Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Against the Infantilization of the Natural History Museum

It has often struck me that no greater misfortune can befall a natural history museum than for it to come into enough money for renovations. These typically take the form of interactive screens displaying 'fun facts' directed at eight-year-olds, and they require the removal of anything that reeks of the past, which is to say also the removal of the very idea of natural history, in favor of some eternally present, unceasingly entertaining, Chuck E. Cheese-like arcade.

Just think about it: what kind of adult goes to a nature museum these days? I mean an adult who does not have some child in tow: a child, it is presumed, in need of perpetual edification? I mean a proper, auto-edifying, end-in-him-or-herself adult. These days, museums that are not about art are about nature, nature is about science, science is about education, and education, as we know, is for the kids, insofar as they, finally, are the future.

Art for the grown-ups, then; nature for the kids. But education must be fun, so out with the rancid body parts in formaldehyde with calligraphic labels in Latin; in with the touch screens that tell you, as if you did not already know this since the age of two or so, that dinosaurs are birds, that Pluto is no longer a planet, and, in case you forgot this for a fraction of a second, that learning is fun. But all this thoroughly and disgustingly ideological rebranding requires money, which, as I've already suggested, the best museums of natural history do not have.

Or which, perhaps, in the case of the stunning, sublimely unreconstructed Galérie d'Anatomie Comparée at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, they scorn, because they understand why this stuff matters, why it's worth looking at even, or perhaps especially, if you are not a kid, and no longer strictly speaking need to be educated, and certainly no longer need your education to come sugar-coated in fun. The adult seeks it out, I maintain (and I believe Buffon, Cuvier, et al. well understood this), because it is philosophical, it is an aide to philosophy: it triggers reflection upon the diversitas unitate compensata that is nature; upon the predicament of mortal corporeal substances such as, but not only, ourselves; and upon what still remains in a certain sense the utter implausibility of there ever being such a person, to speak with Kant, as a 'Newton for the blade of grass'. The natural history museum is in this respect unscientific if not anti-scientific. It works like art. Hell, why not just come out and say it? It's infinitely better than art.

Except that, well, it is art, too. This is something that Damien Hirst well understood with his shark and stuff; the only fault is with the spectator, who did not realize that natural history museums had already been delivering substantially the same spectacle for several centuries. In the case of the Parisian gallery, the art in question is 18th- and 19th-century European art, and its medium is bones, skin, organs, and tissues. The remains on display are both the things themselves, and at the same time representations of the things: representations according to the vision of nature of the naturalists who collected and displayed the things (and who did not at all share in today's reigning ideology of 'science', its importance for the kids' future, etc.). And this is what is thrown away when natural history museums are renovated: a window onto nature through keen-sighted naturalists, who also brought with them a now-unfashionable aesthetic and philosophical sensibility about nature that is worth preserving as much as the things themselves are.

The project of exhaustively collecting and describing the basic kinds of large animal, and analyzing and displaying these animals' bodily parts and systems, is a project that gained momentum in the late Renaissance and that was largely completed by the end of the 19th century. Like, say, realist painting in the Western tradition, it is a project that has a bounded history (indeed the two histories fairly closely overlap one another). This means that an alpaca intestine displayed in formaldehyde is a sample of a part of a South American camelid; but it is also an artefact of a modern European knowledge project. In this respect a proper natural history museum, that is to say an unreconstructed adult natural history museum, is really two museums at once: it is a museum of nature, but also a museum of the history of a very singular attempt to know nature quite literally inside-out.

This is probably more than a child is ready to appreciate. Fine. Take your kid to some inane exploratorium. Or just get it over with and head straight for Chuck E. Cheese. I'll be at the Galérie, sans enfants, quietly meditating on nature's incomprehensible prolificness, and upon the noble effort of a few great men and women to come to know it in full.

Portrait of the Author as a Nematode

Bisexuality and the Linnean Fallacy

[This is a piece I wrote for the Opinionator series in the New York Times to which I occasionally contribute. Somehow it fell through the cracks, and by now the news item to which it is responding is fairly old (in news terms), so I'll just post it here.]

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A New York Times article of August 22 announced with appropriate irony the results of a recent study by researchers at Northwestern University: "No Surprise for Bisexual Men: Report Indicates They Exist." This study followed another, completed in 2005, which had concluded that “with respect to sexual arousal and attraction, it remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists.” The question of human male bisexuality is starting to look like that of the healthfulness of eggs: we are just going to have to get used to periodic about-faces on the part of the scientists. Or at least the questions would look alike, if sexual orientation were not so much more difficult a concept to get a scientific handle on than that of health.

Both studies on bisexuality used the questionable method of penile plethysmography, in which the flow of blood to the test subject's genitals is measured, as images showing various combinations of men and women engaged in sexual activity are shown. Now I do not wish to question this method here, though I will note in passing that there is good reason to wonder whether a bisexual orientation is something that may be measured by degrees of genital arousal. I will also not discuss the inherent problems in selecting subjects for such a study; the recent one is said to have made improvements over the one conducted in 2005, yet plainly, to the extent that such a study must rely on volunteers, there is always a danger that what is being measured is a disposition of people with the sex-study-volunteering orientation, rather than, so to speak, a naturally occurring one.

I want to focus instead on the a priori commitments that would lead a scientist to go in search of such a creature as a bisexual in the first place. I believe that to do so is no less ridiculous --and will look no less ridiculous some generations from now-- than an early-20th-century attempt to, say, distinguish a quadroon from an octoroon, to draw an example from the history of American racial pseudoscience, looks to us today.

In both the case of race and of sexual orientation, we are witnessing a conflation of social and natural kinds. Complex social and historical factors bring it about that it should make sense to speak of a certain kind of person in a certain place and time (a shaman, a serf, a hysteric, to cite a few examples). Today, these factors in turn cause science to set about looking to establish the real existence of such social kinds in nature, as if society and history had no role in our having come to speak of the kind in the first place.

This point was anticipated by Michel Foucault in his powerfully argued History of Sexuality. The Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, partly inspired by Foucault, would make the case for what he calls 'historical ontology': the process by which historical change brings into being kinds that did not, and need not, always exist. Once such kinds come into existence, however, they appear as if necessary; it becomes difficult to conceptualize the world without them.

It is a grave mistake of science, however, to fall prey to this difficulty, and to neglect the historical conditioning of the kinds of things we go out looking for in nature. This mistake results largely from the lack of communication between psychologists (in this case, the ones specializing in what people once felt comfortable calling 'sexology'), on the one hand, and historians and anthropologists on the other.

