Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique
April 7, 2008 10:26 AM Subscribe

Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique Until literature departments take into account that humans are not just cultural or textual phenomena but something more complex, English and related disciplines will continue to be the laughingstock of the academic world that they have been for years because of their obscurantist dogmatism and their coddled and preening pseudo-radicalism. Until they listen to searching criticism of their doctrine, rather than dismissing it as the language of the devil, literature will continue to be betrayed in academe, and academic literary departments will continue to lose students and to isolate themselves from the intellectual advances of our time.
posted by jason's_planet (107 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite

Did I miss a memo or something? Is it MeFites don't like theory day?

And from the article, I particularly like "Derrida’s challenge to the basis of knowledge seems bold, but it cannot explain advances in understanding, evident in the slow gradient from single cells to societies and the steep one from smoke signals to cell phones." He's totally got Jackie D there - his work definitely doesn't explain how we learned to be more than primordial biological soup. It's almost as if Derrida's critique only becomes valuable around the dawn of writing, around the time of Plato. If only Derrida mentioned that his emphasis was primarily on the way writing influences our thought. Oh wait, now that I recall, Derrida does say that, but it's such a random aside (the opening 30 pages of Of Grammatology, the opening paragraph of "Structure, Sign and Play," the discussion of textuality in Cinders, the rather obvious entire first essay in Disseminations - appropriately entitled "Plato's Pharmacy," and a dozen or so other places) that Brian Boyd probably just missed it when doing his extensive research for the article.

Oh, and I'm not afraid to say it: Wilson's Consilience was a stupid book. I'm sure that before the day is up there'll be a whole thread about how Wilson is hella better than French Theory, so I'm sure we can discuss it then.
posted by hank_14 at 10:39 AM on April 7, 2008 [10 favorites]

I'm very happy to see BS being called on the "culture is everything" dogma, though it may be a moot argument soon anyway. As bioengineering gains a foothold and becomes more widespread, the fact that biology applies to humans as well as animals and plants will become clearer and clearer.

It's as though the prevailing wisdom was that the sharpness of swords was a matter of "the culture of blacksmiths". And then we all got access knife sharpeners and could do it ourselves. No, it's just physics and materials science...
posted by DU at 10:45 AM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

Yeah, and I like how the deaf-mute person who was the first black-smith did it all by himself, without friends, or language, or culture. It was just spontaneous sword-making, an instinctive biological push that was replicated the world over, independent of culture. Which is why the global history of weapons manufacturing produced the same looking object, the same sword-making process, and the same functionality for those swords.

Oh wait...
posted by hank_14 at 10:48 AM on April 7, 2008 [5 favorites]

Boyd's article takes on a lot, and would be difficult to take in fully here. One thing that jumped out at me was this quote: "Not everything in human lives is culture. There is also biology." This is not exactly news to anyone who has read Nietzsche, or for that matter Ruth Millikan, or any number of modern thinkers (Freud, Quine, Bergson, Langer, Chomsky, Bachelard, Goodman, Merleau-Ponty, Dewey, Lovejoy, Bateson, Piaget, etc) who have dwelled at length, and in a myriad of ways, on the intersection of nature/culture. The social sciences (sociologists, anthropoligists and lingusists in particular) have long since taken such an intersection as a given. One has to go way back in intellectual history to find a major thinker oblivious to the biological factor.
posted by ornate insect at 10:51 AM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

I should point out the other amusing part of this post, and Boyd's ignorance, is that the Teory he condemns, has done a lot to attempt to correct the more or less inherited epistemological assumptions that distance human from animal. Derrida's The Animal Therefore I Am, Agamben's The Open, and a number of books by Jean-Luc Nancy all come to mind. And that's just the continentals. Add in Donna Haraway as well.
posted by hank_14 at 10:52 AM on April 7, 2008

Yeah, and I like how the deaf-mute person who was the first black-smith did it all by himself, without friends, or language, or culture.

Category error.
posted by DU at 10:55 AM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

"Just where is the problem in the supposedly devastating insight that meaning or knowledge has to be referred or deferred to other terms or experiences, themselves part of an endless chain of referral or deferral? "

I don't have a problem with it, and neither does anyone else I know in my local Liberal Arts college that I know of. This is pretty much accepted by everyone I know -- at college, it's just in the larger culture outside the University that this seems to still be a problem.

