CENTER VERSUS EDGE

I remarked earlier that we need to think about defining groups by their outliers, where things fuzz out into the next group or no group, versus defining a category by its nucleus.  Or what about variegated categories where components mix to make a kind of striped group?  Then what holds them together.  What is their axis mundi?

We’ve broken down the sharp lines between male and female, between the many kinds of desire, between various races -- esp. the ones defined by appearance whether skin color or epicanthal fold.  DNA smashes so many of our cultural and governmental categories.  One of the reasons I watch CSI is that it is an easy way to consider what the show writers have already debated over a coffee-stained table and defined for reflection.  What technical tools have reframed the same questions over and over?

Should we each get a genomic printout attached to our birth certificates?  Or should one be made in the womb so that “faulty” or stigmatized elements can allow an abortion of the fetus before it makes trouble?  Or, since CRISPR allows genes to be replaced rather accurately, should we just do that ?  If we can closely control who we are, what will we do?

What does that imply in terms of demographics -- not who prevails so much as how it will confuse the bean-counters.  Now it appears that everyone is “metis,” mixed.  There’s no such thing as a purebred human -- what a scandal to discover Neanderthal genes -- but, in fact, there’s no such thing as “purebred” anywhere anything, not even in a lab where an impure mix of e-coli strains can abort your doctoral thesis.  Even sitting there isolated in a petri dish, the little bugs mutate.

But history has insisted on sorting everyone by appearance and location.  And using location means drawing boundaries, which means the possibility of gating, controlling who can enter or leave.  Of course, a cell and a body MUST do that -- there MUST be a way to keep out poisons and eject debris.  

Recently the most paradoxical use of face-scanning recognition technology is using it to filter who may attend church services.  Troublemakers?  Heretics?  The disobedient?  Someone with a gun?   In the early days of Christianity there was a phenomenon called "fencing the Communion."  That little rail where you kneel and rest your elbows?  It's meant to prevent you from just walking up and helping yourself.  

Or it could exclude some people from the inner chambers where decisions are made and study becomes more intense.  It took me a while to realize the Board of Trustees of the seminary was mostly for show, to identify people with a lot of money, so as to keep them in mind of the next pledge drive.   The real decisions were made by a sub-group.  In the old days, they were men who retired for whiskey and cigars; naturally, rich widows did not attend.

Who's in, who's out.

Maybe you’ve never participated in a pledge drive in a big church.  The committee -- carefully chosen -- sits down with a set of cards or a list of members and guesses the income of each formal member and then informal Sunday attendees.  (There’s always a banker on the committee.) An estimate is made of the capacity of that person to pledge.  (Kid in college?  House burned down?)  Canvassers are each assigned a certain number of people to visit.  The idea is to remind them what good things generous pledgers had made possible in the previous years and then to hint a bit about “norms.”  One of the men I visited -- wives often weren’t present -- was an important doctor.  He knew I was not making a lot of money.  All I had to do was mention the amount I was pledging to cause him to blush and raise his pledge.  

So a lot of norming -- doing what others are doing -- is based on guessing secrets, which money matters normally are.  DNA suggests belonging to a population whose norm is attendance at a good school and many connections among themselves that will help to attract job offers and provide support after getting the job.  DNA counts more than IQ.

Schisms and eccentricities are bad for business, bad for research, bad for strategies -- IF your goal is to perpetuate an institution.  What kind of institution could be defined by it’s core?  Medicins sans Frontiers seems obvious.  No doubt there are differences among them, but the axis of it all is to heal as many as possible.  They have preserved the original pledge of doctors.

Of course, there are always many forces that are uncontrollable.  Even DNA is constantly being changed by the environment -- providing new opportunities or damages and, more subtly, turning various genes on and off.  Genes don’t necessarily control something like coloring but rather things like the timing of maturation or the interaction of sets of linked genes.  If some CRISPR enthusiast knocks out the gene for something linked to, for instance, metabolism, the person may fail due to its own attempt to succeed.

There are many subtle, internal, unseen dynamics of the code that is each of us.  But ethnic populations of many people also operate as codes, esp. when governments are trying to keep track, politicians are trying to persuade, and advertisements are trying to re-norm us so that we just MUST have some gizmo.

After I read about a lot of this teeny stuff, I love to read the macro research.  Like this quote:

“Until about 9,000 years ago, Europe was home to a genetically distinct population of hunter-gatherers, the researchers found. Then, 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, the genetic profiles of the inhabitants in some parts of Europe abruptly changed, acquiring DNA from Near Eastern populations.