I see the history of 'racial science' as involving an overextension of the classificatory project, initiated in the early 18th century by Carl Linnaeus, beyond the real (or relatively real, though certainly not permanent) boundaries between biological species and down to supposed human subtypes, which are in fact only the artefacts of political and ideological preoccupations and have no biological significance whatsoever. The creation of sexual subtypes, I take it (as kinds of person, rather than as different behavioral propensities of people), is a continuation of this misplaced naturalization, of this Linnean overreaching. It shows science at its most historically oblivious.

Yet the most surprising aspect of the scientific 'discovery' of social kinds is the willingness of self-identified sexual minorities to mimic science's naturalistic language and to express something approaching gratitude at having been discovered. In this respect, the Times headline conveys an admirable if misplaced irony. It reminded me when I read it of Thomas Laqueur's riff in Making Sex on Realdus Columbus's discovery in 1559 of the human female clitoris, and of how this in turn echoed that other Columbus's discovery some decades earlier of something exactly half the world already knew about.

But there is a difference in the case of bisexuality. The existence of bisexuality in men might be something with which the men who experience it are familiar without science having to tell them about it. But unlike knowledge of female anatomy or of New World civilization, these men might protest upon being discovered that they are not an entity in nature, like some new species of butterfly. They are not some special variety of men, but rather they are men simpliciter, with a certain range of interests within a domain of life that, for complicated reasons extensively analyzed by Foucault, we take to be overly definitive of who we as human beings are.

But the politics of science being what it is, human beings who fit the profile of the sort of person characterized by a scientific study are much more likely to take their 'discovery' as an affirmation, one that potentially affords them political leverage, than they are to demand not to be treated as a natural kind. And in this way they perpetuate what we might call the 'Linnean fallacy': the extension of the classificatory project that is well-suited for the identification of biological kinds into human social reality, to which it is most poorly suited.

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Photographing Mushrooms

You might suppose that the person who takes the mushroom as his subject is hardly the most intrepid of nature photographers. Mushrooms can't move! Or at least they are not endowed with locomotion. They can of course move through growth, but this does not enable them to flee, and so the photographer is able take his sweet time in moving up close, finding the right light and angle, and taking as many shots as necessary.

Yet I confess that when I do this, it is often with trepidation. I feel that I am violating the mushroom's territory, and that it could easily lash out at me, giving off some invisible dust, or perhaps just radiating its deathly essence, in my direction. Sometimes I feel as though I'm descending perilously into the world of decay, where only corpses are meant to go. I fear that the mushroom will spread out and engulf me. Once I've snapped my shot I recoil and shiver and walk away fast.

So I'm not photographing lions or cobras or anything like that, but I am definitely coming up against beings: entities that, despite everything I know about neurophysiology and about where science draws its lines in nature, I can't help but take to have their own little world unto themselves, their own something that it's like to be them.

(Help in identifying genus and species will be greatly appreciated.)

 

Boletus subvelutipes

?

 

Some kind of Boletus

Amanita parcivolvata?

 

Grifola frondosa

Mushrooms and Literature

Surely the single largest category of folk names for mushrooms is the one having to do with evil and death, and with the beings who bode and bring these: Witch's Hat, Death Cap, Destroying Angel, Poison Pie, Lead Poisoner, Corpse Finder, Witches' Butter, Devil's Urn, Goat's Foot, Dead Man's Fingers.

Other names are identifications, by appeal to some other thing in nature or artifice, that the mushroom supposedly resembles (though for the most part does so only remotely): Chicken Mushroom, Fried-Chicken Mushroom, Rooting Cauliflower Mushroom, Black Jelly Roll, Moose Ears, Old Man of the Woods, Pig's Ear Gomphus, Pretzel Slime, Scrambled Egg Slime, Blue Cheese Polypore.

Still other names involve incongruous juxtapositions (which include more or less all the 'tooth' mushrooms): Shaggy Parasol, Imperial Cat, Big Laughing Gym, Northern Tooth, Spongy-Footed Tooth, Bearded Tooth, Spreading Yellow Tooth, Hairy Parchment. Many names call the very thing they are naming into question: Deceptive Milky, Fuzzy False Truffle, Questionable Stropharia. Many attach a derogatory English epithet to a proper Latin taxon: Fetid Marasmius, Dung-Loving Psilocybe, Hated Amanita. Yet others appear as plays on words even though they are not, e.g., Dirty Trich. Some names are just revolting: Insect-Egg Slime, Tapioca Slime, Many-Headed Slime, Red Tree Brain; while many are simply and inexplicably delightful: Peppery Milky, Dirty Milky, Buff Fishy Milky, Fuzzy Foot, Carbon Cushion, Elegant Stinkhorn, Stinky Squid.

These are all just folk terms, and so, since the beginning of the 18th century anyway, are not the real names of anything. Or at least that's what we're supposed to believe. But classification is just one of the things we do with language; evocation, or conjuring, is another.

Other vulgates are just as rich as English in their myconymical creations. Thus German: Hahnenkamm, Dickfuß, Hexenpilz, Satanspilz (one possible etymology for the English 'toadstool' is Todesstuhl, which is to say 'death's stool').  Many folk associations are lost as we move from one language to another, thus the Dirty Trich (Tricholoma pardinum) evokes the tiger in its German and Latvian names (Tigerritterling, Tīģeru pūkaine), and the panther in Swedish (Pantermusseron). The Poison Pie (Hebeloma crustuliniforme), also known as a Weeping Fairy Cake, becomes the ciuperca plângătoare ('drooping mushroom') in Romanian, and the parastā bārkstmale in Latvian, which means (I think) 'tattered parasol'. A Swedish cognitive scientist has in fact drawn our attention to the significance of myconymy on the example of this very species; see Gunnar Persson's nicely titled "Fränskivling eller poison pie: kognitiva aspekter på namngivning av svamp i olika språk" ("Fränskivling or Poison Pie: Cognitive Aspects of the Naming of Mushrooms in Different Languages").

What the Germans call the Hexenei or 'witch's egg' is known in English as the 'universal shell', an oviform envelope that surrounds the young mushroom before it takes on its familiar stalk-and-cap shape. The German Stinkmorchel or stinking morel is born from a witch's egg but grows to resemble a phallus, so much so that Linnaeus could not refrain from classifying it as the Phallus impudicus. It is the mushroom that is impudent enough to demand that it be called after the thing no one can deny it resembles. No, that's not quite right. It doesn't resemble the phallus; it duplicates the phallus fungally. It is impossible to come across a Phallus impudicus and not find oneself transported back into that prescientific world-view on which affinities abounded between different categories of natural beings that share no ancestral relation.