You know, with people like the President of the United States, almost all major religious leaders, most public figures, Oprah, the news media, the teachers in most PreK-12 schools, etc. etc. etc.

I agree with him that the humanities could often use a little more insight from other disciplines, but on the other hand I bet the Science Departments wouldn't be so glad to have the Critical Studies people come by to have a look at their research, and ask why they haven't taken into account that their hypothesis about the cause of a neurological disorder is invalidated by Foucault's Madness and Civilization.

(I'm not saying it is, I'm just sayin')
posted by illovich at 11:05 AM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

Oh, do tell. I'd love to hear the explanation or how swords were somehow crafted and designed without attending to culture. Or how bioengineering somehow changes the way we think about/through/with language, especially in a way more substantial than what you are calling culture.
posted by hank_14 at 11:06 AM on April 7, 2008

I'd love to hear the explanation or how swords were somehow crafted and designed without attending to culture.

No one said they were.
posted by DU at 11:15 AM on April 7, 2008

Wow, DU, you're a fun interlocutor. I can see why you pref the bioengineering part of the equation.
posted by hank_14 at 11:18 AM on April 7, 2008

I'm very happy to see BS being called on the "culture is everything" dogma, though it may be a moot argument soon anyway. As bioengineering gains a foothold and becomes more widespread, the fact that biology applies to humans as well as animals and plants will become clearer and clearer.

How would bioengineering help prove that? If a human-like organism is bio-engineered by us, it won't necessarily prove anything about us, since the organism will be something we made, not something that is us.

The idea that biology is rejected out of hand by the humanities is a straw man argument. What's usually being argued is that some aspect of human culture or behavior that is assumed to be biological or universal isn't, not that the biology doesn't exist, or that it isn't a factor.

I'm not saying that they're always right, but you have to be equally careful that the rebuttal "oh, no--biology explains why men behave that way" can also be cultural ideologies in a panic when being faced with information that causes cognitive dissonance, and not actually indicative of a completely sorted out mechanism.
posted by illovich at 11:19 AM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

illovich: I would go even further and say that the familiar binary between nature/nurture or biology/culture is itself (mostly) a straw man. Among those who are thinking through this, rather than just taking the distinction at face value, I would recommend the work of Susan Oyama.
posted by ornate insect at 11:25 AM on April 7, 2008

Sorry, I did kind of imply that sword sharpness was unrelated to culture. But the confusion here is due to your category error. "Sword sharpness" was my analogy to human biological abilities. There's no "blacksmith" in that case (unless you are a creationist), so the entire thing got dorked up.

Perhaps it would be best to stop attacking and defending my off-the-cuff, poorly-thought-out analogy and start talking about the real issue: Experiment after experiment has shown that, while we have obviously build a lot of culture on top, there is a substrate of biology. Math, language, perception, logic, etc--these all have precursors visible in tiny newborns and a great deal of constancy across cultures.
posted by DU at 11:26 AM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

This article has been written before and it'll be written again. Meanwhile, English professors will continue to spend most of their time reading novels, poems, and plays, thinking about how they work, and helping their students to read novels, poems, and plays and think about how they work, just as they've been doing all along, whatever the wound-up editorialists may say.
posted by escabeche at 11:28 AM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

How would bioengineering help prove that?

Because once a material (in this case, human behavior) is open to inspection and modification with a certain toolset (in this case, biology), saying that that material is impervious to the toolset becomes a non-starter.

There are plenty of things that are now sciences where at one time it was thought that "only by inspecting the Word of God can you know $X". But as people use the secular tools and actually get results, that argument gets weaker and weaker.
posted by DU at 11:31 AM on April 7, 2008

DU: I'm not sure I disagree, but I'm not sure what good such a circular tautology provides. The tendency here is to think one "thing" (cult./bio.) can be conceptually boxed within the other. But this boxing only makes sense if it actually generates new thought, rather than just reduction-for-reduction's sake and oversimplification. I would recommend reading Mary Midgely, Susan Oyama, Ruth Millikan, and Susan Langer, among others, to see how the question itself is often spurious.
posted by ornate insect at 11:32 AM on April 7, 2008

Now that we can modify both the environment we develop in and our genetic/epigenetic development, the distinction between the two is moot. Culture vs. biology is a retarded dichotomy believed only by people who want to score points in some obscure rhetorical game.
posted by Pseudoephedrine at 11:33 AM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

This is definitional minefield:

Not everything in human lives is culture. There is also biology. Human senses, emotions, and thought existed before language, and as a consequence of biological evolution. Though deeply inflected by language, they are not the product of language. Language, on the contrary, is a product of them: if creatures had not evolved to sense, feel, and think, none would ever have evolved to speak.

