozen millennia: the story happens many times in many places. The people live in a tribe of several related families, hunter gatherers with stone tools little changed in a million years - but change is coming now. The tribe lives on the coastal runway of the final exodus out of Africa, they are in the path of fully modern Homo Sapiens' explosive expansion around the world. Yet they will not be exterminated, they carry haplotypes, stretches of DNA made of genes that tend to stay together down the ages, which will survive: these people are also our ancestors. Two pieces of their genome will not survive, one we'll come to later, and the other is the Y chromosome. Some of the men will have sons, and some of those will have sons, but all their lineages will die out as women choose others over them. Those choices will favour that one Y chromosome from Africa which all men now carry, only the matrilinear lines will survive from this tribe. They look much like us, except perhaps for something odd about the lower jaw, and after two million years of brain expansion they are the dominant creatures of their ecosystem. But if they lived now they'd be diagnosed as severely disabled, because they don't have true language and can't learn it. They do have many of the adaptations for language, the hyoid bone, the descended larynx that allows choking, the big brain, and the men have Adam's apples as an even more costly laryngeal modification in the contest to be chosen by women for their ability to talk a little. But they lack a whole series of smaller changes allowing a wide range of vocalisation, and more critically, their brains can't deal with the syntax and grammar of true language. Then one day the Stranger arrives, the leading edge of a genetic shockwave, a human just like us. The Stranger is a revelation to the tribe, a super-stimulus for their lust for language, and the reaction is the same as at Gettysburg, Nuremberg and Woodstock. If the Stranger was a woman the effect would be small, as she could raise only a few children in the tribe and then only by staying for a long time. But it's a man, and the effect is much more drastic as he can quickly father many children. Perhaps he doesn't stay long enough to see them grow because he knows what will happen, he's seen such mixed children before. Time passes and the mothers are disappointed to find the children of the god are completely mortal - they can't talk any better than the rest of the tribe. There seems to be no mixing of old and new, but this is an illusion: in fact the children carry a whole range of genes for language which evolved as a group in Africa, but none are activated in these children. The genes are switched on or off by a single control gene called FOXP2, which is recessive, so although every child has one FOXP2, they would need two to get any benefit, and that would require two speaking parents. More time passes, the children grow and produce children of their own. The instinct against incest spreads the FOXP2 gene more widely, but no-one has more than a single copy as long as each has at most one parent descended from the Stranger. Only after several generations, with the original meeting on the beach shifted into legend, do two cousins with the control gene at last let it recombine. A quarter of their children have two copies of FOXP2, and are essentially us. As before, the daughters have little effect on the gene pool as they produce only a few children, but the sons are heroes and spread new waves of FOXP2 into a population already seeded with carriers. They create a generation of miracle children, overtaking the adults' speech by the age of three. Now the tribe is sharply divided, the talkers lead and the rest are unable to follow, often bewildered and sometimes suspected. The talking women pair off only with talking men, and although the talking men are more flexible in their liaisons so the silent women still produce some talking children, the older Y chromosomes are soon cut out of the gene pool entirely. In a few generations everyone but the disabled talks, feeding in to the outburst of symbolic thought in the fossil record from this time: complex new tools, rock painting, figure carving and ceremonial burial. And although it's left no record, there was probably a flowering of story telling, with the appearance of modern language within human lifetimes as a major topic. Perhaps they told it as a hero bringing or stealing the new way of life from the gods, the Greek story of Prometheus. Perhaps they told it as a god fathering human children, the Norse story of Rig/Heimdall. Perhaps they talked of the earlier people as sinister non-human trolls and of the time before language as the Dreamtime. Or perhaps they told the story in the most literal way they could: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2007
7:36 pm	Evolution, a Practical Approach Q: Why are people so stupid? A: For much the same reason that sloths are so slow - they lack natural predators. My first thought on fixing this was to train lions in administering IQ tests (or even how to spot a sloppy apostrophe would be a start), and turn them loose to start raising the bar. But on reflection, I think this may be impractical: we need subtler predators. Tobacco has been useful since about the 1960s in applying selection pressure to filter out the unwise, but has the problem of passive smoking. While most smokers follow good eugenics principles in mainly poisoning their own children, they do also affect random strangers and some of those are probably worth saving. Ideally we need some solitary pleasure that attracts dimwits and at least reduces their fertility. Something could be done with exploding sex toys, but that's specific to only a subset of the target audience, it would be better to apply some measure of practical intelligence with no risk to innocent bystanders. So we need a virtual reality matrix into which everyone goes at birth, but the world it presents should be so completely absurd that only a fool would believe it's real: the test subjects would only be let out if and when they realise it's a trick. By the way, if anyone's listening, I quite like it in the joke world, but I wouldn't mind going out for a look around at some point. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 16th, 2007