It is also hard not to be transported back to a time when the names of things were held to bear some sort of essential relationship to the things themselves. And here (other than in a few cases where the Latin follows the folk, as with the impudent phallus, along with the Lactarius mucidus or Slimy Milky, the Tricholoma saponaceum or Soapy Trich, etc., all of which are only as foreign to our inmost sense of the names of things as is Latin itself): here it is the folk names, and not the Latin binomial nomenclature, that preserves the bond of being between word and thing.

Often, in fact, the Linnean name for a thing picks out features of it in a seemingly arbitrary way, features that seem to have little to do with what we associate with a given creature. In this respect it is often better not to know Greek or Latin, if one wants the name of the being to resonate. To move away from mycology for a moment and into Pleistocene mammalian paleontology, I recall being deeply disappointed when my Greek became good enough to notice that glyptodont means nothing more than 'carved tooth'. As if the shape of that giant, lumbering armadillo's teeth had anything to do with its essence! Much better to just hear the sound, glyptodont, and to picture the beast, as it is not hard for the un-Hellenized to do, as a being that naturally embodies that sound.

Folk names work differently. They do not pick out some arbitrary and contingent feature of a being (I contend that a glyptodont would still be the being it is even if its teeth were otherwise than they are), but instead zero in on the most salient properties of a being, the properties that could not be subtracted without annihilation of the being itself, the properties that the philosophical tradition has associated with essence. That this essence is plainly related to human concerns (Dead Man's Fingers, Scrambled Egg Slime, etc.) does not compromise its status as essence, since the folk see the world anthropocentrically, as thrown up around them for their own purposes, edification, and temptation. In this respect, mushrooms have only being-for-us.

Nabokov famously told the story of the Cornell student who beseeched him to divulge the secret of great writing. 'Learn the names of plants', Nabokov is said to have said. He surely did not mean the Linnean names (though those can help to add an extra flair of erudition); he meant the Russian-English-French names that turn the things into repositories of human lore and values and fears.

I've always found plants boring and have not managed to learn the names of more than a handful of them. I raced through Aristotle's five books on animals, but could not bring myself to read his disciple Theophrastus's Enquiry into Plants or On the Causes of Plants, which were supposed to complete the Aristotelian project of investigating the living world. Animals jump out at me, sometimes literally; they are phenomenally salient, as the cognitive scientists say, whereas plants just fade into the background. We might suppose it shows Nabokov's great subtlety of mind that he picked them out for attention anyway (though we should follow up with the point that his greatest interest among living beings was for that most sensationally salient of creatures, the butterfly). Still, the advice is excellent, perhaps the best ever given in the history of literary instruction. Nabokov's novels themselves (especially Ada) are vividly botanico-entomological, or, better, they are showcases for a sort of phyto-entomonymical mastery. Nabokov understood how to draw essences out of names; he understood that what makes literature live is precisely the theory of nomenclature, the philosophy of language, that had to be repudiated with the rise of modern science, one of the great achievements of which was the arbitrary naming scheme of the System of Nature of 1735.

Genetically and evolutionally, fungus is closer among biota to the animalia than it is to plantae. It doesn't have locomotion, and it doesn't do photosynthesis either. In high school I learned that its natural function (as if anything had such a thing) was that of 'decomposer', in contrast with the 'producer' plants and the 'consumer' animals. This triad is calling out for allegorical interpretation, but I won't offer it. I want only to say here that, whatever is actually going on in nature, mushrooms can't but come across to us as liminal, as a higher-order instance of being neither fish nor flesh.

Liminal entities, as Mary Douglas has shown us, frequently offer a good point of access for unraveling the knots of cultures. Yet ethnomycology, particularly in the wake of R. Gordon Wasson's work, has for the most part been largely preoccupied with hallucinogens and with new-age forms of 'mind-expansion'. I've been doing my best to avoid association with that approach here. Not all mushrooms are psilocybes, and the strange position of fungi in human cognition of the natural environment would be no less strange even without the hallucinogenic species. It is more likely the toxicity of some, rather than the psychedelicness of others, that charges mushrooms with such folkloric force.

But beyond this it is their indissociability from decay and death that, I think, gives them the particular cultural role that they have at least across the Indo-European world. Wasson and his Russian wife, Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, argued in their monumental Mushrooms, Russia, and History of 1957 that the Indo-Europeans can be further subdivided into mycophilic and mycophobic cultures, with the Slavs standing as the clearest example of the former, and the Anglo-Saxons of the latter. One wonders how deep this phobia runs, however, and whether there might not be something in particular about the rise of modern science and rationality (a phenomenon centered in Northwestern, Protestant Europe, relative to which the Orthodox, Slavic world has been on the distant periphery) that required a repudiation of these queer beings, of these living lumps so deeply associated with ghosts and witches and fairies, with beings the existence of which could no longer be defended --in English, anyway-- much after the 17th century.

But literature isn't about what exists, and the non-existence of the beings wrapped up in the folk names of so many mushrooms only makes them that much richer, that much better suited to the sort of exercise Nabokov recommended. It would be nice to read some fungal literature: literature that grows out of years of apprenticeship in the art of myconymy and that is as evocative as the folk-names of mushrooms. This would be a different sort of novel than Nabokov's phyto-entomonymic masterpieces: there would be no flight, no sunlight. It would be a novel from the ground.

The myconymic apprenticeship would at the same time serve as a point of access to human existence --I would say 'being-in-the-world', but I'm already concerned about how Heideggerian I'm sounding-- through a concrete subdomain of language. On the surface this subdomain is concerned, like Linnean taxonomy, with the simple naming and distinguishing of entities in the natural world; but in fact it could not be more different from the concerns that motivated the System of Nature. Name-giving here is not classificatory, it is not 'the logic of the concrete' in Lévi-Strauss's sense. It is rather the accrual of cultural meaning through the things of nature in which this meaning is invested. The literary use of language on this understanding is the unraveling of this meaning through a mastery of the names of things: the real names.

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Photos taken in a protected woodland of central New Jersey, early June, 2011. I should add, perhaps, that I remain a perfect neophyte when it comes to attaching name to thing. I believe these are two varieties of agaricus, plus some variety of polypore, but as to anything more specific than that I am, as they say, at a loss for words.

Physics Solves Problem of Immortality, Again!

As I've said many times, I do my best here not to enter into the usual blogospheric disputations. But there is a certain kind of science writing that has irked me for years, and that is now much harder to avoid as a result of the proliferation of blogs, that I cannot refrain from briefly denouncing.