“Archaeologists have long known that farming practices spread into Europe at the time from Turkey. But the new evidence shows that it wasn’t just the ideas that spread — the farmers did, too.

“The hunter-gatherers didn’t disappear, however. They managed to survive in pockets across Europe between the farming communities.

“ ‘ It’s an amazing cultural process,’ said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the university’s team. ‘You have groups which are as genetically distinct as Europeans and East Asians. And they’re living side by side for thousands of years.’

“From 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, however, hunter-gatherer DNA began turning up in the genes of European farmers. “There’s a breakdown of these cultural barriers, and they mix,” Dr. Reich said.

“About 4,500 years ago, the final piece of Europe’s genetic puzzle fell into place. A new infusion of DNA arrived — one that is still very common in living Europeans, especially in central and northern Europe.”

Dr. David Reich

So this population, possibly sheep herders on horseback, came in from the high north and their clue DNA is present in North American Indians!  Is this an example of NA’s infiltrating Eurasia through Russia?  

“The Ancient North Eurasian line was not present in either the 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers or the 7,000-year-old farmer, so researchers believe it represents a migration into Europe sometime after those individuals lived but before recorded history in the region.

“These Ancient North Eurasians must have spread into Europe at a later time, and so encountered early farmer- or hunter-gatherer-type populations and mixed with them,” Lazaridis said. “It’s definitely, chronologically, the last thing that arrived in most of Europe.”

“Lazaridis said the period of approximately 4,500 years ago appears likely for the influx, because that is when new types of mitochondrial DNA appear in the genetic record. Reich added that there are hints from other disciplines, including linguistics, that point to migrations during that time span.”

A far more controversial and politically incorrect study suggests:

“A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

“The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.

“He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

“In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.”

Tweets between @DavidQuammen and @Dr. Neil Bodie:

 "Why has there never been an outbreak of #Ebola in Pygmies? Very low rate of serious malaria? Genetic protection?"

Now consider what HIV and addiction are doing to the DNA of America.  Which is the center?  Maybe it is NOT entitled white men.  Maybe this winnowing will create a concentration of something new.  The name of the game is survival.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365516010/     First peoples.  So far, so good.  Maybe.

WIRELESS BRAINS

Matthew Lieberman -- want him in your group?

One of the main premises of the book called “Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect” by Matthew Lieberman is that physical pain and social pain (from rejection and attack) are the same somehow.  This comes from fMRI studies of people who play a game called “Cyberball” in which they are little surrogate figures playing three-cornered catch with a dot until the other two inexplicably stop throwing the ball to the guy in the fMRI tunnel.   It’s a conspiracy, but the left-out one doesn’t know that.  The same connectome systems lit up as the systems that show when when people physically hurt.  Indeed, people report that being rejected “hurts” in much the same way as trauma.  Of course, the point of pain is to make you stop doing things that don’t help your survival.  

But the point of science is that hypotheses are welcome but that they must be confirmed by other kinds of tests and by retesting.  Many times the original tests don’t pan out, but the pop media generally grabs them and runs with them into Fantasyland before there is any confirmation or before the raw results can be digested.  I’m afraid that this is true of “Social.”  Here’s an abstract from one of the other related studies.

Article: Physiological stress reactivity and empathy following social exclusion: A test of the defensive emotional analgesia hypothesis.

Ellyn Charlotte Bass, Sarah Josephine Stednitz, Kevin Simonson, Tori Shen, Ethan Gahtan

ABSTRACT: Experiences of social exclusion elicit social pain responses. The current study examined the ability of social exclusion to activate physiological stress responses and adaptively modulate affect and empathy consistent with "defensive emotional analgesia." Measures of affect and empathy, and saliva samples for cortisol and alpha-amylase (sAA) analysis, were collected before and after subjects participated in a computer game ("Cyberball") designed to manipulate feelings of social exclusion. Contrary to our hypotheses, social exclusion was associated with a reduction in cortisol, and social inclusion with an increase in cortisol. Both Cyberball groups showed increases in sAA and decreases in both positive and negative affect, with the greatest drop in affect occurring after social exclusion. Empathy did not differ between the social exclusion and inclusion groups and was not correlated with cortisol or sAA levels. These results support the presence of a defensive response to social exclusion in which central stress pathways controlling cortisol release are inhibited. Cortisol and sAA were shown to have distinct patterns of responses to psychological stress, with sAA responding more rapidly. Related methodological concerns for the use of these physiological stress markers and of Cyberball in social neuroscience research are discussed.