12:37 am	Thinking about the North Sea, and excessive language (first draft) Deep down, dark down, drowned down Doggerland dreaming of loss. Dredger's claw violates a mammoth grave under Magdebosian footprints beneath Beowulf's whale road. No corn rigs for Doggerland, the plough's race for hunter's forest lost to waves, yet vampire rigs suck black blood of older trees, corrupting air with stale breath of fire. Not sudden, like Gibralter's dam cracked flood sundering continents with the ghost of Tethys, nor UtnaPishtim's flight before the rising Euxine, but slow waters breaking at the birth of Albion. Carrying cogs cleave together Cnut's Kingdom cleft by sea. Bright sun sand from the farthest shore mixes in the dark with dust of Ymir's bones, milled slow and fine by creeping ice giants. Deep down, dark down, drowned down Doggerland dreaming of sea that was land that was sea that was land that was sea, and will be land again. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 23rd, 2006
4:47 pm	The Problem of Sex Christmas is a time for getting a new computer, able to run ever more powerful biological simulations, and what better puzzle to tackle this year than the mystery of males: what is the point of them? ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 26th, 2006
10:47 pm	Monarchy and Unrelated Ancestors Thinking further about an odd effect in my previous post, in which people can avoid having any genes at all from some of their ancestors, I notice how well historical systems of monarchy have anticipated modern genetics. Consider Queen Victoria, Empress of a quarter of the world in the 19th century, by a right derived ultimately from her ancestor William the Conqueror in the 11th century. (All legitimate power derives ultimately from violent conquest or revolution, except in Iceland and Switzerland). The theory of monarchy ought to be that Victoria contained part of William, ideally the part that's useful for ruling countries, but any part would be better than nothing. They lived about thirty generations apart, so if there was no inbreeding William would be one of her billion ancestors living in 1066. Unfortunately the population of the world was hardly a billion then, and the population of England was closer to a million. (It's hard to measure exactly despite the enormous effort and precision that went into counting everyone for the Doomsday Book, since they neglected to count women and clergy.) So there was massive inbreeding involved, with each ancestor contributing via at least a thousand incestuous connections. But humans have less than a hundred thousand genes, so Victoria can't have had even one gene from at least 90% of her ancestors living at the time of William. So the chances are that she didn't have any from him at all, and was genetically unrelated to the source of her hereditary power. So what can be done? How can leaders be chosen with confidence that they really do contain pieces of their heroic ancestors? There are three solutions, which we now understand from many years of detailed study of molecular biology. What's bizarre is that they are exactly the three systems used around the world at least as far back as the first millennium BC. One is the Y chromosome, which is mostly not recombinant with the X and effectively reproduces asexually: each male is a clone of their father in that little piece. So if Victoria had been a king in an unbroken male line from William she (he) would definitely have contained about 90 of the Conqueror's genes. From a molecular point of view, male primogeniture and Salic Law are reasonable forms of government. Another is mitochondria, which similarly reproduce asexually and are cloned from mother to both sons and daughters. The ones that go to sons are just lost, ending up as at best the tails of sperm, propelling a nucleus into an egg that contains only the mother's mitochondria. This is reflected in Pictish Succession, where the pre-Scottish inhabitants of Scotland inherited power through the female line. If that had continued to the present day, the current Queen of Pictland would contain the same mitochondrial genes as her predecessor from pre-Roman times. How significant that could be for running countries is hard to say, as these genes don't affect the phenotype of the human as a whole. The third solution is statistical rather than 100% guaranteed to work, and just involves mating brothers and sisters in every generation. The genes get shuffled so it's still possible to lose some permanently, and recessives can build up unpleasantly as in the Hapsburgs, but on average every original gene gets a lot more rolls of the dice to stay in the game. So Pharaohs probably contained many more of their dynastic founders' genes than would have been possible without such close relationships with their siblings. Is it coincidence that social, religious, political and economic factors made people invent and follow all the customs needed to let their genes spread into the future? Or did the selfish genes determine the large and small scale behaviour of monarchies to optimise a molecular strategy none of the participants could have known about? Next week: how covalent bonding determined Classical Greek democracy... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 15th, 2006