It is proliferated by scientists and science amateurs alike, but in both cases it seems to have roughly the same connection to science as Cosmo's sex-position tips have with Eros. Whatever concrete domain of science it addresses, its underlying message is: science is awesome. This genre works by a sort of magic, turning anything and everything that it takes to be of interest into 'science' by its simple attention: the way light shines through stained-glass windows, the way foods cooked sous vide affect the palate, and so on. This transformative power parallels that of the practitioner of yoga, who will claim that in virtue of her commitment to yoga everything else in her life is charged with yogic specialness as well. It is a presumption that, whether yogic or scientistic, must be resisted by intelligent people.

All this a fortiori when, on the basis of this presumption of the universal authority of the scientistic outlook, the science writer ventures into philosophical territory. A fine example of this was Sean M. Carroll's recent blog post for Scientific American on the impossibility of the immortality of the soul. Now Carroll is a friend of many friends of mine, and seems like a gracious and thoughtful person. I hope we can disagree non-crazily, as he would put it. But his post is simply bad: a pseudophilosophical conclusion, drawn from pure non-sequiturs, and based on nothing but the aura of authority with which his social status as a physicist is supposed to imbue his opinions.

At the heart of Carroll's argument is the un-argued-for presumption that souls must be the sort of entities that attach to particles, that they cannot exist without particle hosts, and, further, that since no empirical data about the host particles of souls has been forthcoming in the now-complete physics of everyday life, we are justified in assuming that whatever it is we think of as 'soul' dissolves with the death of the body.

Carroll believes that anyone who is committed to the existence of an immortal soul must answer the following questions:

If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Now some philosophers have argued that souls must remain attached to or associated with particulate hosts (the Stoics, for example), but this is probably a minority view in the history of Western philosophy. There are varieties of soul, the vegetative and sensitive, that are generally held to be indissociably wrapped up with the body, and thus to perish along with the body. But these are generally contrasted with the rational soul: the soul that is capable of knowing the eternal truths of mathematics, etc., and that is ontologically independent of whatever biological host it happens to ride for a while. There is no reason to expect to find this soul stored after death in a physical substrate that can be accounted for in terms of the physics of everyday life: this soul is not the information stored by the brain, which would then after death be transmitted to some other physical storage unit.

Now I sure as hell am not going to argue for the existence of a soul, but I know that if I were to seek to argue against it, I would not suppose at the outset that what is meant by 'soul' is 'brain-stored information about the self'. There are other options in the history of human thought, options that have been well defended, and that require sophisticated refutations based on knowledge of the history of philosophy.

Since Carroll attempted to impress us all into agreeing with him by trotting out Dirac's intimidating-looking equation --it looks hard, the implicit message goes, therefore anyone who understands it must be able to answer our questions about life after death--, I think I'll reply in kind by citing a profound bit of philosophy in French and declining to translate it: où il n'y a pas un être, il n'y a pas un être. Don't worry about the details; what this says is that for deep metaphysical reasons, it is not possible that reality should consist in physical particles, let alone in congeries built up from physical particles. Whatever deserves to be called a being, is going to be absolutely simple, one, monadic, and this means, among other things, undetectable by the physics of everyday life.

Is it true? I have no idea. I am convinced, as are Carroll and Alva Noë, and as is pretty much everyone who qualifies as salonfähig in our era, that the best explanations are naturalistic, that is, that they are based on what is detectable. But it is one thing to circumscribe the domain of permissible explanations, quite another to dismiss an entire order of explanation as false. So again, I don't know whether reality is one and simple or whether it consists in clumps of particles, but I do know that the author of that French phrase thought at least as hard about the nature of reality as Sean Carroll has, and that if the phrase is not true its untruth will not be established by appeal to the current state of physical science. It is not up to the physical scientists, in other words, to refute it, and still less is it up to them to dismiss it. The fact that they are allowed by editors and readers to do so anyway is a matter principally of sociological interest. 

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Postscript, 30 May:

I realized quickly after hitting 'publish' one thing that I should have made clear, and that is that I am certainly not arguing for a strict division of labor between scientists and philosophers, with scientists holding forth on the features of the phenomenal world and philosophers uniquely qualified to speculate on what if anything is grounding the appearances. To argue such a thing would be to go exactly against the spirit of what I have been pushing elsewhere, as in my recent piece for The Stone, where I urge that what is most needed is a return to the era when science was constitutive of philosophy, rather than at best complimentary to it, or at worst antagonistic. But this reconciliation will not occur simply by allowing any scientist, trained in the way scientists are today, with no real awareness of their place in the history of natural philosophy, to hold forth on philosophical questions.

When I was 10 years old or so I came up with what I thought was a knockdown argument against the possibility of reincarnation: I called it 'the demographic argument', as it appealed to the fact that there are vastly more people alive today than in the past, and therefore only a small percentage of them could have a series of past lives going all the way back to the beginning of human history. This was intellectually satisfying, but it failed to grasp the alternative conceptions of history (roughly speaking, cyclical rather than linear), and of the scope of the shared community of beings (extending to all life forms rather than just to human beings), that make theories of metempsychosis make sense. Understood holistically, embedded in the total belief system of which it is a part, metempsychosis makes powerful sense, and it is only a ten-year-old know-it-all mentality that would rest content with an argument such as the demographic one, which imports all of the presumptions of our own contemporary philosophical (or weltanschaulich) predicament for the assessment of a theory that does not arise from that predicament. This is similar to what happens when scientists untrained in the history of philosophy swoop in to settle its millennia-old questions.

On Spotting a Rainbow while Waiting at Rite-Aid

I took this picture while waiting outside a pharmacy in Plainsboro, New Jersey, as the Rutgers-trained apothecary prepared my prescription for antidepressants. I don't know why it takes them so long to count out thirty pills and slide them into a little plastic bottle, but from years of experience I know when I go for a refill that I will have to put in a good hour. Sometimes I take my blood pressure; sometimes I pass the time in admiration of the collection of Russell-Stover chocolate gift boxes; sometimes I wander through the makeshift grocery section, and speculate as to the criteria that determine which grocery items belong in a CVS or Rite-Aid (Chef Boyardee, definitely; Lean Cuisine, probably; Manischewitz, no), and which by contrast are meant only for the shelves of a proper Wegman's or Shop-Rite.

This time I decided to go outside. It was the last day of a series of days of rough storms, which I, being from dry California, always think of as 'tropical'. These storms in the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast were the distant and final echo of the same weather system that had, two days prior, killed several hundred people in Alabama and neighboring states. The rainbow seemed to be saying, on behalf of the sky: Sorry for killing all those people. Sometimes I just, you know, lose it.

Over the years I've returned again and again to the metaphor of storm systems in explaining clinical depression to those who know nothing of it. If in my soul I remain Californian (which is to say that I respond to the vegetation and the topography and the sky and the light there as fitting and proper for a creature such as I), in my neurochemistry I am at this point entirely of the East Coast. My brain is like a May storm in the mid-Atlantic, with its menacing cumulonimbus and its hazy instability. The darkness and the thunder appear suddenly, and for no reason, and just as suddenly give way to half-ass rainbows of apology, which to me, at this point, look like nothing so much as portents of the storm's return.