What about culture as the extension of human evolution? In other words, why enforce the artificial distinction (between evolution and culture) at the same time as you are trying to dispel it?

I could just a easily say: Everything in human lives is evolutionary in some sense, and culture is too. The distinction between our natural beginnings, and current human culture exists as a continuous gradient. It makes no sense to insist upon a delineation. To insist on one only invites a challenge to illustrate, clearly, what is culture, and what is not; Like wise, with evolution. The question is nonsensical when taken to it's extreme.
posted by kuatto at 11:34 AM on April 7, 2008

I read the article, but I don't really understand it. Parts of it, yeah. But the criticisms of "how things are done now," not so much. Then again, I'm a biologist by training. I start with the little pieces and try to build them up into something big.

I do generally feel a migraine coming on when humanities or social science people try to do biology, and vice versa, though. Not because they try-- I always hope it will go well-- but because the results often poorly represent one aspect or the other.

It was maddening when I took Evolution (bio dept.) and Cultural Anthropology (anth/soc) at the same time.
posted by Tehanu at 11:35 AM on April 7, 2008

I am unaware of any theory which posits culture before biology. Most theory, where it touches biology, tends to be rather respectful: look at the Twentieth Century acknowledgment of the effects of sexuality on literature, for example. The study of literature is the study of psychology, in general, in a particular applied form. Literature is (on the whole) a projection of the psychology of the author and (to some degree) the cultural psychology which surrounds him.

As for the field's relevance to the university and the world, well—we're in a commercially-driven period of history, and the study of literature is completely devoid of any commercial application. That's why it's not held in high regard.
posted by sonic meat machine at 11:36 AM on April 7, 2008

pseudoephederine: I believe you are correct. The distinction rings hollow when one considers the degree to which humans have always been toying (for better and worse) with the environment by doing such things as developing new crops, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, perfecting animal husbandry, designing satellite systems, manipulating the gene pool, etc.
posted by ornate insect at 11:39 AM on April 7, 2008

You know, it's very simple. Whenever we culture-dominant types give the other guys room to maneuver, it takes next to no time at all for some nature-type to say something remarkably shitty about black people. Let's not dance around it. Let's not abuse Godwin's Law to ignore it. Biopolitics have helped produce some of the planet's shittiest governments and historical events.

On one level, the truths of biology are so profound we can't ignore them. On another level, wishy-washy guys like me can say, "You had your chance, nature-guys, and boy, did you ever fuck it up."

So we're terrified of it. We gave that POV a go; in some ways, it worked out horribly. Maybe it'll work better this time around -- and maybe not. Let's admit that this is a real problem and that even though a biological perspective could be very useful, it might end up giving us scary things, too.

It seems to me that we just can't operate at either level well. Maybe we have to find some kind of arty Jared Diamond who can bring big history and ecology into the mix as well. Maybe when it's that diverse, we can analyze without any single, powerful prejudice hitting too hard.
posted by mobunited at 11:45 AM on April 7, 2008 [4 favorites]

sonic meat machine: thank you for mentioning psychology, the one discipline above all others that has so wonderfully disturbed, both explicitly as practice and implicitly as it has been absorbed into our everyday understanding, any facile dichotomy between nature/culture. Psychology drives a wedge between so-called human sciences and so-called physical sciences that still causes some anxiety (to speak psychologically).
posted by ornate insect at 11:46 AM on April 7, 2008

ornate insect: I would go even further and say that the familiar binary between nature/nurture or biology/culture is itself (mostly) a straw man. Among those who are thinking through this, rather than just taking the distinction at face value, I would recommend the work of Susan Oyama.

Bingo. Neither biologists nor psychologists think in those terms these days, in spite of the attempts by Pinker to play agent provocateur.

kuatto: Everything in human lives is evolutionary in some sense, and culture is too.

Danger Will Robinson! Contemporary evolutionary theory is built on a three-legged tripod of Natural Selection, statistics and genetics. Kick out one leg of the three and the whole edifice tumbles. Cultural entities are not genes are don't necessarily behave like genes. Therefore, the notion that we can use a theory that is strongly robust for describing the behavior of genes in order to describe cultural innovations has some serious problems.

