Why I Gave Up on the Neanderthal Parallax

I recently read Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids, the first book in a trilogy about a quantum portal that opens between our world and a parallel universe in which humans went extinct and Neanderthals developed into an advanced technological culture. I enjoyed the first book, despite some glaring implausibilities, a bit of preachiness, and a distracting subplot involving a character being raped. And then I went on to start the next book in the series, Humans. But I only made it about halfway through before abandoning it. I really don't like giving up on books, especially ones that I've invested a fair amount of time in, but I just couldn't go on.

The flaws of the first book were accentuated in the second. In Hominids we find out that the Neanderthals never developed agriculture, and yet they found cities and develop advanced technology, such as AI implants called "companions" that assist them and record everything that happens around them. But how could a hunter-gatherer culture have the stability to settle down permanently and engage in the sort of division of labor necessary to advance technologically? Humans has an extended discussion of this, in an exchange with a Native American anthropologist, who manages to point out the arrogance and stupidity of "white people" while pointing out that it's perfectly plausible. The explanation rests on such a culture not growing beyond its available food supply by excessive breeding, and by not overexploiting their resources.

The Neanderthal visiting our world seems astonished that we would ever hunt another species to extinction. He also seems astonished that we would breed as much as we do. In our world there are over 6 billion people; in his world there are only a couple hundred million Neanderthals. I guess while they were developing advanced AI and physics, they didn't learn dick about ecology. No one should ever be surprised when a species exploits resources to the greatest extent possible and maximizes its reproductive potential. Evolution is a greedy algorithm. Individuals seek to maximize short-term gains; there is no foresight in evolution. A co-evolving population of predator and prey or bacterial infection and host population will typically oscillate. Fox populations increase as they prey on rabbits, but as the number of rabbits decreases, they are scarcer, so the fox population declines, which in turn allows the rabbit population to expand, and so on. If the foxes overexploit the rabbits and drive them to extinction, then the fox population will probably die out if that was their main source of food. What keeps this from happening is the reduction of the number of rabbits, not foresight by foxes, either individually or collectively. The foxes don't keep themselves from driving the rabbits to extinction. They do what they do. They hunt, eat, and reproduce as much as resources allow. This idea should not be surprising or shocking to a scientist.

We also get chided for polluting the environment (Neanderthals have sensitive noses, so all their locomotion is environmentally safe). They have no crime (because they have an Orwellian monitoring system and practice eugenics). However, the darker implications of the Neanderthal society are not really explored. Instead, human society is constantly portrayed as stupid and short-sighted.

However, it was Sawyer's ham-handed handling of a human character's rape that put the nail in the coffin for me. Being a geneticist, she collected the DNA from her rape instead of going to a hospital or the police. But the DNA samples are lost and she gets upset. Another woman in the area is raped, and this character blames herself for what happened. The Neanderthal tells her she needs to forgive herself, and so we get a scene where she goes to Catholic church and goes to confession. And that was enough for me. The rape subplot already seemed mildly exploitative, but its featured prominence in the second book and its awkward handling just drove me away from the story.

Which is a shame, because Sawyer's prose is incredibly crisp and readable. There are a lot of interesting ideas to explore in such a setup, but Sawyer instead writes a talky, polemical diatribe that's thin on story and stretches willing suspension of disbelief to the snapping point.

Valkyrie

In dire need of having our movie palette cleansed, we finally did manage to see Valkyrie yesterday, and it was quite good. Then again, it's been a long time since I've seen a decent movie, so maybe I was just starved for good acting, direction, and storytelling, and this one was just relatively good by comparison.


The movie is like others such as Apollo 13 where the broad strokes of the events are reasonably well-known, while the details are generally not. Some of the tension is sucked out of Valkyrie since we know that Hitler was not successfully assassinated. Thus, we know our protagonists are going to fail in their mission from the get-go. What we're interested in is how they fail, and how agonizingly close they get. That's where the tension comes from, and it's done well.

Several times in the film I was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's "Bomb Theory":

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Valkyrie knows how to generate suspense, and it does it well. It also seems to have done a reasonable job remaining faithful to historical events (at least about as close as a Hollywood blockbuster is going to).

It's a depressing movie, though. You'd think it might be uplifting to think of the plotters as heroes, motivated to kill the monster Hitler by lofty notions. But they each had their own reasons, and they were guaranteed positions in the new power structure if they pulled it off, so it's likely that they were motivated by a mixture of base and noble reasons.