The water cycle makes sense to me in a way that the process of natural selection that produced brains such as mine does not. A recent study showed that well-exercised mice are more likely to anxiously cower in the corner of their cages than lazier ones. A scientist jumped in to caution that we should not extrapolate too much from them to us, since they are prey animals, and it is advantageous to not be excessively at ease. But I am not a prey animal, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what natural utility such a neurometeorological profile could possibly serve.

But that's just how it is, and there's something undignified about dwelling on it overmuch. One doesn't want to let it become the kind of person one is, in the way that Foucault argued so many new kinds of people came into existence in the last few hundred years.

But still, the timing of the rainbow deepened my sense that in the end meteorology and psychology (or psychiatry; whatever) are but two branches of the same science.

Curiosity and Method, Princeton, April 9, 2011

Nuclear Power and the Quest to Perfect Nature

A good book to read in light of recent events is William R. Newman's Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. Now I don't have it handy and I don't want to misrepresent his argument, but if I recall correctly he suggests that a number of the desiderata of the early modern alchemists were in fact eventually obtained. We can in fact turn one element into another (if not quite the elements that interested them most); we do in fact have flexible glass, in the form of plastic, and so on.

Of most relevance, we do in fact have a sort of perpetual-motion machine, which was certainly the most sought-after invention of early modern Europe (in the 1670s G. W. Leibniz ridiculed Joachim Becher for having claimed to have made one; Becher responded by saying that Leibniz's plan for a high-speed conveyance belt between Hanover and Amsterdam was no less ridiculous). Definitions vary, but at a minimum a perpetual motion machine is one that gives you work without needing to be fueled (and thus has as a corollary but by no means primary feature that it can keep going forever). This, as I recall Newman suggesting, has been to some extent realized by nuclear energy. It gives us something for nothing.

But the persistent theme of Newman's book --the title references an expression from Pope John Paul II-- is that throughout Western history the quest to perfect nature, and to make it give us more than it is in its primordial state willing to give, is one that has throughout the same history left many people feeling uneasy. Newman himself is only diagnosing; he certainly does not side with the pope or with the Catholic wariness about modernity.

The former pope unwittingly finds common cause in his suspicion of humanity's Promethean ambitions with the environmentalists, who more often than not draw their inspiration from what they take to be pagan sources. Wherever the inspiration comes from --scripture or some imagined past harmony with Mother Earth-- it is hard not to think they're onto something as we watch what looks to be a nuclear meltdown in Japan. During a crisis like this, it is hard not to conclude that it is foolish to try to get something for nothing. In any such attempt, humanity will end up paying sooner or later. (I suspect this is why, in spite of so many scientific studies proving the contrary, conventional wisdom holds that aspartame causes cancer. For if it does not, we are getting something for nothing, which is impossible.)

Of course, there is one source of energy which simply gives, and gives, and that is the sun. It is not a perpetual motion machine --it will run out of energy at some point in the future-- but on the scale of human existence, it may as well be. It is the starting point of the terrestrial life cycle; it is so important to our existence that philosophers have at times suggested that even though it is a particular, and there is only one of it, still in some sense it ought to count as a sort of honorary universal. Aristotle said that 'the sun and man generate man', and that has it just right. Each species is responsible for its own reproduction in specie, but the sun (via the plants, the atmosphere, and so on) keeps it all going. And at least if we are willing to accept the conditions of an organismic life cycle (finiteness, illness, etc.), then we may say that it does so for nothing.

All this leads me to think that the anti-nuclear, pro-solar camp is really, whether it knows it or not, taking up a parti pris in a very fundamental and millennia-old debate about the proper comportment of man towards nature. The two camps are roughly, as I see it, these: the one says you should go with it, the other says you should fuck with it. 

Increasingly, though I have a lingering admiration for early modern inventiveness, I am coming to think that the quest to perfect nature will always come at a cost greater than any advantage it confers, and I am ever more sympathetic to the papal warning, and to all the pagans who have heard it. I am coming to agree ever more with Ogden Nash: "Progress is a fine thing, but it's gone on long enough."

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The image is of me at Rancho Seco nuclear power station, near Sacramento, California, circa 1988. Photo credits Jay Truesdale.

Animal Intelligence: An Exchange with Abraham Stone and Frans de Waal

I recently had a long-distance exchange with two very interesting thinkers --the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal, and the philosopher Abraham Stone, himself approaching eminence-- concerning the scientific study of animal intelligence; the epistemological problem of the interpretation of data on animal intelligence; the inadequacy of most 'science writers' to the task of communicating what is at stake in the study of animal intelligence; and other no less interesting matters.

The exchange initially began from what I took to be a typically disappointing science writer's article at Discovery, by Jennifer Viegas, concerning some purportedly new signs of elephant intelligence. Have a look at that article before reading on, so that you might better understand how this exchange got rolling.

I took issue with the author's observation that "[o]ther animals clearly engage in teamwork," while by contrast one of the scientists involved in the study, Joshua Plotnik, "thinks they are 'pre-programmed for it', unlike elephants that seem to understand the full process." I wanted to know, in response, what kind of empirical evidence could ever ground such a distinction. Moreover, I wanted to know whether understanding is really incompatible with pre-programming. Those were my deep concerns about animal-intelligence research. I also expressed a concern about Viegas's style of science writing, namely that the condescension and cutesiness of it (using words like 'yummy' and easy alliterations) did not inevitably transform any intelligence animals might display into the same old familiar circus performance, if now in print or on screen, rather than in the three rings of old.

At this point Cameron Brown (who left the exchange early on), set us on the right path philosophically by suggesting that the usual criterion by which scientists attribute understanding of processes is "based on improvisational ability, which must be supposed incompatible with pre-programming." Cameron went on to wonder whether "understanding could be on a gradient rather than binary, similar to how psychologists have sometimes distinguished between goal-directed and rule-based or formal rationality." Another contributor to the discussion also suggested that it is improvisational ability, or the capacity to do something new and unexpected, that signals animal intelligence. He noted that humans quickly and constantly form new meanings through language and custom, whereas ape social behavior, such as hunting, always involves "just a few signals that do not vary or combine."

In response to these two points I took a historical turn, as I often do, and noted that using the apparent absence of spontaneity in animals as an argument for denying them understanding, will, or moral status, is very old. Descartes uses it, for example. But at the same time there is a parallel line of reasoning, that goes back at least to Girolamo Rorario in the 16th century, according to which animals act predictably because they've already figured out exactly what motions of their bodies are most in agreement with nature, whereas we humans are uncertain and floundering. And thus, as Rorario puts it, animalia bruta ratione utantur melius homine [brute animals make better use of reason than men].