I had never heard of alpha-amylase, but it turns out to be pretty interesting.  It’s an enzyme.  (unattributed from Wiki:   Enzymes are highly selective catalysts, greatly accelerating both the rate and specificity of metabolic chemical reactions, from the digestion of food to the synthesis of DNA. Most enzymes are proteins, although some catalytic RNA molecules have been identified.”)  People in hunting cultures have fewer genes for this stuff than people who eat starches, so it is thought to be a mutation associated with the development of agriculture.  It’s not tested by analyzing blood, but rather from spit which makes a test both cheaper and less painful.

Human beings seem to need to form groups, which is logical enough since it’s an excellent survival strategy for a species that is partly herd (prey) and partly hunting party (predator).  The forces that draw the boundaries are both those of ostracism because of people who make trouble, are contagious, or don’t seem to fit (stigma), and those of inclusion which may be because of affinity or merit, a shared goal or because no one else will have them so they band together.  Now and then I check back to some group where I was once included (even my family) and find I just don’t fit anymore.  Some -- not all -- are sorry to see me go.  Some are just astounded that anyone would care to leave.  Mostly the catalytic enzyme for departure has been education, but maybe lack of education would do the same thing.

By birth I belong to Portland, OR, by location I belong to Valier, by history I belong to Browning, by education I belong to Chicago in two ways:  south side university intellectuals (a group slow to change) and north side Method-based theatre (now pretty much dispersed).  The Portland where I grew up does not exist anymore.  There are other groups that are covert, either because I would have to invoke Thumper’s law (“if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”) and others because it would endanger them to be exposed.

The kind of groups I prefer are not inclined to huddle but more like nomads who need a point of return in order to regroup and go out again.  The groups I avoid are dangerous, either because they try to capture members through fear or reward or because they develop interior hierarchies that sacrifice the least powerful for the benefit of the most powerful.  Others are endangered because bigger and better armed groups target them and try to eliminate them.

Actually, though I probably “count” in the periphery of a hundred Venn diagrams and in the overlap of a few, I’m a satellite to most orbits because of conflicting sociology -- I move in terms of intellectual inquiry, while staying put in a high prairie village, one of the least known of all American contexts.  What difference does it make?  Mainly I can forget about publishing, my “home” denomination has already forgotten about me and anyway has changed away from my values, and though the internet has been a home and a joy, it is clearly about to be commodified to exclude me.  If I dress down, I am ignored and put down.  If I dress up, I am treated with respect.  Typical.  Predictable.

by Valentino Korokov

Since I write for myself as Ariadne’s thread of thought that I follow through the days, how I dress doesn’t really take the value out of what I do.  That day when the government tries to force me to get a “writer’s license” that dictates what and how I write (don’t be shocked -- it’s bound to come) I’ll just do it quietly at home as a guerrilla scribbler. Some are very experienced at this and can write in plain sight, because the authorities are not smart enough to recognize the markers.  Inquire about South American magic realist novels.  Look into the deeply hidden underculture of dictator-ruled countries whether Soviet or African -- the message might be music or painting.  In fact, one of the uses of prudery in America is to criminalize defiance and transgression.  But oppression is always a catalyst.

Lieberman’s book insists that brains “are built to make sense of other brains and to understand everyone’s place in the pecking order.”  Hidden in his work is the need to categorize humans as “better” than animals and some humans as “better than others.”  He is fond of sci-fi and therefore closes with a paragraph about Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel called “Foundation.”  I haven’t read it but it’s supposed to describe “a new branch of mathematics called “psychohistory”, in which principles of psychology are used to predict how many psychopolitical events over the next several decades will materialize and be resolved.”  He’s talking algorithms.  He’s talking statistics.  He’s assuming that pecking orders are unchanging.

He’s prioritizing groups as defined by some survey -- NOT individual choice or self-description -- and ASSUMING that everyone else is just like him.  He speaks of “unprecedented quality of of life” as measured by the stock market.  It’s not that he doesn’t want to help the impoverished and suffering, it’s that they are not part of his consciousness.  He’s a pinhead playing catch with pixels.  He’s no more useful than the Netflix experts who can’t figure out what movie I want to watch.