11:56 pm	Traumatised by Molecular Biology Yesterday I was in a workshop on Polyamory and Spirituality, in which I was an outsider even in this fringe of a fringe grouping, because my belief system is based on science. The intellectual space that is normally occupied by religion (including a creation myth, Original Sin, the causes of Evil, and the reasons for choosing morality) I fill from an exciting mixture of evolutionary biology, paleo-genetics and game theory. But one disadvantage of a system based on reality rather than faith is the problem of new things being discovered, as you then have to change beliefs rather than burn the discoverer. Today I found out about haplotype tracing results (not actually new research today, just new to me), which turns everything upside down. I'd thought we knew for sure how humans first settled the world, tracked by Y-chromosome and mitochondrial tracing, which agree in showing a small band leaving Africa eighty thousand years ago and spreading out to become us. I'd thought the real Original Sin that created the modern world, which we're still paying for with racism, was that expansion exterminating all other hominid groups, including even the earlier waves of our own species. I'd thought we form such an astonishingly closely related group that we're more like a tribe than a species, and only treat each other badly because we don't realise strangers are actually family. But the story from Y-chromosomes and mitochondria was always a sample: one leads back through our fathers' fathers and the other through our mothers' mothers, and I had assumed that gave a representative sample of our complete ancestral populations. Newer more detailed tracing of other gene clusters gives a very different result: we actually have genes added recently from quite different species, showing migrations as far back as Erectus leaving Africa 1.7 million years ago. So we're not a tightly related family descended entirely from the first population of anatomically modern humans, we're each a mosaic of new and old hominid types that varies from place to place. We didn't simply eliminate the other types of human, we mated with them first and then eliminated the less modern individuals from mixed populations. And it gets more weird. One species not linked to modern populations yet is the Neanderthals, for whom we have some DNA that looks as though it was separated from us half a million years ago. But since we have millions of ancestors and only tens of thousands of genes, most of our remote ancestors don't contribute even one gene: it's quite possible we're descended from Neanderthals too, in a genealogical sense, even if they've given us no genes at all. It's extraordinary and very unsettling that we're still finding out at such a fundamental level what human beings actually are and how they relate to each other. The certainty of conventional faith would be much easier. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 16th, 2006
9:56 pm	Language as a Barrier to Communication I used to work for an elite software company, and one of the things I liked most about it was the habit of starting every new project by making up a new language in which to write the new software. At the time I saw this as a purely technical approach from computer science, though with a nod to the Whorfian Hypothesis (that language determines thought) from conventional linguistics. This took a slight knock from Chomsky and his cohorts when they dismissed Whorf's conclusions as just wrong, aggravated by finding that most of his evidence was nonsense too (see urban myth of Inuit languages having more words for snowy things than English does). But there were other nagging oddities in the use of computer languages, especially in that company with its special culture of creative standards so high it was almost impossible to recruit new people, but also in the wider software industry too. The layout of code on the page has been a battlefield for at least thirty years, and although people arguing over it appear to be talking about logic and efficiency, I've never ever heard of anyone changing the way they do it. If it was a matter of reason, I'd expect the arguments to sometimes persuade people. And then there are coding standards, for how to write code so other people can read it, which can run to large books, even bigger than the definition of the language they're for. Most companies have their own version, all incompatible with each other. There's something very wrong in this: a whole industry shouldn't be crippled by the inability of its professionals to write in a single compatible style. Worse than that, my elite software company never made any money, all its ingenuity and talent produced a very distinctive technical culture and group of increasingly exotic programming languages, but was even less successful at its notional purpose of making useful products than the rest of the industry. Something so widespread, involuntary and harmful wouldn't be a minor recent invention (like golf or algebra), it must be built into our brains. And of course it is, computer languages draw on the same brain structures of grammar and symbolism as human languages do. I doubt very much that feral children can ever learn to program well. But officially, human language evolved for communication, so why do computer languages work to prevent it? The trick is that human language was never primarily for communication, it's actually for isolating small groups. This seems unintuitive, but there are clues everywhere: There are about four thousand languages