Enter, at this point, Abe, with an observation about the proper division of labor between the natural scientists and the philosophers with respect to the question of animal intelligence: "The reasoning and terminology of natural scientists, Abe writes, "typically appear sloppy and insufficiently reflective to philosophers and even to mathematicians. And yet in the end they often discover things that philosophers and mathematicians couldn't. Descartes is a far better philosopher than Newton, but Cartesian physics is crap. So it's not easy to know when we should criticize them. Linguistics and animal intelligence may have been colonized by bad philosophy to some extent, which just makes this more difficult rather than less." At this point I came back with my initial compaint about mediocre science writing, and argued for a role for philosophers in the work of interpreting the data on animal intelligence (and implicitly for a role in disseminating these interpretations to the broader public).

I repeated here my concern that in typical science writing on animal intelligence, such as Viegas's article, anything the animals might accomplish is degraded "in the very framing of the story into the clever trick of a beast already assumed on a priori grounds to be lesser." I also said that philosophers ought to jump into the interpretation of the data on animal intelligence even if the scientists do not want us there; and I said --which I know very much goes against Frans's long-standing practice, as we'll soon see-- that there's something inherently troubling about the use of diminutive names ('circus names', I called them) for animals that are at the same time the subjects of scientific study. It is not necessarily bad, I add here (which I did not say before) that scientists form affective connections to the animals they study, but the problem comes at the stage of dissemination by science writers, when the public is told of all the clever things some Dumbo or Bongo has managed to do.

Abe replied that "[t]here's probably not that much risk of getting in the scientists' way, if only because they'll probably pay no attention to us." He then went on to dismiss my concern about naming practices: "I think we can agree that a lot of science writing is bad. I'm not sure I agree with your criticisms of this particular piece. Should we be worrying about the dignity of elephants in this sense (e.g. their right not to be given diminutive circus names)? It might be kind of like worrying that they aren't decently dressed. Not that I can quite explain what would be wrong about the latter."

I responded with a bold claim, that "[r]eal study of animal intelligence would not have any prior implicit supposition that to be intelligent just is to be like us (that's a strong philosophical claim, I know), and the diminutive circus names are one of the ways in which the animals studied are framed in advance as lesser versions of us (that's a fairly modest sociolinguistic claim, I think, with well-known parallels in the study of class and gender relations)." I add here (again, which I did not say before) that a good example of the study of elephant intelligence is the discovery of the significance to them of the vibrations caused by their stomping. Something we took before to be just brute bodily motion turns out to be an important part of the maintenance of an intricate social network. This sort of discovery is fundamentally different, and I think more important, than the elephants' performance in tests set up by human beings.

At this point Frans joined us with a succinct and optimistic summary of the state of scientific research on animal intelligence: "Joint attention has been found in all sorts of animals, not just apes, it's no cognitive marker anymore. Recently it was reported for wolves (thus negating that dogs have it because of domestication). Theory of mind is hardly a unitary phenomenon, and for all we know some of it can be found in apes, monkeys, dogs, jays. The literature is moving fast." To this, another participant suggested that all of this data gathered on all of these species could simply be the result of scientists 'seeing what they want to see'.

I replied that this latter suggestion in response to Frans's account of the state of the discipline "underlines the difficulty that has plagued the animal-intelligence debate since at least Rorarius: for those who suppose on a priori grounds that any apparent sign of intelligence in animals is only an anthropomorphizing projection, no amount of the sort of evidence that Frans adduces is going to make a difference." I added that "the only reason why we don't have any problem attributing intelligence to other human minds is that we need to suppose their existence on practical grounds, and so when called upon come up with good-enough philosophical arguments to do away with the other-minds problem.

"Frans is optimistic, I went on, "that the empirical evidence is coming in so fast and is so overwhelming that soon everyone will be convinced. I'm more inclined to think that the withholding of intelligence (and other traits associated with human-likeness) has much more to do with the way human societies define the boundaries of community, and if they've already determined that these boundaries don't extend to baboons, then there's no ability a baboon can demonstrate that will change their minds in this matter. So we very much need the sort of empirical data that Frans is spending his life finding, but in order for the prejudice of human uniqueness to be pushed toward decline these data need to be accompanied by arguments, issuing sooner from moral and political philosophy, that are not themselves based on the data."

Here there was a sort of juncture in the conversation, where Frans, it seems to me, laid his cards out (though in a way that is certainly not surprising to anyone who has read his published works): "For any Darwinist the assumption is simple: continuity between closely related species. Even often between distantly related ones. The human brain contains no parts and no transmitters that until now have not also been found in other primates. There are differences, but they have more to do with brain power than with a qualitatively different brain. The reason humans assume they are different are essentially religious, handed down from traditions that arose in the desert where people had never met nh primates. When the first live apes arrived at London Zoo, early 19th century, the queen herself declared them 'disgusting'. And ever since Western intellectuals have been busy trying to determine what sets us apart."

And at this point I could not hold back from the temptation to cite Cicero (himself citing the poet Ennius): Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis ['How similar to us that most ugly beast, the simian!'].

On Orgasm and Irritability

I recently came across a website ridiculing undergraduates for turning in written work in which they had conflated the words 'organism' and 'orgasm'. But this might not have been so much the usual sign of subliteracy, nor even a Freudian slip (if ever such a thing existed); it might, just might, instead have been a sign of incredible erudition.

In Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's La Philosophie zoologique of 1809, the latter term appears to be taken as more or less synonymous with the former. Chapter 4 of the treatise, entitled 'Of Orgasm and Irritability', defines orgasm as "the state preserved by the internal, soft parts of animals insofar as they are alive." Further on he describes it as sensibilité latente, and thus as a notion that is complementary to irritabilité, which is the capacity of the body to sense and react to external stimuli.

'Orgasm' in today's sense is something like a reduction of what Lamarck meant to only its most extreme instance. Somewhere also I remember Leibniz saying earlier, in the 1670s, that the reproductive act in animals is the summum or culmination of its existence as a sensitive being, and a sensitive being is just what an animal is in its very essence. So the idea is that the sensation involved in reproduction is the ultimate expression of what it is that an animal does qua animal. So it is not at all hard to see how we slide from Lamarck's orgasme to our orgasm(s).

Interestingly, as I and others have argued in more scholarly spaces, a similar shift happens in the history of the term 'organism', which starts out describing an abstract state, like Leninism or Judaism, and ends up being a count noun that can easily be rendered in the plural. One might of course speak of 'multiple Leninisms', but one has to strain to do so, whereas multiple organisms or orgasms are easily tallied.

