Evolution on multiple scales

I really liked the part of emergence that compared cities to brains. I’ve always wondered about this type of concept: what sorts of things can experience evolution? In an earlier part of Emergence, the author stated that anything that reproduces imperfectly and is faced with conditions that create a struggle for resources can evolve. So, one could then say that, for instance, our cells experience evolution. An individual cell needs energy, which it gets from the food broken down in our bodies, to survive. Also, our bodies only get a finite amount of energy at any given time, so one could imagine that some sort of competition exists between our cells to get a hold of this energy. After all, a cell that is better programmed to get at the food it needs is able to survive longer, and replicate (except in the case of brain cells, I think). So why don’t the cells in our stomach, which get the first dibs on food, selfishly take it all for themselves? It better ensures their survival, at least in the short run, to not share. So why do they share?

You can’t answer this question by examining it at the level of the cells themselves. You have to look at the larger structure: the human being. I have no idea how these cells got together and decided to form this larger structure, but once they did, it became in their favor, in the long-term this time, to not be selfish. If our cells all rebelled against the system and tried to hoard all of the food for themselves, we would die, which would mean they would die. So we have natural selection, and evolution, happening on two very different scales here. And it is obvious by the fact that we can walk and talk that the larger scale predominates. Why would the larger scale predominate, and what does this imply about even higher orders of evolution?

I imagine that higher orders of evolution predominate over longer time scales. Natural selection acts over the scale of generations. Generation times are much much shorter for cells than for humans. So, one could theoretically expect cell evolution to be important over shorter time spans, time spans we don’t care about. But over the time scales that matter to us, our evolution wins out. Now, what about higher time scales? Eventually, if the inhabitants of a city run rampant, without regard to a higher social order, the city will be destroyed, or at least, not worth living in. One could say that there is an evolution occurring amongst cities. They compete for resources, and those that compete best survive the longest. One could say that only those with “smart inhabitants” (analogous to “smart cells”—ones that aren’t completely selfish) will survive and prosper. One problem I see with this idea is the following: do cities really meet all the conditions for evolution that Dawkins described in The Selfish Gene? Specifically, in what way do cities evolve? It could just be that cities have an indefinitely long generation time, so the question is not “Who can best reproduce” but instead “Who can live the longest?” I don’t know. What do you think?

Tank, no tank, tank, no tank...

This book looks awesome. I was particularly interested in the idea that programs can evolve in the same way living things evolve through natural selection. The idea came from Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, in which he stated that in order to see evolution by selection, all you need is variation in a population, a way for members of the population to reproduce, and for them to reproduce imperfectly. If you then have a way to selecting force (such as limited resources) for “fitter” attributes, you can drive evolution. The idea that you can do this with computers sounds so cool. You can model situations that are so mathematically complex that it would be very difficult to find the best possible parameters using your own logic. For instance, say you want to build an ideal airplane wing. Now, the aerodynamics of those things are a bitch to figure out, so you can’t expect to figure out the best design through your own calculations. So what you do is write a program that takes a bunch of different airplanes with different types of wings, and it makes them fly. Then, it takes the ones that fly the best and it lets them reproduce in such a way that the planes’ “offspring” are similar, but not the same as the parents. You repeat this process over and over, and then in the end, you are (theoretically) left with airplane wings that fly really well. You then look at the parameters of the wings, and you build your real wing based off those parameters. It sounds genius. It is, however, very complicated, and can produce unintended results, as my engineering-major boyfriend pointed out. Consider this:

The US military was trying to find a way to be able to tell whether or not a tank was hiding in some particular area. So, they thought they might apply this idea of evolving programs to design a program that could learn to read a picture and figure out whether a tank is hiding in it. So what they did was go out one day and take thousands of picture: tank, no tank, tank, no tank, etc… They came back, and they fed these pictures to the program. Now, the program started out really dumb—it had no idea what was a tank and what wasn’t, so the program initially guessed randomly whether there was or wasn’t a tank present. So in making it’s predictions, the computer messed up a lot at first. But the programmers were patient. Every time the computer messed up, the programmers let it know, so it redesigned its schema to better fit the definition of “tank” vs. “no tank”. Eventually, the computer was able to perfectly tell which pictures had tanks and which did not. To make sure the computer was not just memorizing the pictures, they saved a couple that they did not show to the computer until the end, and it managed to get those right as well. So, the military was very happy because they thought they had made the computer learn the difference between tank and no tank. Then, as a final test, they went out and took some new tank & no tank pics and showed them to the computer. They were unpleasantly surprised: the computer had gone back to being dumb again—it got just as many wrong as right. What happened? Why could the computer figure out the first group of images but not the second? It turned out that in the first group of images, all of the “tank” pictures had been taken in the morning, but all of the “no tank” pictures had been taken later in the day. They hadn’t taught the computer the difference between tank and no tank: they had taught it the difference between day and night! Just a reminder of how complex these things are…

