All posts by Deborah Binder

Bursting Out of the Pristine Homeland

The Environment

Acknowledging that ecosystems are in constant flux doesn’t mean all change is good. But it does change our conception of what’s at stake. It’s not about preserving a biological moment in a specific locale. It’s about saving species.

Sure, protecting current locale-based biological communities is a worthy cause, but it’s not the only cause. The bottom line is to protect species and create robust habitats for species to thrive.

The history of the biosphere is a history of ecosystem upheaval.  Humans may have accelerated disruptive processes but the genie is out and we can’t turn back the clock anyway. All we can do is try to manage the disruption so that life continues. For me, that means thinking about how to maintain the reproductive viability of the flora, fauna and microbial life forms we’ve got now – without any precondition that they’ve got to stay put. Species have rarely stayed put unless natural boundaries prevented their migration.

Why should natural boundaries have the last word?

Neuroscience Party Tricks, Part I

Scientific Encounters

Here’s a simple party trick that’s both fun and interesting:

  • Move your right foot in a clockwise circle. Now move your right hand clockwise on the table at the same time your right foot is moving clockwise…. Pretty easy.
  • Stop moving your right hand but keep moving your right foot clockwise. Now move your left hand counter-clockwise while you move your right foot clockwise…. Not too hard.
  •  Stop moving your left hand but keep your right foot moving clockwise. Now also move your right hand – but this time counter-clockwise, while you’re still moving your right foot clockwise. Can you do that? … I didn’t think so.

What happened?

Long story short: the right side of our brain controls movement on the left side of our body and vice versa.  The brain gets discombobulated when opposite motor signals are sent to the same hemisphere.

The brain also gets confused when we try to rotate our tongues and hips in opposite directions, either with each other or with our limbs. Try it.

Such a Romantic!

Explorations Outside the Box

In “The Age of Wonder”, Richard Holmes writes that “the idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science.”

Metaphors reveal truths and inspire action. We are still in the Romantic Age. And in some other Age as well,  as yet unlabeled,  one that recognizes that romance can be married to pragmatism.  (I have no illusions about being singular).

Reference:

The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science Paperback by Richard Holmes (2010) Vintage Press, New York, New York

Change, Continuity, and Ecosystems

The Environment

Ecosystem: “A biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.”

– https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ecosystem

According to many ecologists, ecosystems are either in a stable state or shifting from one stable state to another – otherwise known as “catastrophic change”. Although ecosystems are never completely stable, the idea is that they achieve a dynamic equilibrium by absorbing and accommodating change. But once some threshold of change is reached, we get catastrophe.

Are those the only choices we get:  stability or catastrophe? Does such a categorical approach represent how ecosystems actually work?

Not according to an increasing number of bioscientists. For instance, Brian Huntley and Thompson Webb argue that biological communities are bested viewed as temporary assemblages of flora and fauna that have come together by chance and opportunity, in continuous flux as species migrate in and out and evolve in response to changing conditions. Long before humans entered the scene, dynamic disequilibrium ruled the biosphere.

When the parts of a system are constantly changing, at what point do you say that the system is no longer itself? That may be easy to answer when the system is a living organism, which is either alive or dead. But ecosystems aren’t single organisms, so the either/or approach doesn’t really apply.  The concept of ecosystem needs to be freed from the shackles of its founding metaphor – that of a living organism – for us to better understand and manage ecological processes and change, without the bias inherent in presenting catastrophe as the sole alternative to stability.

References:

Huntley, B.  and Webb, T.  Migration: Species’ Response to Climatic Variations Caused by Changes in the Earth’s Orbit Journal of Biogeography Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 5-19. DOI: 10.2307/2845307

Kricher, John (2009) The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ; ISBN: 9780691138985

Mascaro J, Hughes RF, Schnitzer SA (2011) Novel forests maintain ecosystem processes after the decline of native tree species. Ecological Monographs 82(2): 221-228. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/11-1014.1

Scheffer, M., Carpenter, S., Foley, J.A., Folke, C. & Walker, B. Catastrophic shifts in ecosystems Nature 413, 591-596 (11 October 2001) | doi:10.1038/35098000

Truitt AM, Granek EF, Duveneck MJ, Goldsmith KA, Jordan MP, and Yazzie KC What is Novel About Novel Ecosystems: Managing Change in an Ever-Changing World. Environmental  Management (2015) 55: 1217. doi:10.1007/s00267-015-0465-5 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00267-015-0465-5

The Electoral College – Part II

Politics and Economics

Care of The Economist, here is how US counties voted in the 1992 and 2012 presidential elections:

Margin of Victory-1992

 

Margin of Victory-2012

We all know who won in 2012. But did you know Obama actually won by the lowest number of counties in modern US history?  Just 712 counties out of 3007  voted blue – that’s less than a quarter of all counties in the US.

