Amidst the housing crisis, the financial market meltdown, and rising unemployment, to survive and prosper requires the natural spirit that has helped humankind to endure for millennia. Nothing better exemplifies that spirit than a couple, forced from Hawaii, drawing upon their primitive understanding of Eskimo ways to make a new home in Oregon. To realize fully life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness requires appreciation for the ridiculous.
learning from history: Armageddon Week on the History Channel
While having some dental work done last week, I had a TV screen stuck in front of me. It was showing Nostradamus: 2012, from Armageddon Week on the History Channel. In this intellectual investigative report, a solemn, authoritative male voice objectively narrates what some scholars believe and what other scholars believe. Particular scholars appear as talking heads. Bottom-third text boxes on the screen show the scholar’s name, usually “Ph.D.” after the name, and, on a line below, the scholar’s scholarly affiliation. They seriously debate the question of Nostradamus’s predictions. Viewers are encouraged to assess the facts presented and to come to their own conclusions.
Emerging from the earliest English newspapers and the first deliberately styled objective report of current public opinion, Armageddon Week on the History Channel is the apotheosis of a particular style of public reporting. This style flourishes in a era of expensive media, when editors make crucial affective choices about what to present to viewers. It trades on conventions of authoritative knowledge created in circumstances in which obtaining knowledge is difficult. The ongoing collapse of traditional media might at least offer better opportunities for different styles of reporting.
passing thro'
On a lazy Sunday morning
after a week of diligent
bureaucratic service,
bought a couple of rolls at
the Giant deli, a cup
of wildberry yogurt, and
a little bottle of orange juice.
Started eating a roll on my
way across the parking lot.
Food fills, drink spills –
headed for the park.
A few benches under some evergreens.
In the middle of the soccer field,
trucks, campers, and cages huddled
like cottages of a small Alpine town.
A lion tamer poached an egg.
A trapeze artist hung laundry.
Elephants, huge raisins, chained
leg to leg, playfully tossed straw.
Around a picnic table, closer
to me, and closer to my childhood
dreams, two panhandlers shared a drink.
Wednesday's flowers
communication evolved with sociality
Behavioral technology correlates sociality and communication. The design of inorganic technologies such as the telephone, email, SMS, and various web-based interfaces for social networking affect both the kinds of social networks among users and characteristics of communication among users. For example, allowing anonymous commenting typically leads to a higher number of comments but also more rule-violating comments.
Studies of non-human animals show that organic technology also correlates sociality and communication. Among rhesus macaques, females spend much more time grooming other group-mates than do males. Females also more frequently make close-range social vocalizations than do males. Female bonding characterizes rhesus macaques as a biological species. That same biology also generates more frequent female social vocalizations.[1]
Across rhesus, pigtail, and stumptail macaques, less frequent and less varied gestural communication are associated with less complex social dynamics. A study of gestural communication in these three species found:
the gestural repertoire of rhesus macaques is generally poor in comparison to that of pigtail macaques, and especially that of stumptail macaques. Rhesus macaques exhibit fewer signals and use some of them with a lower frequency than the other species.[2]
Rhesus macaques’ relatively poor gestural repertoire is associated with a relatively simply social structure:
In a despotic and nepotistic society like that of rhesus macaques there may be little pressure to develop a sophisticated system of affiliative signals and bonding patterns. Maintenance of group structure and coordination of behavior between individuals can be effectively achieved if a few unequivocal indicators of differences in dominance are recognized and if unrelated or distantly-ranked individuals simply avoid each other. In pigtailed macaques, instead, complex dynamics of intergroup cooperation and high levels of social tolerance appear to have led to the evolution of intense affiliative communication and bonding patterns.[3]
The evolutionary forces that created these three distinct species of macaques created both their characteristic social structures and their characteristic patterns of communication.
Comparisons with less detail but covering more species similarly show correlation between increased sociality and better communication capabilities. In forty-two non-human primate species for which data are available, social group size (the number of animals with which a given animal forms social bonds) correlates with vocal repertoire size (the number of acoustically distinct vocal signals the animal makes).[4] Assuming equal times for each signal and an equal probability of using each signal, the organism’s signaling bandwidth in bits is proportional to the logarithm of the number of signals it makes. More generally, biological communication bandwidth increases with an increase in the number of distinct signals that an organism makes. Greater bandwidth indicates better communication capabilities. In non-human primates, better communication capabilities are thus correlated with larger social group sizes.
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Notes:
[1] Greeno, Nathalie C. and Stuart Semple (2008), “Sex differences in vocal communication among adult rhesus macaques,” Evolution & Human Behavior – 10 November 2008 (10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.09.002).
[2] Maestripieri, Dario (2005), “Gestural communication in three species of macaques (Macaca mulatta, M. nemestrina, M. arctoides),” Gesture 5:1/2, p. 69.
[3] Id. p. 70.
[4] McComb, Karen, and Stuart Semple (2005), “Coevolution of vocal communication and sociality in primates,” Biology Letters, Dec. 22; 1(4): 381-385. The data for the graph above is from this source and is available in spreadsheet form here. In doing cross-species comparisons, controling for phylogenetic relations is important. Id. does this, but the graph above does not. Nonetheless, the picture is similar.