Nature

I hoisted this from comments…because I can. (Although you should read comment 101 by Jenna Moran in the previous thread as well.) Also, because people often covertly stipulate that men could “amass resources from which to provide for children” on the veldt, and I’d really like to see that…ah…fleshed out a little more because piles of rotting food≠sexy times, unless YOU’RE MOLE! Well, I suppose moles are more plausibly relevant than spiders; at least they’re mammals about whom Kafka has written depressing stories. Oh wait, by that logic cockroaches are back in. Sort of. Whatever. Also, I apologize in advance for the profanity which is going to get CT banned from the Panera Bread wifi and which we were wont to employ in the past only when complaining in the most vehement terms about torture. Now that CT has gone downhill and isn’t a serious academic blog anymore what with the lady-posting about all the lady-topics that only affect ladies, such as human reproduction, I’m just busting out with profanity all over the place. If this is causing anyone any actual problems please contact me.

One thing one might wish to consider is what the actual economic/social conditions were like back in the Environment of Early Adaptation? Well, the real answer is that we have no idea, but a not totally implausible answer is that the most similar existing societies are those who live in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung, and (apparently) less ¡exciting! tribes in the Amazon. In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.

Generally, the gathering (mostly done by women) provides 80% of the average adults’ calories and the hunting (mostly done by men) 20%. That’s on average, and the protein is obviously important, so… Now, being the all-that best hunter in the tribe can convince lots of laydeez to have sex with you. Is this because they want your resources? No, because every motherfucking-body shares the food, Holmes. Shares the motherfucking food. They don’t want your resources—-though they probably wouldn’t say no to you getting the oysters off that roast wild turkey for them. They want your hot body. Why are you so good at hunting? You’re in the pink. A fine physical specimen, keen of eye, etc.

Now, if you, hypothetical armchair evolutionary psychologist, are very, very good, I might allow you to construct a loooong chain of argument by analogy, in which being the best hunter=social capital, and monetary capital today=social capital. Note, however, that you will be forced to leave out all the bits about “providing” for the offspring and so forth, and be left with something more along the lines of birds that do stupid dances to garner sexual attention, and the great engines of modern capital will turn out to be the baroque construction of a thousand bower-birds working at cross-purposes. Which, granted, not totally implausible.

“No but food’s important,” I hear armchair evolutionary psychologist cry. Yes. Food. Totes important. We’re all together on this one. So maybe fucking the best hunter does get you (as female hunter-gatherer) a bit of extra food. (Note that everyone’s far from starving or they could just put in a little more time looking for food, which they do not, because they’d rather hang around poking the fire with a sharp stick or creating oral epics.) Then maybe you’d want the best hunter to think your kid was his so your kid would get extra food too. But life is short, and being the best hunter doesn’t last forever, maybe you better fuck that likely young up-and-comer with the blue feather in his hair. And then again, truth be told, strength isn’t everything, and that guy who used to be the best hunter a few years back knows a trick or two, if things were to get rough, might be useful. You know what you should really do here? Fuck every last member of the tribe who isn’t your dad or your brother, and convince each and every one of them that he is your special little schnookie-boo, and separately at various times of the day give each of them a blushing, downcast look which indicates he is the still point of your turning world.

And that explains why women are all total sluts to this very day, and why people who think that the veldt predisposes women to sleep with old men who have lots of money appear to have forgotten about the perishability of food items, and the non-utility/replaceability of almost all other items, and the fact that there was no money then. The End.

P.S. My husband came up with the “ad hominid” formulation and deserves full credit.

I was talking to a friend in the trade policy world this weekend, who told me that he understands that Canada will indeed be taking a “WTO action”:http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2009/05/05/eu-seal-ban-505.html seeking remedy for the EU’s ban on the importation of seal products, imposed because of the perceived cruelty of clubbing baby seals to death so as to get their skins off intact. Apart from the innate merits of the underlying argument (which you can discuss in comments to your heart’s content), this should (unless Stephen Harper loses his job in the meantime and the new government loses interest) really, really have some interesting effects on debates over world trade and globalization. Screw the turtles – when anti-WTO protest groups are able to run full page newspaper ads with adorable baby seal cubs, they’re going to be in a truly excellent position to wage public relations war. All the more so when the Canadian counterposition (that the seals are killed humanely) turns on the legal requirement that the baby seals should have stopped blinking before the hunters start skinning them. Perhaps Stephen Harper should have applied similar attention to the current state of the Doha round – I don’t see it moving around very much at the moment, but it does still blink occasionally. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be the _coup de grace_ for trade liberalization this decade and the next (which does not, of course, mean that it would be the most important explanatory factor if trade liberalization grinds to a halt, merely one of the significant immediate causes).