HTML 2 class

I attended an HTML 2 class a while back, and I was just too lazy to post about it until now. It was pretty interesting; I learned how to make my web page valid and all that good stuff. The most interesting thing was learning about how HTML is basically just defining the layout of the page and for telling google spiders and such the main parts of the site, which is used to generate keywords. In terms of the actual content, one then uses other services, such as Dreamweaver and Fireworks. The class will hopefully be useful with respect to my final project; I am a bit more comfortable with the HTML code so I should be able to edit the source directly when I need to.

McDonalds makes people unhappy? Please!

On Thursday, we began watching Lost in Translation. We were supposed to look at it through the frame of Augé’s nonplaces. According to Augé, a nonplace is a space that lacks connections through history or identity. People in these nonplaces are using the spaces simply as means to an end—for instance, an airport is just used for transit. A Starbucks is used to get coffee and get the hell out of there (at least, it is for many people). For Bill Murray’s character, Tokyo was definitely a nonplace. He didn’t want to be there; he was just there to make a quick buck filming a commercial. Whether it was a place or a nonplace for Scarlett Johansson’s character is a bit less clear. She had no obvious purpose for being there; she was just following her husband for his work.

A possible argument one could make with respect to the film is that the nonplaceness of Tokyo adds to the characters’ feelings of sadness and being alone. The city is very commercial; the characters move around it, seeing all of the people and all of the lit up signs, without really understanding what is going on—they don’t know the language or the people. One could argue that globalization and commercialism isolates the characters further and takes away feeling. However, this is not necessarily true. For example, when Scarlett Johansson’s character visits a Buddhist temple, she later calls her friend (or family member) and tells them that she felt nothing in the temple. If a Buddhist temple is not a place by Augé’s definition, I don’t know what is. One could argue that the effects of globalization were lasting on her, and rendered her unable to feel even when she left the nonplace. That argument seems grossly unfair, however. If one could use that argument, then how could one ever possibly disprove the hypothesis that globalization leads to these characters’ malaise?

Ignoring globalization, one can develop a reasonable theory as to why Scarlett Johansson’s character is unhappy. First of all, she is a recent college graduate with a major that offers little opportunity to find a job that is as intellectually satisfying as the field itself. It seems a little strange, given that the character seemed quite intellectual, that she did not continue on in graduate school intending to do academia. Now, I’m not a psych major, but I am inclined to say that she is very much not self-actualized. First of all, she is only 22 or so, and she has been married for 2 years. If my math is correct, that means she got married when she was a sophomore or junior in college. Now, I know this works fine for some people, but it is incredibly dangerous to get married at such a young age if you don’t know who you are. Judging by the fact that she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, I would guess she doesn’t know who she is. So, getting married at 20 was a bad idea. And she seems to be thinking so herself, based on her phone call to her friend in which she said “it’s like I don’t even know the man I married.” No wonder she seems unhappy—and it doesn’t matter if she’s in a Buddhist temple or in the biggest McDonalds in the world, she’s still going to be plagued with these problems.

Her attitude in this, and the overall tone of the movie, reminded me a lot of a poem by Charles Baudelaire called Spleen. In it, he expresses feelings of ennui and unhappiness with no obvious origin. The narrator in this poem says it is Nature herself who seems to be pressing upon him and causing his unhappiness. Now, to be fair, he had no globalization to blame—this was written in the 1800’s. I’m just using this as an example of my overall theory (which agrees with what I think John said in class) that people make their own unhappiness. They just also look for something convenient to blame.

The relativity of place

I was walking on good old State Street this morning, and I saw a girl walking from Starbucks back to the Towers, carrying a grande no-whip something or other. She was dressed in a very coastie manner, sunglasses and all, looking straight ahead at her destination and ignoring all those around her. State Street, at least for her, is certainly a non-place. She was using it simply as transit between her apartment and Starbucks. I figured State Street would be worth further study as a non-place. So, I returned later today to see what I could find. What I found did not at all support my hypothesis that State Street was a non-place. I saw people sitting around with their dogs, talking to each other and enjoying the above-freezing temperatures. Scanner Dan was there as well, offending some group of girls near Einstein's. It was too cold for the Piccolo Guy or the crazy sci-fi spraypainter, but from what I saw, it was pretty clear that State Street has a definite culture, years in the making. I would consider State Street to be the heart of Madison, and I love it. So it is impossible for me to see State Street as a non-place. However, I would say that it was a non-place for the coastie girl was pretty undeniable. So, I have to conclude that place vs. non-place is really just relative. It depends on who is using it, and perhaps just on the day. Maybe the coastie girl was just feeling antisocial, and would normally treat State Street as the place it deserves to be treated as. I myself have sometimes treated Espresso Royale as a place, and used it to meet with people; I have also occasionally used it as a non place, and just gone for their good chai. Looking at it all from a post-modern point of view, you can't say anything absolute about the place itself--it is only how people interpret the place that defines it, and that can change from day to day.