Still, I never found the movie boring. All in all it was a solid experience, and I'd recommend it.

The Spirit

It's been a long time since I walked out of a movie theater, but this one justified it. Laurie and I were in New Orleans for Christmas, and she won some movie passes in a White Elephant gift exchange. We wanted to go see Valkyrie, but it was sold out. Hey, I said, The Spirit opened as well. Big mistake. I hadn't seen the ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll never make that mistake again.

Remember Derek's Movie Review Maxim: If most critics say it's good, they're sometimes right and sometimes wrong; if most critics say it's bad, they're almost always right.

Well, they were right about this one. It was a big, steaming pile of dookie. It was like someone took Sin City, sucked out all the good stuff (like interesting characters), and left a hollow, stupid movie with the same graphical style. You know you're in trouble in an early scene when the good guy and the bad guy whale on each other with toilet seats and punch each other dozens of times and neither one gets a scratch. Why the hell should I care about a fight in which no one has the capacity to get hurt?

Anyway, it was crap. Avoid at all cost.

Cake Wrecks

Via Boing Boing, here's a blog that posts pictures of horribly decorated cakes and then mocks them. Good fun.

The most recent post as of this writing was of an attempt to render a Texas Longhorn (from my alma mater):


They say:

It's impossible to say how this idea first entered the decorator's brain...

But now it will haunt us both day and night.

This cake makes a mockery of my horror, Chris L. It's also really icky. Tell me, do all University of Texas cakes look like week-old medical specimens?

Nice. Whoever made this cake should scribble "Deep in the Heart of Texas" on it. Or maybe "I Bleed Burnt Orange."

Anyway, they've got lots of holiday monstrosities, just in time for Christmas. Go check it out.

The Future of Computer Interfaces?

Check out this short video by Johnny Lee, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. Using a Wii remote, a small LED array, and some reflective tape, he shows how you can have an interface which tracks the movement of your fingers.



Cool, huh? He talks about how the interface is similar to that used in Minority Report, though I was also thinking about the bit in Jurassic Park where the researchers manipulate virtual strands of DNA using their hands. Lee says that using your hands might not be practical because it's tiring. As the sole method of interacting with a computer, I'd think so. But as a peripheral to compliment existing means of interaction, or for certain special applications (e.g. computer-aided design), I think it would be extremely useful.

They should give this guy his PhD and someone should hire him so he can get this stuff to market.

Octopuses and Personality

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald talks about recent work with octopuses done by Macquarie University marine biology researcher Renata Pronk. The article describes two interesting things about the research.

One, it seems that experiments in which they displayed video to the octopuses were more successful with high-definition, 50 frames per second video than with the slower, lower-resolution 25 frames per second.

The second claim is just weird. She says they "have no personality."

"Octopuses," Miss Pronk said, "are very smart. I have seen my octopuses open Vegemite jars by unscrewing the lid. They can find their way through mazes to reach food rewards at the end.

"And they can learn simple puzzles", recognising that symbols, such as squares or circles, mean food is available.

"The definition of personality," she said, "is having repetition in your responses, for example, being consistently bold, or consistently shy, or consistently aggressive."

To resolve the debate she collected 32 common Sydney, or gloomy, octopuses from Chowder Bay, near Mosman, and showed them a series of three-minute videos screened on a monitor in front of their tank.

One video featured a crab, an octopus delicacy.

A second starred another octopus, while a third had a "novel object" they would not have seen: a plastic bottle swinging on a string.

Miss Pronk then watched each octopus for any consistent response pattern, such as boldness or aggression.

When the crab movie was screened "they jetted straight over to the monitor and tried to attack it", she said, adding that was strong evidence they knew they were watching food.

When the octopus movie was screened some became aggressive while others changed their skin camouflage or "would go and hide in a corner, moving as far away as possible".

On viewing the swinging bottle, some puffed themselves up, just in case the object was a threat, while others paid no attention.

But significantly, when the experiment was repeated over several days, she found no consistent response from any octopus. Such random responses implied octopuses have no individual personalities.

So what we're supposed to believe is that the findings support behavioral variation within an individual, but not between individuals?

