Review of Our Kind by Marvin Harris

[note, if anyone read the first draft of this...I'm sorry.]

So much of history, as it's usually presented, is either a local microcosm or a culturally specific snapshot, it fails to capture the big (the big impersonal) picture of the human experience. Philosophy follows a similar flaw of intimacy, driving for a first-principals explanation of the human condition, proceeding from axioms created in our skulls to as many future conditional progressive tenses as may be (here's how I think I think, therefore, here's how society should work). I am liking the empirical perspective lately, that is, the anthropological one, observing the evidence of human coexistence and making inductive generalizations from the pattern of the data. It's been my growing conviction that for all the myriad ways we're fucked up on an individual level, human behavior in the aggregate is a lot more predictable and explainable than six billion partisans would have you believe.

In Our Kind, Marvin Harris moves quickly to an important distinction in this explanation, in truth another one I've been wrestling with: that cultural evolution is different than the biological sort, faster, and even if it's not working through genetics, it's force is similarly powerful. Harris describes how cultural development as an unconscious, collective means to most efficiently realize our various biological imperatives. The species is, more or less, equally endowed, but we react in different ways to the externalities of different communities: different availabilty of proteins, vitamins, and heat sources, differnt population density, different history, and varying degrees of feasibility that somewhere else exists to go. The outlines of politics and culture derive from these parameters. He puts the lie to fertility as a biological imperative, digging up anthropological evidence and biological analogies to show that humans are more wired more for sex than we are for babies, and develops the consequences. He pokes at race as an artifical construct. Our body shapes and colors over the generations correlate more to local geography than our ethnic heritage, both because of cultural selection and extensive interbreeding (Jews, he notes in an example, generally look more like the locals than they do Jews elsewhere, which is maybe one hint that journalists should be careful not to casually conflate ethnography with genomes.)

It gets touchy in parts. Harris outlines ways in which early societies dealt with population pressures, reducing the idea of war to a means to deal with this, and correlating that with misogyny. Preservation of a warrior class limits population more than in the obvious way, Harris says, and includes selection for male heirs for the patriarchy, pushing toward female infanticide as a remarkably common device, even in modern times. Historically, life has officially begun at the point parents decided to keep the child, sometimes months ex utero. He questions the cost of misogyny in terms of male life expectancy (along with the contemporary unwillingness to question this), paints government as an inevitable consequence of animal domestication.

I don't think any of the above discussions are comfortable, but the cases are strong. His religious angle is perhaps the most sensitive. He describes "killing" religions, entailing animal and human sacrifice, as a development of a means of protein redistribution, drawing patterns across the globe from Aztecs to the Vedic to the Pacific island traditions. The non-killing faiths he paints as reactionary creeds developed to address the failure of the faiths that passed out meat, usually in response to specific political pressures. He draws a line from here directly to subjugation empire, implicating the gentler religions as a direct enabler of military powers. Why? Because making a virtue of poverty and delaying material rewards past death suits would-be emperors brilliantly. The first act of conquest of non-killers, cites Harris, is to convert to the non-killing faith, as true of Christianity, as of Jainism, as of Buddhism. The proscription against killing, historically, has been easy enough to circumvent, but the faith in ethereal rewards much harder to shake, and murderous zealots have been useful tools of tyrants. (One amusing point: even as Harris constructs a general condemnation of religioun that quite clearly includes the Pauline faiths, he sticks with the western conceit of weighting Biblical history toward the factual, using Christian-formal terms like 'year of Our Lord', and citing that holy book, and only that one, using chapter and verse. It's got to be force of habit.)

Stylistically, Marvin Harris both worked for me and didn't. His ultra-short sections--the book is five hundred pages long, but every third page was a blank title--got right to the point, but they were so brief and un-footnoted, that it lent to a less than scholarly feel. It's not that the sections are unresearched: the author has done his share of influential work the field himself, and there is a a detailed bibliography for each tiny chapter in the back. He just doesn't point to it. He also has a penchant for scribbling over his weaker points with anecdote or irritable analogy. For example, he's probably out to lunch on his message of gender identity--not so culturally controlled between sexes as all that--but on the other hand, his message that cultural selection usually satisfies the biological preferences in the aggregate is almost certainly true, and biologically, he's largely divorced sexuality from both reproduction and gender anyway. I admit that I'd be more bothered by his idiosyncratic style if I agreed with less of it.

We all know how short the timeframe of civilization is compared the earth's history, but even our species is young, only around for a hundred thousand years or so. By contrast, our various hominid ancestors populated the earth for about 3 million years. (Our most recent evolutionary analog, the Neandertals were a short-lived species, only lasting about 200 thousand altogether). Even given the age of our genome, sapient, language-using humans have only been evidenced for a fraction of that, about 35,000 years. I can't accept that early humans were any differently intellectually gifted (and neither can Harris, which is why he describes evolution in the cultural sphere). In that short time, we've graduated from the stone tools that our ape-plus ancestors and cousins had used, and covered the earth in dense societies, razing mountains and forests, and erecting countless evidence that we lived. Although we may still fight like animals, we've made a hell of a mark in the short time our kind has been civilizing.