These election maps document the emergence of what journalist Bill Bishop calls The Big Sort: the residential segregation of Americans by ideology. Democrats dominate the coasts and big cities; Republicans dominate almost everywhere else.  Within their regional bubbles of the like-minded, Americans have become more confident of their own righteousness and less tolerant of those who think differently.

Let’s return to the issue of Electoral College versus direct election of presidents.  Given the increasingly regional nature of political affiliation, should we abolish the Electoral College? I say no.  If we directly elected presidents, less  populated states would become even more marginalized than they already are, as candidates focused more on vote-rich areas where their party is already dominant.  As a result, no matter which party won, whole  regions would feel disenfranchised and  be steeped in grievance.

Yeah, if we directly elected our presidents, the candidate with the most votes would win. That sounds good.  But if huge swaths of the country are ignored in the process, the center will not hold.  Forces of secession would tear us apart.

Democracy is about much more than one person-one vote. It’s also about accountability to an entire population, not just the party faithful.

The Electoral College Versus Directly Electing the President – Part I

Politics and Economics

The strongest argument in favor of the Electoral College against direct elections of US presidents is that direct democracies tend toward tyranny (aka “tyranny of the majority”). Direct election of presidents would encourage candidates to ignore sparsely populated regions and focus more on garnering votes in vote-rich areas. Under a directly elected president, residents of suburban and rural communities would likely feel more disenfranchised than they already do in the Electoral College system. Whole states would become politically irrelevant, as the concerns and political inclinations of urban voters would increasingly dominate the national political agenda.

To simplify a bit: the big city would ride roughshod over the countryside.

The Electoral College system mitigates the excesses of majoritarian rule by giving less populated states a bit more influence in election outcomes. The Electoral College system forces candidates and presidents to attempt a transregional appeal because no single region of the country is sufficient to guarantee victory.

Of course, many would argue that the one person-one vote system is still the best. After all, that’s what democracy is all about: power to the people, so the more people, the more power. The majority should be calling the shots.

Next up: a couple electoral maps that illustrate a major problem with this narrative.

Technocrats and Visionaries – Part II

Explorations Outside the Box, Politics and Economics

The technocrat  is often perceived as  uninspired, narrow-minded, overly focused on details,  a competent underling.  The opposing meme is that of the visionary: charismatic, impassioned, focused on the Big Picture, confident of his vision, a leader.

These stereotypes are exaggerations of individual differences in cognitive processing styles. Some people are systematic in their approach to action decisions; they are analytical and methodical, careful to gather sufficient information before reaching a decision. At the other extreme are the heuristic processors who use less effortful strategies, relying more on pre-existing beliefs and a few rules of thumb to guide their decision-making.

Of course, these individual differences aren’t absolute – they’re more like tendencies each of us possesses to a greater or lesser degree. Our moods also influence which processing style takes control at any given moment: negative moods trigger more systematic processing; positive moods trigger heuristic processing. Since emotions are sources of information about our environment, this makes perfect sense.  Tiptoe carefully when in danger; take carefree leaps when safe.

We need leaders who are able to navigate the range of processing styles, who can switch from seeing the forest to seeing the trees, and back again.  Leaders who are both technocrats and visionaries, whatever is needed in the historical moment. Who can think big and think small.

Or, at the very least, leaders who are good listeners and willing to learn from people who think differently than they do.

Technocrats and Visionaries – Part I

Explorations Outside the Box, Politics and Economics

Technocrat: “a technological expert, especially one concerned with management or administration” Dictionary.com

“To do this may be to be a mere technocrat, rather than a complete human being concerned with the moral implications of what I say and the greatest good of society…” (Solomon M. Fulero and Lawrence S. Wrightsman-2008: Forensic Psychology)

“…to reduce the statesman to what we would today call a mere ‘technocrat’ – a manager of political details.” (Eric Gander-1999: The Last Conceptual Revolution: A Critique of Richard Rorty’s Political Philosophy)

“A few weeks ago he was the premier everyone loved to hate, a mere technocrat holding power only as long as it took the politicians to sort out their squabbles and fix new elections. Now he has been thrust into the role of political superstar, and everyone is anxious to woo him on to their side.” (Andrew Gumbel-1995:  Technocrat Dini becomes the Toast of Italy).