Pseudoephedrine: Now that we can modify both the environment we develop in and our genetic/epigenetic development, the distinction between the two is moot. Culture vs. biology is a retarded dichotomy believed only by people who want to score points in some obscure rhetorical game.

Damn those archaic cyanobacteria!
posted by KirkJobSluder at 11:51 AM on April 7, 2008 [3 favorites]

...and in some 20 years, what is said now, what is revealed as profound, what we argue about here will seem naive, simplistic, so so old.
posted by Postroad at 11:52 AM on April 7, 2008

What a stupid article.

You know, it's very simple. Whenever we culture-dominant types give the other guys room to maneuver, it takes next to no time at all for some nature-type to say something remarkably shitty about black people. Let's not dance around it. Let's not abuse Godwin's Law to ignore it. Biopolitics have helped produce some of the planet's shittiest governments and historical events.

This is exactly the reason I defend culture against all comers. NATURE EVERYWHERE soon turns into reinforcement of existing sexual and racial hierarchies.
posted by nasreddin at 11:52 AM on April 7, 2008

in order to work, science requires a commitment to the possibility that we can improve our thinking. Insisting that no ideas are valid except the idea that all ideas are invalid, or that all ideas are merely local, except this one idea, is the least likely route to genuine change.

Is excitable, impetuous bio-optimism the new faith...?

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
posted by cowbellemoo at 11:55 AM on April 7, 2008

Meanwhile, English professors will continue to spend most of their time reading novels, poems, and plays, thinking about how they work, and helping their students to read novels, poems, and plays and think about how they work ...

I wish I'd gone to your college.
posted by Bookhouse at 11:55 AM on April 7, 2008

escabeche: Meanwhile, English professors will continue to spend most of their time reading novels, poems, and plays, thinking about how they work

Astrologers continue to think about the stars; their failure is in how.

I don't think feminist theory is how Middle-English poetry works, or that postmodernist koans can teach you how to mine the aesthetics of language. Were the majority of poetry courses actually about said poetry and prosody, instead of force-feeding literature to political ideologies and philosophical trends, your claim would be true. Till then, people who create novels, poems, and plays might feel there are better places to be.
posted by kid ichorous at 12:09 PM on April 7, 2008 [3 favorites]

KirkJob,

Yes, you are absolutely right. In the sense that 'constructing' a cultural entity out of evolutionary theory cannot be robust in the same way as the construction of a cultural entity out of physical theory.

But, to say that we can construct a 'cultural entity' in a manner devoid of any trace of evolution (or chemistry!) is farcical. We recognize that there is a theoretical continuity that exists on all levels of analysis. Yet practically speaking the most robust analysis is expressed in an abstract language that suits a particular level of theoretical continuity. But the abstraction presupposes the underlying framework.

I actually came up with a much better rephrasing for the above quotation:

"[Something] in human lives is culture. There is also [some] biology [involved]."
posted by kuatto at 12:09 PM on April 7, 2008

mobunited: You know, it's very simple. Whenever we culture-dominant types give the other guys room to maneuver, it takes next to no time at all for some nature-type to say something remarkably shitty about black people. Let's not dance around it. Let's not abuse Godwin's Law to ignore it. Biopolitics have helped produce some of the planet's shittiest governments and historical events.

While I see the situation as quite a bit more complex than that. Social Darwinism, to take an example, didn't come entirely from biology. The smug sense of cultural imperialism that spawned it had already existed, and rationalized by any number of arbitrary criteria under which Anglo-Saxon Protestant values were deemed superior. Even today, ethnocentrists argue the immigration debate entirely on the same cultural terms they used a century ago. As Americans, we are the heirs of the greatest cultural heritage in the world, they argue. This heritage must be defended against the overly Catholic values of Latin America, the Muslim values of Central Asia and Africa, and the post-modern values of feminism and gay rights.

To point the finger at people who see biology as a factor in human behavior, while ignoring both the strong dissent in those fields, and the problem that your own backyard is stuffed to the brim of heterosexual white guys asserting their dominance over everyone and everything, is a huge problem.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:16 PM on April 7, 2008

I think what irritated me was that there was a contradictory tone to the reasoning that "not everything" is culture, as if the point was the conflict between our natural origins and our culture.

Rather the challenge is to illustrate and synthesize the connections between culture and the natural world, to promote a cultural 'investment' in the ecological systems that nurtured us in infancy and still support us.
posted by kuatto at 12:16 PM on April 7, 2008

Astrologers continue to think about the stars; their failure is in how.

