Social networking is not new 26 May 2009 John Hawks mentioned a lovely article in the New York Times, interviewing an anthropologist, Pauline Wiessner, who worked with the !Kung bushmen in the Kalahari. She notes that they maintain social relationships across many hundreds (and in her case, when they found a satellite phone, thousands!) of kilometres. This means that through the use of small gifts and messages, they have people who can help them with resources when they are in need. Q. Were there any special messages in the gifts? A. That the relationship was alive and well, and to remind the exchange partner that they had a kind of contract to call on each other in times of need. Actually, in the Kalahari, people send gifts to their exchange partners even when there isn’t a crisis. Like Christmas cards and presents, these objects are information on the status of the relationship. We may not particularly want Aunt Sally’s holiday fruit cake, but we’d be troubled if it didn’t arrive every year. In the Kalahari, if gifts aren’t sent, it means the relationship is in poor repair. People know their networks are crucial to how they get past the hard times, and they tend them with loving care. She goes on to make a very significant point about human prehistory: I think they are a clue to how modern humans moved out of Africa around 45,000 years ago. Unless these migrants had support systems in a founding group and could maintain ties with them, it probably wouldn’t have been possible to keep pushing into unknown territory. It only took modern humans some 5,000 years to move out of Africa, cross Eurasia and end up in Australia. I think that the invention of social networks — the storing of relationships for a time when you will need them — is what facilitated this expansion. When Claudia Dreifus, the journalist, asked her for a modern example, of course it was Facebook. People who use it say it keeps memories of distant friends alive and it sometimes brings long-lost relationships back home. We all know of people who’ve been “friended” by old pals from college and former neighbors they’ve lost touch with. When they see pictures of them and read “sharings” from their Facebook partners, they are reminded of their presence in their lives. This set me going about my childhood friends, and so I set off looking for my oldest friend, who I haven’t seen in 21 years (he moved to Darwin, and I just moved). He didn’t have a FB page, but he was mentioned online, and I have wikkid Google fu! So we spent a nice time on the phone (oldtech, sure, but hey…) catching up and exchanging news. I first met him when I went to kindergarten. Only one other person alive has known me longer. If ever there’s a major drought here, I hope I can go live with him until it recedes… Evolution Social evolution
Evolution Evolution quotes: Darwin on randomness 25 Jun 2010 Some authors have declared that natural selection explains nothing, unless the precise cause of each slight individual difference be made clear. Now, if it were explained to a savage utterly ignorant of the art of building, how the edifice had been raised stone upon stone, and why wedge-formed fragments were… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity Some new work on speciation and species 12 Dec 2008 There is a widespread tendency of biologists to overgeneralise from their study group of organisms to the whole of biology. Sometimes this is because the organisms are model organisms, like Drosophila (the “fruit flies” that have been used in genetics since the beginning).Other times it is because specialists tend to… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity The mind of the ecological engineer 27 Oct 201127 Oct 2011 I watched a very interesting documentary episode recently, entitled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (a phrase of poet Richard Brautigan’s), in which the maker Adam Curtis put forward the view that ecology was founded (at least in its modern iteration) in direct analogy with the view of… Read More
Here’s a digression that might be tangentially relevant (as in definitely tangential; might be relevant). Once, back when I was living in the residential wing of a theological college, I overheard a lecture in which students being instructed on how to become a Christian missionary. The lecturer told the students that what you do is, you find someone who has recently had a dream about a messenger from far away who would deliver an important message, and you declare yourself to be the messenger from that dream. Honestly, that is what they teach people. It was also strongly implied that you can always find someone who has had such a dream and that this is evidence for the truth of Christianity – your arrival was prophecised. My thoughts: (1) In a society where people send messengers on long treks to tell each other about the location of dead elephants and so on, it isn’t very surprising if dreams about long-distance messengers are common. (2) If you want to count dreams as evidence for your own religion, you should be consistent and count them as evidence for other religions, too (e.g. the appointment of the Dalai Lama is alleged to be based on dreams).