I'm sorry, but this just doesn't seem to make much sense. I'll grant her definition of personality for a moment. An organism in a population that has a personality would exhibit different patterns of behavior than some other members of the population. In other words, there would be individual differences in behavior among members of the population.

That's exactly what evolutionary theory would predict. In any population, while considering any trait, there will be some type of individual differences. The distribution of variation may be restricted or it may be broad, but it should be there. Variation is the engine which drives natural selection. In a population of bears, for example, some will have thicker fur than others, due to their genes, but also due to their specific developmental path (e.g., their specific diet, etc.). If a change in the regional temperature favors a particular subset of the population (e.g., it gets colder), those individuals better suited to the change will have an advantage, and will be more likely to survive and propagate their genes.

A population with no variation in a trait is evolutionarily stagnant with respect to that trait. I'm no evolutionary biologist, but I'm not even sure it's possible to have a population with absolutely no variation in a given trait. That would have to mean that the genes that encode for and mediate the trait are functionally identical and that any environmental influence on the trait has been exactly the same for all individuals. And with a trait as complex as behavior, I'm just not buying it.

I think Miss Pronk just needs to spend more time with her octopuses.

A Conversation With Sam Harris and Rick Warren

In poking around the Wikipedia entry on Rick Warren, I came across this conversation between him and Sam Harris. The whole thing is worth a read, but I'll talk about a few of my favorite bits.

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it?

WARREN: If you're asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don't. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal, but I do also know metaphorical terms are used. Did God come down and blow in man's nose? If you believe in God, you don't have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it's fine with me.

HARRIS: I'm doing my Ph.D. in neuroscience; I'm very close to the literature on evolutionary biology. And the basic point is that evolution by natural selection is random genetic mutation over millions of years in the context of environmental pressure that selects for fitness.

WARREN: Who's doing the selecting?

HARRIS: The environment. You don't have to invoke an intelligent designer to explain the complexity we see.

It's worse than that. If you invoke an intelligent designer, you've now got a whole lot of additional complexity to explain. How did the designer arise? Not only are you not explaining the existing complexity we see, you're adding a whole new heap of unexplained complexity.

But I like the silliness of Warren's answer about the literal interpretation of Genesis. He believes that "Genesis is literal" but that "metaphorical terms are used". Well, we sure didn't have to go very far in the conversation to find Warren saying things that contradicted each other. Maybe he doesn't understand what "literal" means. And I'd be interested to know if he literally believes in a talking snake and the rest of it.

WARREN: One of the great evidences of God is answered prayer. I have a friend, a Canadian friend, who has an immigration issue. He's an intern at this church, and so I said, "God, I need you to help me with this," as I went out for my evening walk. As I was walking I met a woman. She said, "I'm an immigration attorney; I'd be happy to take this case." Now, if that happened once in my life I'd say, "That is a coincidence." If it happened tens of thousands of times, that is not a coincidence.

INTERVIEWER: There must have been times in your ministry when you've prayed for someone to be delivered from disease who is not—say, a little girl with cancer.

WARREN: Oh, absolutely.

INTERVIEWER: So, parse that. God gave you an immigration attorney, but God killed a little girl.

WARREN: Well, I do believe in the goodness of God, and I do believe that he knows better than I do. God sometimes says yes, God sometimes says no and God sometimes says wait. I've had to learn the difference between no and not yet. The issue here really does come down to surrender. A lot of atheists hide behind rationalism; when you start probing, you find their reactions are quite emotional. In fact, I've never met an atheist who wasn't angry.

HARRIS: Let me be the first.

Hah! Nice. I'm guessing that not only is Harris the first non-angry atheist Warren has met, but that he's the first actual atheist Warren has gotten to know on any level. This is the sort of thing you learn in logic 101. It's called ad hominem, attacking the character of someone, rather than the legitimacy of their arguments. Oh sure, atheists make good arguments, but they're all bitter, angry, narcissistic little people who have daddy issues and just like to fling poop at joyful true believers since they're jealous because their own lives are so miserable.

Well, the atheists I've met are on the whole not angry and twisted. They're nice, gentle people who are decent and happy. They are often frustrated that they live in a society that's dominated by superstition and bronze age beliefs, but that doesn't make them fundamentally unpleasant people.

Anyway, go read the whole thing, if you can stand the annoying ads. They cover a lot of important ground in a relatively short space.