And the big question remains this: are we going somewhere, or have we achieved our ecological niche? According to ideas of punctuated equilibrium, species persist for a long damn time, but originate and fill in their ecological space very quickly. In terms of biological evolution, the fossil record and all that, 35 kiloyears ain't much. We humans are probably still spreading into our role As a conclusion, Harris calls our penchant for empire and evil as the likely inevitable cultural consequences of our nature. Our failures to will into being benevolent governments are a result of the unfortunate statistical average of human action. They've all followed similar paths. Is there hope, he wonders, a conclusion beyond the state? I have to think that there's not going to be any success in regressing pre-state, that the factors that pushed governments into existence--food dependence, population, and circumscription--seem to only drive one way. But here's the thing, the catch: trying to will cultural evolution forward is how our biological imperative works, and there may be a point we haven't yet achieved with it. We're certainly on different ground this time in terms of communication, size, and boundaries. Is there still time to realize a better existence than empire?

I'm not very optimistic actually--existential brinkmanship can't continue forever--but the idea of a better future beyond nation-staes is the hope I can find. Maybe we'll get there.

A Sciencimilitudinous Three-Fer

1. Naughty Economics
You know, there are lots of things I wish I wrote. Happens all the time. More rarely, I encounter stuff that I like to pretend some more sophisiticated, educated, practiced, knowledgable, motivated, and skilled version of myself could pull off--not just what they said, but I'd like to have said it that way too. Readers of this-here blog, and God bless both of you for sticking around this long, might have noticed my sometimes-uneasy fascination when it comes to contrasting things like macroeconomics and demographics against engineering and the physical sciences. Maybe the fact that I'm such a slapdash practitioner of the latter is why those former things appeal in the first place, but I also think, more generally, that quantification and understanding the relationships between variables are important skills for understanding aspects of the world beyond basic science, and I believe that there are patterns in those dynamics that either actually repeat, or that humans are especially adept at recognizing, and that these different schools of understanding should inform each other better than they appear to. And I love nothing better than torturing a scientific metaphor as well, there's always that.

The field of economics adopts phsyics math concepts rather consciously at times, and I've frequently thought I should be able to get some traction there, at least get it up to my shitty physics comprehension. But there's something that's always been niggling at me about the whole damn thing, and in all those posts (and as usual) I sidle up to a point repeatedly, and try to wrestle the language into representing what the hell it is exactly that's bugging me. And so I say that economics just doesn't support the precision it claims. I say it's a behavior model which in many cases fails to model behavior, one that tries to be a phenomenological representation, but that thinking about it that way will only get you so far. Also, I distrust financiers who purport to give me advice, when they own suits that are more expensive than my car. Fuck those guys.

Anyway, I found this paper via a commenter on Balloon Juice, who referenced another blog. You should read the article, it's awesome. I very much enjoyed the discussions of deductive reasoning vs. empiricism (both good things), and I also liked the just-enough-epistemology-to-be-dangerous, including the part acknowledging some continuity between natural sciences and the humanities, so that's why all my friends are engineers and lawyers.* Deirdre McCloskey details the sins of economics, including the virtues that are mistaken for sins (should economists apologize for the urge to quantify? for trying to understand via deductive reasoning? absolutely not!), serious sins, and ultimately the two dark, secret sins:

Economics in its most prestigious and academically published versions engages in two activities, qualitative theorems and statistical significance, which look like theorizing and observing, and have (apparently) the same tough math and tough statistics that actual theorizing and actual observing would have. But neither of them is what it claims to be.

Okay, the article is not perfect; there's always something to complain about. I don't how her Libertarianism has survived, why assumptions about fairness are supposed to be an ennobling (and weakly defended) virtue instead of a perhaps venial sin of naïvete (even if a motivation to fairness is all well and good). But she gives plenty of tools to address what's wrong with this outlook. It's a bit more implicit in her piece, but I might further emphasize a general failure to embrace induction--observing laws based on the data—maybe it's buried in her sin of institutional ignorance (not spending time in the places where economics actually happens), the first serious one not unique to the field, or maybe it's a part of the second secret sin.

[I don't know about her anthropology either. I have never suspected a tendency to exclude impersonal variables in favor of humanist ones, and my limited reading has certainly suggested the opposite. If Marvin Harris and E. O. Wilson (who, okay, is not really an anthropologist) are atypical, then I'm going to have to revise my opinion of the field! The poster at Language Log didn't think her closing comparison with linguistics was apt, either. Oh, and Euler's formula is damn useful in addition to being a particularly elegant expression of pure mathematical theory. Dissention noted.]