left now, and may have been as many as a hundred thousand in tribal hunter-gatherer times. If its evolutionary or social role was communication, there would be as few as possible, perhaps only one. Languages change very quickly for no good reason, making communication much harder. The big ones have recently been stabilised somewhat by writing (unwritten ones have been seen to go incomprehensible in a few generations, compare the difference between Chaucer and Shakespeare with the difference between Shakespeare and us), but they still change. They shift vowel sounds (English), lose all their endings and have to imply them with tones (Mandarin), adopt the word order of unrelated neighbouring languages (the Balkan group), drop words that sound like the names of people who've died (Australian Aboriginal languages), replaced prepositions with inflection (Latin) and then replace inflection back to prepositions again (French). The changes are endlessly varied in weird and, from a communication point of view, completely counter-productive ways. People love to make up new dialects that initially amount to codes which only their friends and relatives can understand. Sometimes it's in the form of new words that allude to a shared experience, but often it's an arbitrary obfuscation, like dropping the leading 's' of words with a consonant as the second letter (Italian) or using "bad" to mean "good" (urban youf). Teenagers' accents diverge: girls shift to neutral middle class because that helps with marrying up the social ladder, while boys adopt the working class accent for their area, preferably a small area. The accent acts like gang colours, formalising an alliance with an entry requirement that's difficult to fake (loosely a shibboleth, though that implies a phoneme that can't be faked because humans have great difficulty with any sounds they didn't hear in their first year of life). Comedians generate catchphrases so easily it's not even always intentional. Audiences seize on any frequently used phrase because it's a badge that isolates them from outsiders. In extreme cases these escape into general use, as the dialect of "Friends" has reached most of the English speaking world, but even then it acts to separate the groups who use it and those who don't. Text speak, a bizarre system for 'abbreviating' words which are easy to type with text completion into new forms which aren't in the dictionary, exists only for the users to show they're not everyone else, and for everyone else to show they're not the users. Though some gestures are derived from the ancestral pre-spoken language and can be used to interpret non-verbal communication such as deception, others vary regionally. People have made them up as secret signs, especially insults or recognition signs, driven by the same brain structures that make them create new spoken or computer languages. The urge to create or modify language is too strong to overcome, the best that can be done in a software house context is to recognise it and try to supply enough unique culture in other ways to save the programmers from needing to express their group identity in ways that lead to bankruptcy. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 12th, 2005
1:42 am	Right and Wrong and Squirrels Having been woken up by radio news, I felt it was polite to listen to at least two stories rather than get up. As it happened they were effectively the same story, both presented with an obvious assumption of right and wrong, but with opposite interpretations. I suspect I'm the only one who saw it that way. The first was about France's current round of self-destruction, and featured a leading Neo-Nazi politician arguing that French people with Algerian ancestry should lose their citizenship and be deported. The case, as ever, hinged on misunderstanding both economics and history, and the interviewer was obviously horrified at the monstrous idea of so favouring white French people over black ones. The second story was about a final plan to save the British red squirrel from being completely replaced by its North American grey cousin. Broad-leaved forests favour the greys too much so they've been surrendered already, but some remaining coniferous enclaves of reds will be defended by culling all the greys within a three mile perimeter. So why are the two cases treated completely differently? The facile answer would be that humans and squirrels are not the same, but we rational adults need a moral worldview sophisticated enough to deal with people and squirrels in a consistent way, not just arbitrary rules. One answer would be the same reason it's more acceptable to eat domestic cattle than endangered tigers. The cattle have minimal genetic diversity so they're individually worth little, whereas each remaining tiger carries a large amount of rare or unique genetic material. Similarly, the red squirrel is separated from the greys by millions of years of accumulated diversity, whereas all people are so closely related that they have almost no separate genetic identity at all. But that's not a good answer because there's no danger of the white French becoming extinct anyway. A better argument is about synergy, the benefits of co-operation in diversity. The grey squirrels make no attempt to co-operate with the reds, they just out-compete them for food. They're like the first European settlers in Tasmania, who wiped out the previous inhabitants, not like their counterparts in North America who (at least initially) learned from and traded with the people already there. So it's reasonable to cull a hostile invader, but not a co-operative fellow citizen. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