“It’s been there for a few days, apparently”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2008/oct/10/wildlife-conservation . But I first heard this morning. Someone took me round the side of the building where I work and there it was. So big and powerful, I could hardly believe it. Snoozing for now, oblivious to the stream of people passing by to take a look. You almost wonder whether small children would be safe in the vicinity. Not the kind of thing you ordinarily see in the middle of an English city.

Update: I took some pictures this morning ….

The BBC “tells us”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6956867.stm

bq. Tyrannosaurus rex would have been able to outrun a footballer, according to computer models used to estimate running speeds of dinosaurs.

But which one? Outrunning some footballers would be no great achievement. More to the point, would T. rex have been able to control the ball and get a decent cross into the box? Those who have followed the career of the Danish winger Dennis Rommedahl know that speed isn’t everything.

Here is a likely poorly-specified question for biologists, prompted by wanting to buy Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us and then reading a story about genetically modified mice. Weisman’s book asks how the world would change and what of us would survive if humans were all wiped out overnight or just disappeared by something (a virus, the Rapture). The premise is unlikely (something that kills people — all people — but leaves the rest of the world standing) but intriguing.

So I wondered, what if, long, long after our disappearance, some other species arose on earth at least as intelligent as us and eventually started doing evolutionary and molecular biology. Let’s say they have a working theory of evolution much like our own. Now say for the sake of argument that a bunch of transgenic organisms produced by humans have survived and prospered in the interim. So our future biologists find things like a bacteria that produces insulin, or a plant that secretes insecticide, or rice that is high in beta carotene, or more exotic stuff as needed.[1]

I’m wondering, would such organisms even present themselves as empirical anomalies? (That is, how much would you have to know about genomes and evolution for them to seem odd?) And if they did seem odd, how would they be explained? That is, would the evidence of their intelligent design by a previous, now-extinct species be clear? You can see that I’m just irony-mongering here. Would some Arthropod-staffed functional-equivalent of the Discovery Institute point its claw at some of these organisms, saying they were anomalies that could only be explained by the intervention of a divine intelligence? Would Charles Crustacean find a story that could account for their evolution by natural selection? I’m particularly interested in whether the artificial provenance of transgenic organisms would be clear on internal evidence alone. I don’t know anything about this stuff, so probably the answer is “Yes” for reasons obvious to experts. But if it weren’t …

From the sound of Weisman’s book, though, internal evidence wouldn’t be all that was available. Our putative Arthropod successors would likely be able to conjecuture as follows: “The lost civilization who did this is probably the same one responsible for leaving those giant goddamn piles of steel-belted rubber rings and miscellaneous plastic items piled around the place.” To which someone would no doubt reply, “Come off it, no organism that spent its time making rubber tubes and piling them up in giant mountains would have ever been smart enough to figure out genetic engineering.”

[1] It occurs to me that rice requires a lot of cultivation to prosper, but there aren’t any humans to take care of it. Hence, “insert example as needed.”

Before I get evacuated (not a completely crazy idea with the sheriff right outside my office), I thought I’d post just how quickly fire can spread depending on the circumstances.

I realize those are not on the same scale, but the surrounding trees should help identify the areas. Understand that I was just trying to do some work this afternoon and then headed out periodically to take some pictures. I didn’t set up shop for a sequence.

The distance between the fire and the nearest road is quite big so eventually the firetrucks just had to head up on the hill.

The above photos would convey things much better if I added lots of helicopter noise, but I should get back to work…

And I promise not to clutter the blog with future dish fire photos. I might be inclined to if the fire got any closer, but if that were to happen, I am certain we’d be evacuated immediately anyway.

Just this morning I was contemplating how horrible it must be for the people who suddenly lost their homes in the fire around Lake Tahoe. By the afternoon I was watching firefighters from my office window battle flames on Stanford’s hills.

I was sitting at my desk already unable to work having just received word about the death of Peter Marris, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA, dear husband of Dolores Hayden who was a fellow Fellow at CASBS this year. The two of them had to end their year at the Center early, because Peter was sick, but I don’t think any of us expected things to escalate so quickly.

Unable to concentrate on work, I turned around to look at the beautiful view from my office. I spotted some big red flames. Soon I realized that a large area around it was completely black with smoke and flames on the periphery. Eventually sirens and helicopters appeared, as did firefighters. Some of the smoke was now white not just black, apparently a good sign. But not all the black smoke disappeared and an hour later there was still much activity. I went to an event and by the time I got back to my office, another hillside was completely black (see the difference in the left area of the two photos above).

How quickly things can change.