The second sin is a discussion of what we choose to measure and say is important, which I think is common everywhere, but when you're dealing with human variables, as you do in ecomics, what matters is inherently subjective. McCloskey tells us that the field has deviated unforgivably from this, and has, almost as a rule, confused statistical significance with either an essential truth, or worse, an essential importance. I appreciate the first argument more: that economic theory is based on pure deduction, heavily dependent on its description of starting conditions and its governing assumptions, both of which can be suspect, and which does not result in a quantitative, measurable result. That's an artifact of my naïve background, of course; my last ten years has been more about exploring the humanism.

None of which means that such an endeavor is not useful and important, just that we should understand what it is.

*that and the life of relative, though not impressive, privilege

2. Inherent Complexity
Dear Deirdre:

"I have to keep saying “pure” because of course it is entirely possible—indeed commonplace—for novelists, say, to take a scientific view of their subjects...Likewise scientists use elements of pure narration...or elements of pure mathematics...to make scientific arguments. I do not want to get entangled in the apparently hopeless task of solving what is known as the Demarcation Problem, discerning a line between science and other activities. It is doubtful such a line exists. The efforts of many intelligent philosophers of science appear to have gotten exactly nowhere in solving it. I am merely suggesting that a science like many other human practices...should be about the world, which means it should attend to the world.

It's not quite where she's going with the quote, but I'm taking a chance on using it as a segue. It's not easy to dispassionately observe the world even in the pure sciences; the fact that we're people is hard to escape. A recent Archdruid Report post was about complexity (I have no intention of latching onto the guy like a remora nibbling up post ideas--it's more that I made a long comment, the only reply to which leaked over here and wrung another long comment out of me. He's been getting the brain working.). He points out some contemporary versions of complexity, and relates it to Joseph Tainter's theories of societal collapse, in which the diminishing returns of bifurcated attempts at problem-solving doom the endeavor at some critical point. It sounds like a reasonable description of how humans behave when they run into problems, and sometimes diversifying the approach isn't going to be enough to overcome a deeper problem (simplification may be—can we branch from an earlier point?). I can't quite get myself to describe collapse is an inevitable consequence of complexity, however. And I think we need to be clear about what complexity actually means.

As I understand it (knowledge! I read a paper yesterday), the usual measure of complexity, pulled from the computational world, is defined as the length of the minimum necessary description of something. As a useful description of the natural universe, of course, this is fucking nuts. Anything can be "minimally described" by nothing more than "that thing." When I describe a pin, it's simple as can be, but I tend to neglect the innumerable quantum mechanical angels dancing around on its head. Nature gets more complex the deeper you look at it. Wheels within wheels, dude, and turtles all the way down. For that matter, some things that look complex are overestimated. A wave looks more complex than a gradient...until you do the appropriate transformation on it. I mean, "complexity" is so obviously and closely tied with our ability to describe something, that working on that definition as a natural phenomenon is a mighty philosophical head-scratcher. You can't have complexity without invoking the ability of humans to represent a system, right?

[And as far as the complexity of finance goes, it doesn't seem to follow Occam's suggestion of a minimum necessary description of trade and investment. That's something beyond what an inherent complexity might be: I think intellectual positions of power within society (whether financiers, academics, or priests) have a temptation to add complication in order to perpetuate their exalted and insulated role. (But don't worry, when I use jargon it's only because it's necessary.) Unnecessary complexity is another word for bullshit.]

And yet....

Complexity really seems like it could be a material property, a thermodynamic variable. We already have entropy, which--and this still blows my mind--has a statistics basis that is related to the information content of something. Maybe call entropy a measure of meaninglessness, or of equivalence. Complexity, if it can be cornered, has got to be something related. And statistical thermo also has some of the same issues that a description of complexity would, namely, how do we account for the all of the microstates (not to mention all the underlying nano-, pico-, femto-, and myrmecological attostates, and so on, all the way down)? The dodge is that any coarse-grained microstate is a superposition of a ridiculous number of quantum mechanical (atto?)states, which end up being equivalent enough for government funding.

I'm going past my own observations now. I'm not the first to head down this path, unsurprisingly, and now I'm specifically looking at some descriptions from a paper by paper by Rojdestvenski et al. (It was the first credible-looking source when I Googled the topic yesterday, and I mean, really, if I knew you could publish irresponsible speculations like this, I'd have quit this thankless paying job long ago. Maybe they were reading my blog? Nah, the dates don't work out.) Unfortunately, I can't link a pdf, but trust me that it introduces itself via a ride on some of my old bloggy hobby horses (shameless self-linking follows), such as admitting an early problem with completeness in describing the information content of something real, the peculiar situation of looking at coded things when we are the expressions of coded things, and entropy vs. evolution. It was a little validating, I admit.