7:58 pm	Food, sex and long-term relationships, a phylogenetic view Events of the last four billion years have separated us humans from our more distant relations in some important ways, but we remain tied to other descendants of the primordial self-replicating molecule by the bonds of nutrition and reproduction. There are interesting parallels and differences between these two ways in which we interact with the rest of the life web. Food is good for us in direct proportion to how closely related we are to it. At the low end, we can't digest viruses because they're such remote relations that they don't even appear in standard tree-of-life diagrams (apart from the not-being-alive thing). Bacteria are at least uncontroversially alive, but little use to us as food. Coming up to the organisms that only diverged from us in the last billion years, plants do us good, but it's impractical to live entirely on them. Fungus gets us 11 of our favourite 12 amino acids, but it's the animals that really suit our nutritional needs. Even within those, jellyfish are worth less than proper fish and birds, and our mainstays are the other mammals, preferably the placentals. Yet we stop short of the logical conclusion of using other homo sapiens, and preferably close relatives, as our main food supply. Though many cultures have included cannibalism, particularly of family members, that's always been more symbolic or religious than a matter of nutrition. And the same applies to other creatures, cannibalism examples from tadpoles and spiders to lions are always primarily part of some other mechanism, usually reproduction, rather than basic food intake. So, bearing that odd mixture of distant attraction and proximate repulsion in mind, let's look at how we choose mates in the same way as food. Most creatures need tricks such as courtship rituals to avoiding dating outside their species, but since we're gifted with both intelligence and having eliminated all other humanoid species long ago, we have no trouble recognising mates of our species (ignoring overly dark discos). As with food, we need to avoid partners so different that they might not be inter-fertile, but we also have the widespread incest taboo that discourages the apparently logical desire to spread our genes by pairing with people who share them. It's difficult now to separate the cultural and instinctive aspects of the taboo, but there are some clues as to how it works. One is the tendency for siblings raised apart to happen to meet as adults and unknowingly marry. Statistically this should virtually never happen by chance, but there are several cases, which makes it count as common in this context. This suggests people choose similar mates when they can, and very similar ones if they haven't been inhibited by long-term contact already. Another example is from the Israeli kibbutzes, where unrelated children are raised communally and then don't marry when they grow up. It looks as though they see the kids they grew up with as siblings, again suggesting the incest taboo is triggered not by anything genetic, but by prolonged social contact. So, what happens in the apparently benign case of unrelated people who grow up separately, meet as adults, fall madly in love, and settle down to live happily ever after? After some variable period, usually from 5 to 20 years, they can't stand each other and get the divorce. That's like spending a child's lifetime together, with the programming that tells us people we see every day are relatives, and therefore not suitable for mating. In the past we would have died at thirty and not noticed, but now it's kind of awkward to have a long-term relationship taboo instinct. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 14th, 2005
6:34 pm	A horse, a horse, my goddess for a horse Discussions elsewhere raise the question of who to blame for the patriarchal sexism so deep in modern Occidental culture that we can't remember where it came from. Cases could be made against the usual suspects of: the Classical world, the Old Testament, the original cities of Mesopotamia, or the Neolithic Revolution of agriculture, but I have a growing suspicion about the proto Indo Europeans. The Indo European language group, that now dominates not only India and Europe but their former conquests around the world, comes from origins thick in controversy. My preference is the steppes of Central Asia around 7000 BC, which falls within the range of most claims. One of the odd things about this massively successful and expansionist language group is that its growth doesn't seem linked to the spread of agriculture, which generally explains the expansion of other big groups (e.g. in China and Central America). Europe already had cereal farming before the Indo Europeans arrived, and Central Asia isn't a good source of crop farming anyway. So this group must have had some very powerful advantage to allow it to spread out, and of course we've been seeing new peoples burst out of the steppes for millennia since then, overwhelming settled populations in the surrounding areas by virtue of horse power. These recent cavalry have conquered the same areas as the Indo European language group, from the Hephthalite Huns who took out an Indian civilisation to their cousins under Attila who made it to France. More recently, they've brought a new non Indo European language into Europe as the Hungarian of the Magyars. But the expansion of the original Indo Europeans dwarfs the later achievements of even the greatest Mongol Khans: they must have had a special advantage. Why did their form of horsepower trump agriculture? The second thread here is the peculiarity that horses can be trained for riding. This isn't like the domestication of other animals, which is based on