What in the world should I do with my life?

Ok, so I'm now going through a dilemma that I'm sure is not too uncommon: I have no idea what I want to do after college. I am a junior planning on 5 years, and I am majoring in math, physics, and french. My original plan when I came to college was to go to graduate school in physics. I've recently decided that I do not think physics graduate school is right for me. This is for two main reasons: 1. I haven't been thrilled about the research experiences I have had; they were not all that exciting to me. 2. I have recently become very interested in medical sciences. When I hear about some new study with the brain, or the HPV vaccine, or any new medical development, I get very excited.

So, I was thinking of medical school as a possible option. However, problems with this include 1. I may be more interested in the research aspect of things, so getting an MD makes slightly less sense than getting a PhD. 2. Med. school is hella expensive, and although I have heard you can easily pay off the loans on a doctor's salary, I would want to do pro bono work in Africa or somewhere like that for a while once I get done with med. school, but I would be flat broke :(

I considered an MD/PhD program, which is good because 1. get the MD and research, and 2. It's free! However, it is impractical because 1. it is nearly impossible to get into, and 2. it takes about a million years to finish.

Also, medical physics does not seem like a great option, because it seems somewhat limited in scope (meaning if I got a PhD in it, I'd be working with radiology machines my whole life.)

So, I am opening my future up to the class. Anyone here interested in medical research? What are you plans? Any suggestions?

How to make a person

There are several new technologies that raise some interesting questions, such as: what does it mean to be human? How do you define consciousness? For instance, if Dan and Steve go under the knife, and Dan gets Steve’s brain, and Dan’s brain and Steve’s body both get chucked, who is still alive—Dan or Steve? We’ve not come quite that far in technology for this particular question to be particularly relevant, but it can be thought of as an extreme example of the sorts of questions that are relevant.

First of all, millions of people use antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy in the treatment of depression. Many people, depressed and non-depressed, are a little freaked out by these things and would hesitate to take them, because they are afraid that the drugs or the ECT would “change” them. I think this is a really interesting idea that a lot of people I have talked to seem to share. People seem to think that by using a drug or something that alters your brain chemistry, you are making yourself a different person. I think Phineas Gage is a good example. He was a construction worker who got a tamping iron literally driven through his skull, which caused major damage to the frontal lobe of his brain. According to friends and family, Gage was a totally different person after the accident. It makes you wonder what the change seemed like to Gage: when he got the iron driven through his head, the Phineas Gage everyone knew and loved died. Did the Phineas Gage that Phineas Gage himself knew and loved die as well? If you change your personality such that you become unrecognizable to the world, are you still the same person? I am not going to claim that taking Prozac is the same as getting an iron driven through your brain, but in the sense that they alter the way your mind works, the two are similar.

Another interesting question can be raised about the increasing power of artificial intelligence. As a neat example, check out Kismet, a robot built at MIT that was made to simulate social interactions. He physically responds to people much like other people do. For instance, he has a range of stimulation in which he is happy. If nothing much is going on around him, he will get bored. If someone walks into the room, he will appear interested and look around. If you wave something right in front of his face, he will display fear and back away to maintain his personal space. Watching videos of Kismet, I thought he was the cutest little thing and I fell completely in love with him. He was like a puppy or a little kid; he certainly seemed real to me. When we can create robots that can elicit this sort of emotional response from people, we have to start wondering to what extent the robots actually are real. After all, we are ourselves bio-electronic machines. We can not empirically see any physical soul anchored in our bodies; therefore, how can we really say we are any different from robots? And when we see Kismet respond in interest or in fear, can we really say that what he is feeling is not real?

Also, on a less philosophical note, I played around a lot my freshman year with various chatbot programs—programs designed to chat with you like a real person would. My favorite was Billy—a bot who started out with an extremely limited vocabulary, but who built up his sense of vocab and grammar based on your interactions with him. Here are a couple of quotes I managed to get him to actually say:

Billy: “When I was younger, I had a tappin’.”

Billy: “Actually, my girlfriend has my mother.”

Erin: “You sick bastard!”

Billy: “My mother used to tell me that!”

Erin: “Will you be my omega?”

Billy: “Not for a million dollars!”