Anyhow, I don't know when the semantic shift occurs precisely, and would be pleased to learn some more details. I expect the occurrence of Lamarck's technical term in the title of this post will, given the way search engines work, garner more readers for it than I am used to having. But alas these will probably not be readers interested in helping me to fill in gaps in my knowledge of the history of science. 

For Salt, a Cricket: Notes on Folk-Taxonomy and the Hindu System of Reincarnation

Here, from the 2nd-cenury BCE Laws of Manu, is the most explicit elaboration I'm aware of of the system of Hindu reincarnation: that is, the specification of which sort of soul ends up in which species of womb:

A priest-killer gets the womb of a dog, a pig, a donkey, a camel, a cow, a goat, a sheep, a wild animal, a bird... A priest who drinks liquor enters the womb of a worm, bug, or moth, of birds who eat excrement, and of violent creatures. A priest who is a thief is reborn thousands of times in spiders, snakes, and lizards, aquatic animals, and violent ghouls. A man who violates his guru's marriage-bed is reborn hundreds of times in grasses, shrubs, and vines, in beasts that are carnivorous or that have fangs, and in people who engage in cruel actions. Violent men become carnivorous beasts; people who eat impure things become worms; thieves become animals that devour one another; and men who have sex with women in the lowest castes become ghosts...

The rhythm of the list grows more rapid and staccato as it moves on to the crime of theft:

For stealing grain, a man becomes a rat; for brass, a goose; for water, an aquatic bird; for honey, a stinging insect; for milk, a crow; for spices, a dog; for ghee, a mongoose; for meat, a vulture; for marrow, a cormorant, for seseme oil, an 'oil-drinker';  for salt, a cricket; and for yogurt, a crane; for stealing silk, a partridge; for linen, a frog; for cotton, a curlew; for a cow, an iguana; for molasses, a bat; for perfumes, a muskrat; for lettuce, a peacock; for cooked foods, a porcupine; for uncooked food, a hedgehog.

There appears to be a system of correspondences here, as clearly in the pairing perfume/muskrat. Each theft seems, though often in a very cryptic way, to be followed by a transformation into the sort of animal associated with the object stolen, an association either in virtue of a property of the animal itself, or in virtue of the animal's characteristic activity (what Leibniz would call its officium). But then the system grows more straightforwardly just, in a poetic sense, when the sort of theft in question involves the taking of another living being:

[For stealing] a deer or an elephant, [he becomes] a wolf; for a horse, a tiger; for fruits and roots, a monkey; for a woman, a bear.

Presumably, stealing these sorts of animals (or plants) is akin to preying on them, even if one does not in fact eat them as a real predator would; and presumably there is something bearish in the ravaging of a woman.

Far worse than theft or even murder is to fail in the carrying out of the innate activity (the officium?) of one's social class. For this one becomes not an animal but some variety or other of ghost. Thus:

A priest who has slipped from his own duty becomes a comet-mouth ghost who eats vomit; a ruler who slips from his duty becomes a false-stinking ghost who eats impure things and corpses. A commoner who has slipped from his own duty becomes a ghost who sees by an eye in his anus, eating pus; a servant becomes a moth-eater ghost.

This is all very vivid material for the imagination, but what interests me most are the correspondences between animals on the one hand and the theft of various objects on the other. Following a lead from Zimmermann (1982), it seems that in this system we have a basis for claiming that Indian folk-taxonomy is embedded not just in therapeutics and pharmacy (Zimmermann's focus), but also within its system of justice. This would provide grounds for claiming that a text such as the Laws of Manu leaves a rich trace of a science of nature, in much the same way that Leviticus does with its dietary prohibitions: which have to do with morality, hygiene, and taxonomy all at once.

The difference is that the Hindu system of justice is an explicitly cosmic system, where the consequences of moral transgression are projected into a future life that begins through a radical species transformation. Because it is such a bedrock principle of Western natural philosophy that species transformation must involve the eradication of one individual and the generation of another (even lycanthropy in Europe is almost universally explained as a taking on of the outward appearance of a wolf, while maintaining the human species essence), it might be harder to see that what the Hindu system of reincarnation is doing is not only trading in metaphysical impossibilities, but also saying a great deal about the nature of various kinds of social action and about certain salient features of the natural environment. And again, like Leviticus, it is doing this by a single motion. 

I'll be writing on this more in the future, towards an eventual article. But for now I have to keep working on my Sanskrit, and keep reading...

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See Francis Zimmermann, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1982.

See also my earlier post on Zimmermann here.

The 'Catalog of Meats' vs. the Historia Animalium; Or, Why There Is No Sanskrit Zoology

Francis Zimmermann's 1982 work, La jungle et le fumet des viandes. Un thème écologique dans la médecine hindoue [The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine] is a remarkable thing. Ostensibly, it is a study of Ayurvedic medicine by a student of the great ethnographer Louis Dumont, but it would be more correct to describe it as a contribution towards the anthropology of natural science, and in this respect to be an important precursor to works such as Scott Atran's Cognitive Foundations of Natural History of 1991.

While Atran focuses on an explicit comparison between folk-taxonomical systems, on the one hand, and on the other the Linnaean system at the foundation of scientific taxonomy, Zimmermann instead seeks to explain why there is nothing like zoological taxonomy in the Indian tradition. His answer is that zoology is effectively edged out by pharmacy, but that pharmacy, in turn, needs to be understood as implying both a cosmology and an epistemology based on 'qualities' (guṇa) and 'savors' (rasa). Understood this broadly, it is not surprising to find 'meats' among the things listed in the Indian pharmacopoeia, nor to find that it the 'cataloguing of meats' comes to play the role in the Indian tradition that the classification of animals would play for Aristotle.

There is, Zimmermann writes, an "exclusion of even the possibility of a botanical or zoological classification: the beings themselves are no longer of any interest, only their dietetic and therapeutic qualities" (130-31). This divergence is surprising, given the tremendous overlap between other aspects of Greek and Indian life science: "From a comparative point of view, in the domain of physiology the theory of vital breaths and the theory of the humors constitute remarkable points of convergence between Indian medicine and Grek medicine; nevertheless, a deep divergence separates the two when it comes to methods of classification. On the one hand, in the Greek tradition, natural history; on the other hand, in the Ayurvedic tradition, the inclusion of taxonomy in pharmacy and the subordination of pharmacy to a complex interplay of savors and curative properties, which envelops the inventory of the flora and fauna in a welter of synonyms, redundancies, enumerations, division, and cross-references" (132-33).