slightly redirecting their natural behaviours (dogs worship pack leaders, sheep like to follow each other, cats want to be spoiled kittens), as wild horses would never react well to another creature climbing on their backs. So horses were probably domesticated in two stages, firstly the same way as cows and sheep, making them tame enough to raise for food, but secondly and uniquely, in a way that makes them able to learn to be ridden by humans. Standard domestication happened independently to different species all over the world, but this riding thing is very unusual indeed, and I'd guess it only happened once (so, for example, zebras can't be trained for riding however hard you try). One horse had a mutation that made it ridable, and the lucky owners realised its huge value and bred from it to change the whole species, as it eventually replaced both wild and food horses. The military benefit of having riding horses before anyone else allowed the group with them to expand to dominate the known world (or at least all the parts of it suitable for horses). Forensic analysis of modern languages allows reconstruction of the ancestral Indo European, which is not a precise exercise but throws up an interesting concentration of words related to horses. This shows they had horses before spreading out and losing contact with each other, and also suggests horses were important to them. And the association of horses with power continues into modern languages. "Chivalry" and the aristocratic rank of "chevalier" come from the French for horse, just as the Latin "equites" for the upper middle classes (usually translated as knight) comes from equus. For a cultural rather than linguistic example, in traditional Indian weddings the groom must arrive on horseback: he doesn't have to be strong or intelligent but he needs to claim the power of the riding classes. So, one tribe 9000 years ago was able to spread its language, and therefore almost certainly its culture (though mostly not its genes), to the majority of the modern world. What else did they give us? At this point we lose even a tenuous connection with known historical fact and get into speculation, generally based on personal preference. Perhaps the pre Indo European cultures were more female-based, and the horse lords replaced that with male values. There are just a few clues. The pre Indo European Picts survived in Scotland into historical times when they overlapped the Roman Conquest. They're known now for their custom of female inheritance that extended to their royal line. Unfortunately I heard recently this is being questioned and revised, as the past is one of the most malleable areas of the soft sciences, so it may not be good evidence. The Etruscans are another example, who managed to pass a little of their culture to the Romans before being eliminated, but the only image of them I now recall is the she-wolf suckling a feral Romulus and Remus, which could be allegorical of almost anything. The Finns are another, and do have the unusual mythological theme of each male hero being backed up by a mother who is even stronger and more powerful than he is. The Basques are the fourth, and it would be fun to look into anything remaining of their old culture as it seems to have hints of Mesolithic hunter/gathering that certainly predates Indo European influence. This is probably linked to their rough mountainous homeland being not suitable for farming, but it's also not ideal for horses. On the other side, is there anything particularly male-oriented about the Indo Europeans? I'd guess expanding by horse power would lead that way, putting value on aggression and physical strength which other cultural expansions (e.g. farming or pottery) might do less. Another test would be to check their reconstructed language for male/female elements, but I don't have the expertise or bandwidth to do that properly. As a casual observation, I notice that the words for father, mother and brother form a group that's different to sister, in at least English, Latin, French and German: but probably not significant. There are also clues in religion, with the French enthusiasm for Mary over Jesus at least partly traceable to an earlier Goddess tradition. The Norse mythos is also suspicious in laying the very boyish warrior Aesir (Odin, Tyr, Thor) on top of the older fertility gods and goddesses, the Vanir (Frey and Freya). It would be fun to research this rather than rely on the vagaries of memory, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Let me know how it turns out. 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Wednesday, October 12th, 2005
11:35 am	Eves and Intelligence Design by Intelligent Design There are several individual prehistoric women who tend to be called Eve for magazine cover reasons. 80,000 years ago was Out-of-Africa Eve, the one woman in the small band that crossed the Red Sea at the Gates of Grief who became the mother of all non-Africans now alive. And 150,000 years ago was Mitochondrial Eve, the last woman to be the female ancestor of all modern humans. But these Eves are mothers of the race in only a physical sense, providing the unbroken line of live cells that we're made of. The much more significant part of being human is to be intelligent, and that's the end of a road taken much earlier. Brain size tripled in the last two million years, and most of that growth is intellectual rather than just matching body size changes. Tripling is a huge change, unknown in other animals (ruling out most possible causes as they'd apply to other creatures too), and far more than can be explained by natural selection, survival of the fittest, which kills only a small and somewhat random proportion of each generation. The