“The objective of curriculum design is to groom a mechanical engineer with a broader outlook, adaptability to any circumstances and made him/her a full flagged human being rather than mere technocrat.” (Description of Mechanical Engineering program at the IILM Academy of Higher Learning in India-2016).

“Why do some progressives tend to dismiss him as a mere technocrat who doesn’t inspire? (Michael Hirsh- 2015: Can Martin O’Malley Take Flight?)

The takeaway here is that technocrats aren’t fully human, don’t inspire and are narrow-minded, overly focused on details, and ill-suited to be leaders. The opposite of a technocrat is the visionary: charismatic, impassioned, focused on the Big Picture and confident of his vision.

(Stereotypes partly grounded in reality.)

The Balance of Nature is Illusory – and That’s a Good Thing

The Environment

“Any form of balance of nature is purely a human construct, not something that is empirically real.”

 – John Kricher; The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth

 “We’ve forever altered the Earth, and so now we cannot abandon it to a random fate. It is our duty to manage it.”

– Emma Marris; Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World

 “Influenced by natural climatic, geological, and evolutionary changes, landscapes and the ecosystems within are continuously changing.”

– Truitt et al; What is Novel About Novel Ecosystems: Managing Change in an Ever-Changing World

“Our results support empirical predictions of the functional effects of diversity, but they also suggest basic ecosystem processes will continue even after dramatic losses of native species diversity if simple functional roles are provided by introduced species.”

– Mascaro, Hughes, and Schnitzer; Novel forests maintain ecosystem processes after the decline of native tree species.

“Nothing endures but change.”

– Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher (c. 535BC-475BC)

Saving threatened species will require a lot of creative problem solving. Let’s not make the job harder than it already is by letting nostalgia limit our options.

This by way of softening you up for an upcoming post on rewilding.

Social Status, Health, and Happiness

Politics and Economics

There’s this cool measure called the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status. It was developed to capture self-perceived social status by means of a pictorial  9-rung ladder. The Scale asks individuals to place an “X” on the rung on which they feel they stand. There are two versions of the ladder: one instructs respondents to mark, relative to others in their country, where they currently stand in terms of income, education, and occupation; the other asks respondents to mark their status, relative to other members of their community.

Research participants choose their own definitions of community. In one study, significantly more African-American than European-Americans defined community as neighborhood (80% to 33.3%). Otherwise, there were no gender or race differences in definitions, which included: city or town (37%), religious groups (22%), social supporters (20%), workplace (18%), family (18%), friends (12%), people with similar interests (12%), their region (12%), and the nation or world (10%), plus a bunch of idiosyncratic categories. So cogitate on that and come back to me.

Across several studies encompassing a wide range of countries, subjective social status (SSS) has been a better predictor of health and happiness than objective indicators of status. For instance, in a large longitudinal study of English civil servants, SSS predicted health outcomes better than civil service employment grade. The authors speculated that subjective status is based on a wider range of information than single global measures of objective status and is more likely to incorporate relevant circumstances that influence health trajectories.

However, most studies use multiple indicators of objective social status, with the same basic findings: when it comes to physical and psychological well-being, perceptions of status matter more than the reality.

References

Adler, N.E., Singh-Manoux, A., Schwartz, J.E., Stewart, J., Matthews, K. & Marmot, M.G. Social status and health: A comparison of British civil servants in Whitehall II with European- and African-Americans in CARDIA. Social Science and Medicine. 2008 Mar;66(5):1034-45. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.11.031.

Scott KM, Al-Hamzawi AO, Andrade LH, Borges G, Caldas-de-Almeida JM, Fiestas F, et al. Associations between subjective social status and DSM-IV mental disorders: results from the World Mental Health surveys. JAMA Psychiatry 2014; 71: 1400–8

Singh-Manoux A, Marmot MG, Adler NE. Does subjective social status predict health and change in health status better than objective status? Psychosom Med 67: 855–861, 2005