Robert Fogel is a Fractionally Awesome Douchebag
July 29, 2006 12:39 pm English, Miscellaneous, RantsThis kind of linguistic sloppiness pisses me off, but for it to come from a Nobel Laureate really gets under my skin. Granted, Fogel’s actually an awesome guy who’s brilliant, and I actually use several of the things he figured out (he’s one of the pioneers of modern population economics) when I’m annealing neural networks, and granted I would have never figured out what I do today without his work, but christ on a crutch, he needs to be more careful about phrasing. Sure, he’s way smarter than I am. Still, someone needs to hit him in the face with a dictionary. Makes me highly stabby, it does, yeeeeees.
In brief, the context is that of discussing a radical shift in the health of the aging; the supposition is that, since the advent of antibiotics, we are as a people becoming bigger and badasser and far less susceptible to the ravages of elderlyhood. (Shut up, it’s a word now.) In that respect, Robert Fogel correctly points out that we are experiencing a kind of change at the species level that we’ve never had before (which is debatable, considering the transition of our being small-ish frigovores to our being omnivores, which many biologists credit our having enough spare energy to develop big brains, but that’s moot here.) The question of the day seems to be that of our transition from a group who lived their lives to a group who lives their lives carefully, and thus reaps significant rewards in terms of survival and slower senescent deterioration.
Unfortunately, Robbie’s travel into the land of personal hygiene products begins when he refers to this shift as an evolutionary shift. It’s not a slip of the tongue: he actually seems to believe that this is a function of natural selection (since species never evolve, ever, dipstick, they are selected for.) To quote the article’s framed quote (I adore nested nesting,) ” Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.” “ And, curmudgeon that I am, I’m saying bah. I reserve the right for future humbuggery.
Let’s be clear: this is not evolution in any way. If a meteor hits the planet and we lose our infrastructure, if our antibiotics and good food structure goes away, we go back to being frail. Natural selection is (sort of) permanent. It takes new selection to get rid of what was already done. If you have a collection of ten cars, and you treat five of them well and five badly – the first five you keep up on their scheduled maintenance, whereas the second five you never change the oil and fluids – then the first five will be performing far better in their 100,000 mile “old age” than the second five.
Have those cars evolved? Dork. We’re just taking better care of ourselves, and are as a result less damaged. That’s not evolution. That’s a change in lifestyle. The Japanese are a foot taller than two generations ago because they’re eating more protien (yay mcdonalds.) Have they evolved? The Northern Africans are having circulatory problems far less often than previously because of the efforts of various health organizations to eliminate certain classes of bloodworm. Have they evolved? People in the American Midwest have dropping rates of heart disease and colon cancer because of a slow shift away from saturated fats (which needs to happen more;) have they evolved?
Before I even get into that that’s not what evolution is, you big target of a Summer’s Eve commercial, let’s review: if something is kept well, and therefore is less statistically likely to fail after a given timespan, IT HAS NOT EVOLVED. It’s simply being better taken care of. Not all progress is in terms of the fundamental design of the species. Believe it or not, there are other things governing us than selection and taxes.
Maybe one of these days I’ll explain what the word evolution actually means. What people usually use it to mean is actually called “natural selection,” and the verb-ish form is “[to be] selected for.” Weather systems and fractals evolve. Life forms don’t. Evolution is the progression of a pattern. Someone needs to read some goddamned Darwin.
It’s not often one gets to call a Nobel Laureate a dumbass, but today is that day. Luckily, I have friends and family at his university; maybe I’ll be a big asshat and tell them to get him to read this.
But prolly not. 
I don’t need for a Nobel Laureate to come to my blog and make me look dumber than I already do.
January 7th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
This is one of the funniest blogs I’ve read in a long time and a nice explanation of how that which most people call evolution is really natural selection.
And, regarding this quote:
“The question of the day seems to be that of our transition from a group who lived their lives to a group who lives their lives carefully…”
This may not relate to the major points of your blog, but I would say this change came about with the development of the first symbol (language). Before that, there was no real human concept of time and man merely existed within each present moment. Symbols preserved a moment in time, and humans could look forward and backward. The upsides are love, great literature, art, philosophy. The downsides are fear, religion, boundaries, etc…
Basically, language (and the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago which made more permaneny societies who could preserve more complicated symbols and ideas) led to societies where people felt they had more to protect and more to lose, and looked at themselves as individuals with worth. Thus, they lived more carefully.
January 9th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
“Before that, there was no real human concept of time and man merely existed within each present moment.”
I’m not sure I think this is correct. I’m a strong believer in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that language gives us the framework that we use for thought, but animals are perfectly aware of time – they know about day and night, they know about seasons, they know about what happened to them in the past, and they know when they have X amount of seconds to complete a task.
I’m also not sure I think language was the first symbol. Cave paintings predate language significantly, and there are probably predecessors theretofore which have been lost – if you can paint on a cave wall, you can draw in the dirt with a stick, style of thing. Indeed, many animals have shown the ability to learn simple symbols, and some of those animals have shown the inability to learn language, suggesting a difference between the two.
Indeed, above and beyond that, I don’t think love is a function of language at all. I remember, as a teenager, when we gave my cat’s kittens away. She wandered the house meowing pitifully for months.
And, of course, there are many well known groups of humans who do not have written language but who do have society. Remember how some Native American tribes reacted to being introduced to the written word; I would have a hard time arguing that they didn’t have society.
January 9th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
I should be more clear. Or rather, should have been in my initial post.
First, I am definitely including cave paintings in language. By symbol, I certainly don’t mean a form or beginning of an alphabet specifically. Of course, language can include that but can encompass any number of vocal or “written” expression. Native American groups, likewise, would have definitely used a type of language or symbolic expression in their societies.
Understanding what day and night are is a lot different from being able to express or quantify it.
Love is a word we have to convey a complicated array of thought patterns, expressions, and feelings. Love is a word that means something. It’s not something that is. With all due respect, I don’t think what your cat felt for her kittens was love. It is evolutionary advantageous for parents (cats or otherwise) to feel for their children. If they did not, their children would not survive, and any generation (or species) which did not care for its children would be the last generation of that species.