only engine that can drive evolution so quickly is a runaway spiral of mate selection for a new trait. Taking advantage of the large number of "spare" males in the 50/50 sex distribution, a species can change very quickly by using just a few alpha males in each generation to father the whole of the next generation. Although essentially all the females breed, this filtering of the males for only the best has the effect of scrubbing out not only bad but even the mediocre genes in each lifetime. In peacocks this causes the ridiculously impractical male display tail, by females choosing them and males needing to compete in tail complexity even if it kills them (which it does when they can't escape their predators because of it). But the spiral is relatively slow because the male tail and the female taste for the tail have to develop separately. Intelligence is different in that females can only judge competing males for it by developing it themselves. So once mate selection for intelligence starts, it goes faster and faster until the brain is so big that it becomes too much of a disadvantage (initially in terms of energy cost, leading to a reduction from about 200,000 years ago, but more recently from the tendency to get into trouble with it). And the spiral had to start at a single moment. Somewhere in Africa two million years ago was the origin of what it means to be human, not with a big black monolith from space, but with one woman choosing her mates not for strength or beard-length or a charming expression, but for intelligence. By starting the intelligent design of intelligence itself, that Eve was our most important mother. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 5th, 2005
12:24 pm	Gilgamesh and the Black Sea Flood When I was a lad I read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story, about the hero-king of Uruk and his quest for eternal life. At the time I was vaguely aware of its landscape as mostly historical, Mesopotamia at the time of the first civilisation. The inclusion of Utnapishtim and his wife, sole survivors of a much earlier flood, was obviously a reference to an earlier unwritten myth, as well as a probable ancestor of the Noah story. But the real implications escaped me. Then Communism fell and Russian archaeology was opened up to the West, including undersea surveys of the Black Sea. It was astonishing: they'd found human settlements on the banks of the drowned Danube, over a hundred meters beneath the waves. We can now reconstruct what happened there. During the last Ice Age sea level fell below the current channel at Istanbul, separating the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. With its Northern tributaries drying up under the icesheets the Black Sea largely evaporated, becoming a basin containing a small lake. As the ice retreated and humans in that area developed agriculture, they found the fertile basin ideal for the dense new populations farming could now support. But sea level was rising, and the ocean slowly advanced towards the Dardanelles dam. About 5750 BC the Mediterranean came over the cliffs in a waterfall that would be impressive even to us, with our television, travel and computer-generated special effects. To anyone seeing it then it would have been an unimaginable cataclysm. But the basin was very big, it took about a year to fill, and the water advanced horizontally only about a mile each day. People could outrun it, as long as they avoided the trap of low hills not high enough to remain islands. So a large population of farmers flowed out of the basin, perhaps fighting for other farmland, perhaps changing back into hunter-gatherers and seeing their population crash. They would certainly have been traumatised by the experience and told their grandchildren about it. But is there an echo of this in the story of Gilgamesh? The timing is a stretch, written down by about 2800 BC it would have been an oral tradition for a while before that, and the Utnapishtim insertion would be older too, probably somewhere between 3000 and 4000 BC. The detail that made me go "Eek" when I put it together with the archaeology is what Gilgamesh does to get eternal life when he meets Utnapishtim. He dives to the bottom of the sea and collects a magic plant growing there. We're familiar with the idea of treasure under the sea, from at least the time of Shakespeare who makes many references to it, but that's probably because we have a tradition of sea-going ships carrying valuable cargo and sinking. The inland Mesopotamians of the first cities didn't have that reference, so why would they think the great prize is underwater? And why a plant, rather than gold, or lapis lazuli, or anything else they actually prized as treasure? It's a myth of drowned farmland, told by hunter-gatherers who knew their ancestors had lived on Neolithic crops, lost to a flood that seemed like the end of the world. And if this is an example of history-become myth lasting 2500 years, are there others? Real languages fragment into mutually incomprehensible new languages, and without writing this happens in just a few centuries, perhaps quickly enough that people could remember it happening as the Babel story. There are drowned land myths all over the Northern hemisphere, where land was submerged after the ice age. More extremely, Australians have been isolated since early in the development of language, perhaps the Dreamtime was a time before verbal self-awareness. More more extremely, all the humans who came out of Africa went around the world by following the coastlines, much the best source of food before agriculture. Now we all have a fascination with the seaside. How deep do our cultures go? (1 Comment |Comment on this)