They make a point that complexity, like the usual thermodynamic variables, is better thought of in terms of differential changes anyway (whether any third-law equivalent applies to complexity, who knows). The macro relations hold, in other words, and if complexity is a valid thermodynamic quantity, then this is how it must behave. If you think about things like internal energy, then the microstates aren't generally counted well there either. It's not that unusual, but it still feels weak on what complexity is.

I am a good deal less comfortable with their evasion of that question. They say that DNA, which has an inherent pattern, is independent of our observation, and is thus especially well-described by some (hypothetical) thermodynamic complexity. But doesn't everything have some level of organization? Surely any such material property must apply to non-living systems as well. It reminds me uncomfortably of the crank arguments that say the second law of thermodynamics proves creationism, and for that matter "complexity" is also a buzzword of intelligent design, so who knows what sort of search results I'll get on this one. Rojdestvenski has the opposite agenda, I suppose, and unlike creationists (or irresponsible economists), he (or she) is at least trying to refine a theory that describes evidence. The reason the authors wish to keep complexity in the realm of living things is because they are interested in forming a physics-based description of evolutionary processes, and they draw up some entertaining little cellular automata simuations to describe how evolutionary adaptions to deal with that energy balance might affect the development of populations. But still, even if evolution is unique to living things, I don't believe that complexity is.

I don't know enough about Tainter's ideas to know if they can work with evolutionary theory or not. For some extreme perturbations, the more complex individual (or species) will fail, even while complexity of the whole ecosystem appears to make life itself more robust, just giving us a bigger toolbox of accessible traits and adaptations to adjust to the big change. Evolution appears to increase complexity, but there also should be something to explain that the populations of complex organisms ain't got nothing on the simpler ones--even at this late date the bacteria are outnumbering us, possibly even pound for pound. The authors observe that in their highly limited simulation, highly variable conditions favor simpler organisms. That seems reasonable enough.

And it might also not be a bad shot at imagining how societies end. If the perturbations are big enough, then a more complex system will be less robust, and if I were clearer on what Tainter says, this would be a far better post. I'll go back to this eventually. Maybe in another couple years.

3. Pissed Epistemology
Okay, this is getting long, but since I've cited the thread already, here's a good example of something that's bothered me for a long time. The poster had a great start:

Mental constructions of gardens are much simpler to create than real ones, because putting a theoretical person on a plot of rhetorical soil is just the beginning...

What follows is a description of examples of the challenge of understanding a small agricultural ecosystem, much of which is ignored by industrial-scale farming, which, I'll bet you a lap in the nearest shit lagoon, is at our long-term peril. Gardening is a complex effort, even in the human-limited language of the comment. But clearly, gardening is technology. Hawk1eye starts advocating a better, deeper level of understanding, and the conclusion, to "chuck the idea that the best way to proceed is by working the industrial teeter-totter of 'empirical observations' leading to 'theoretical formulation'" just doesn't follow from those kinds of arguments. I mean seriously, if we want to entertain the idea of intuitively listening to the land instead of gaining an understanding and keeping track of what works and what's real, then let's start shitting in the wild, eating random berries, and take our best chance at surviving the first cold night. What, all of a sudden we have to observe and be careful? Well, no shit! So how should we know how much to observe, and how are you going to justify how much? If there's one bottom-line lesson I learned from nearly a decade of engineering edjumication is that intuition is something that's earned.

Here's my broader complaint: I hate it when people try to invoke reason to dismiss reason. People arguing something like intelligent design will often try to corner you in a rational-esque Encyclopedia Brown kind of gotcha moment. "Hey, it couldn't be that complex without thwarting thermodynamics, so therefore God made it six thousand years ago. Huh? Am I right?" Faith isn't necessarily such a bad thing, but when it's willfully pitted against science (which is really just an organized attempt to be descriptive), sometimes I wish they'd go full-on mystic and be done with it.

It's a similar phenomenon as demanding authority to regulate authority. Maybe it works when it's different authority with a different constituency, or if you're reasoning around different observations or assumptions, but you know, if that's what you're saying, then go ahead and say that. For a guy who doesn't know much philosophy, I realize that using rational argument to probe the nature of rationality (to uncover paradoxes and such) is valid enough, but that's a slightly different animal than using reason to prove non-reason. If arguments in general are not valid, then neither are the arguments making that case. (And maybe a contradiction like that can be derived from some advanced thinking--those knowledge paradoxes again—but those don’t really deny the thinking that got them there, and I don't think what we're talking about incorporates quite that much thought--on the practical human scale, it's well past the why-bother point.)

Describing our epistomologies and ontologies while using those same things is a formidible challenge, but making the effort to do so is both reasonable and important. Like Deirdre said, the asking of the why is no sin.