The richest catalog of meats given in the Sanskrit corpus is found in the Suśrutasamhitā, or Suśruta's corpus, which dates most likely from the 12th century of the present era. This text, Zimmermann writes, "represents a corpus of knowledge about... fauna, knowledge not set out as such bult slipped into the mold of discourse intended for the use of medical practitioners" (98). One particularly vivid passage of the corpus illustrates how, from an initial distinction that appears taxonomical in an Aristotelian sense (as between plants and animals), we are quickly diverted into a potentially infinite branching of sensible qualities (and insensible too, since in the Ayurvedic tradition a 'savor' need not be detected in order to exist; it is something closer to an 'essence' actually inhering in the world):

Food is seen as a single category from the point of view of its object, the category of what can be eaten; byt from the point of view of its sources, it is double since it is composed of both immobile and mobile beings; it is also double from the point of view of its action, if one makes a distinction between beneficent and harmful effects. It is quadruple with regard to its mode of employment since it can be drunk, chewed, crunched or sucked; sextuple with regard to its savors, since there are six savors; vigesimal with regard to the qualities which are, successively, heavy/light, cold/hot, unctuous/dry, sluggish/lively, solid/liquid, tender/hard, dessicant/lubrifying, smooth/rough, subtle/crude, viscous fluid. They are innumerable in respect of its varieties because there exist a multitude of possible combinations and preparations for all these substances.

Shimkus's Shibboleth

A minor storm of outrage has been set off by Representative John Shimkus's (R-IL) 2009 testimony before the US House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, in which he assured the chairman that there will be no further climate change since "the earth will end only when God declares it's time to be over." You can see it all here:

 

A first thought on seeing this might very well be: "Who let this yokel into the meeting?" And then the sinking realization: "Oh yes, of course, this is the US House of Representatives, who are all elected by their constituents." Congressmen always come across as a cut below senators. They can often be spotted wearing bolo ties and cowboy boots, small mementos of the places they come from, almost always discarded for anonymous blacks, greys, and reds if and when they ever reach the upper house. So it's not at all unusual to spot a congressmen who retains a bit of local flavor. In fact, his principal job is to spice things up at the federal level by bringing a recognizably local manner to the house chamber, and all the better if the small people back home are watching.

This testimony, I mean to say, is a performance, and more specifically it is a hand signal, a shout-out, a shibboleth for the people Shimkus has figured out he needs to gratify in order to be reelected. Congressmen can do their gratifying openly, in the language of the regular folk who elect them, while senators and presidents can only do it in code. Congressmen generally really are of the people, rather than just being representatives of the people. Being of the people, they are free to express the anti-Enlightenment sentiment that has been simmering in pockets of the West since the 18th century, and that is now at full boil in that pocket of the West we call the 'Midwest'. One may honestly doubt that Shimkus or his constituents themselves believe what they claim to believe; the insistence that they believe this is really just defiance, or negation, of what they are being told to believe by people they resent.

In this respect Shimkus's crude display of illiteracy ought to appear more as a public declaration of a certain sort of affiliation, rather than as having to do with some sort of clash of ideas. The compatibility of God's infallible word with empirical science, and with an allegorical understanding of the factual content of scripture, is something that was already worked out not hundreds of years ago, but thousands of years ago, within the first century of the spread of Christianity, in the subtle philosophical doctrines of Christian Platonists such as St. Clement of Alexandria. We've been over this stuff already, and countless Christians have worked out to their own satisfaction a way of interpreting the world based on tools more handy than a simple, blunt, literal reading of the holy book. Were they condemned as heretics when they made use of these tools? Generally, no, and as often as not they were made into saints. So whenever an American neo-Protestant politician says that he is constrained to believe x because he is a Christian and the Bible says he must, then quite apart from any concerns about the separation of church and state one may still wonder why his freedom to come to conclusions based on his own faculties of reason, judgment, and inquiry is even more circumscribed than that of the first-century Church Fathers.

I try to keep out of this sort of stuff because I think that in general to comment upon it is to become complicit in the cycle of predictable stupidity followed by impotent shock. On the rare occasions I cross over into what is called the 'liberal blogosphere' I am alarmed at the inability of its players to grasp that they are not, or not only, speaking truth against lies, etc., but are also occupying a certain role in a certain unsavory game that requires and craves constant refueling from performing monkeys like Shimkus. I believe that it is better to step back a bit, to remove oneself from this obscene cycle.

The reaction to Shimkus that follows the usual rules of the game, the one that I know without looking has already popped up at the Huffington Post and elsewhere, says: Shimkus is in error here. Global warming is a phenomenon that is unconnected to anything we might uncover through our amateur interest in Semitic philology. To which I want to say in reply: No shit, but who cares about the content of his claims?

We need to be analyzing the claim that the truth about climate change lies in scripture not as a context-free proposition, but as a speech act and as a performance. It's a delirious performance, one that blends wildly different registers of speech by combining phrases like 'parts per million' and 'cap and trade' with words like 'infallible', 'theological', and 'discourse', sometimes in the very same sentence. We should study the conditions that make this sort of confusion possible, and seek to eliminate them. Little or no progress will be made in this task by acting as though Shimkus is an equal communication partner who may properly be held up to our own standards of reason and judgment, and who may properly trigger our disappointment when he says something stupid.

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Where's the Philosophy?

By Justin E. H. Smith

Now that I am a tenured professor of philosophy, and thus may resign from service in my profession's pep squad without fear of losing my salary, I'm going to come right out and say it: after all this time as a student, and then as a graduate student, and then as a professor of philosophy, I still have absolutely no idea what philosophy is, and therefore what it is I am supposed to be doing. I do not know what the special competences are that I, qua philosopher, am expected to have. It's clear that I am expected to say "qua" a lot, and to give off other such social cues through language, gesture, and dress. But it is that thing that I can do because I am a philosopher that a surgeon, or an archeologist, or a thoughtful sales clerk cannot do, because they are not philosophers, that remains elusive.

On Language and Bipedalism

By Justin E. H. Smith

Contemporary evolutionary biology tells us that there are five distinct evolutionary lines in which bipedalism has emerged independently, including, among other species, lizards (see R. C. Snyder, "Adaptations for Bipedal Locomotion in Lizards," American Zoologist 2 (1962): 191-203); kangaroos (see M. B. Bennett, "Unifying Principles in Terrestrial Locomotion: Where do Hopping Australian Marsupials Fit In?" Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 73, 6 (2000): 726-735); and, obviously, birds. Yet the perception persists that these other species are not really bipedal, but only balance on their hind legs for long periods, and that moreover they cannot be bipedal, since as we all know the ability to walk on two legs is peculiar to humans.