What a horrendous analogy. If astrologers are the counterparts to English profs, who correspond to astronomers? (I presume that was the unwritten direction of your thought.)

To collapse the levels of the analogy a bit: I'd much rather study literature with an astrologer than an astronomer.
posted by voltairemodern at 12:30 PM on April 7, 2008

And of course, another direction of criticism in this area comes from ecofeminist and some radical thinkers on race and ecology. They note that whenever people propose that "culture" is distinct from "nature" three things tend to happen.

1) "Progress" becomes a major value to be pursued at the expense of long-term environmental health and sustainability.

2) Women, the lower classes, and people of color are identified with "nature" and therefore less worthy of full participation in "culture."

3) Women, the lower classes, and people of color get the short end of the stick when it comes to environmental sustainability.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:31 PM on April 7, 2008 [2 favorites]

voltairemodern: To collapse the levels of the analogy a bit: I'd much rather study literature with an astrologer than an astronomer.

Why? Do you automatically assume that an astronomer would be unwilling to consider methods out side of her field?
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:33 PM on April 7, 2008

While I see the situation as quite a bit more complex than that. Social Darwinism, to take an example, didn't come entirely from biology. The smug sense of cultural imperialism that spawned it had already existed, and rationalized by any number of arbitrary criteria under which Anglo-Saxon Protestant values were deemed superior. Even today, ethnocentrists argue the immigration debate entirely on the same cultural terms they used a century ago.

Sure. It's a rationale, not a pure output of the mode of analysis. But rationales are powerful and in many cases, are he defacto way we go about forming positions in the absence of rigorous experimentation (and how can we have double-blind statistical litcrit?). As an excuse, Nature did a lot of damage, and we know for a fact that there are the Pioneer Funds and so on waiting in the wings to do it again. So we must be cautious.
posted by mobunited at 12:41 PM on April 7, 2008

To collapse the levels of the analogy a bit: I'd much rather study literature with an astrologer than an astronomer.

I'd rather study literature with an astronomer. Like taxonomists, they tend to know a whole bunch of obscure literary stuff. Scientists identify some new object in space or organism in the ocean based on science, but the names they give them are often drawn from myth, folklore, and literature.
posted by Tehanu at 12:51 PM on April 7, 2008

mobunited: Sure. It's a rationale, not a pure output of the mode of analysis. But rationales are powerful and in many cases, are he defacto way we go about forming positions in the absence of rigorous experimentation (and how can we have double-blind statistical litcrit?). As an excuse, Nature did a lot of damage, and we know for a fact that there are the Pioneer Funds and so on waiting in the wings to do it again. So we must be cautious.

To answer the question first, double-blind experimental tests are only one of several possible methodologies. I don't expect astronomy or ethnomusicology to do double-blind experimental studies either.

And you are still ducking the two big problems with your argument here:
1: Many of the most powerful critiques of those rationales are going to be informed by biology.
2: The construction of man as cultural and not natural has been a hugely oppressive rationale in its own right. When will you deal with the blood on your own hands?
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:53 PM on April 7, 2008

If we substitute "mind" for stars in the analogy above, are psychologists, poets, and cognitive scientists astronomers or astrologers? I would say that the anaology falls apart here precisely b/c the layered reality and phenomenological complexity of our mental life and experience is such that there is no one "correct" way of thinking (about thinking as such)...
posted by ornate insect at 12:57 PM on April 7, 2008

And let's not Godwin around this. Cultural and economic determinism has also been the cause of many bloody oppressions in history.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:02 PM on April 7, 2008

Culture is influenced by biology, that's completely uncontroversial. But biology is influenced by culture. Anybody who's seen Supersize Me will know that. The prevalence of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in modern society is another example. The rapid increase in average height in the last decades another. One of the many problems with thinking of culture and biology as oppositional absolutes is that once one begins to think in absolutist terms the big guns of good and evil start to come out. To conceive of culture and biology in moralistic terms isn't necessarily the road to genocide, but surely it isn't very useful in the quest to understand the world.
posted by Kattullus at 1:30 PM on April 7, 2008 [3 favorites]

Has anyone read Boyd's book on Pale Fire? It had a really interesting premise, as I recall. I think the idea is that Shade's actual, literal ghost (his "shade"; get it?) is communicating with Kimbote from beyond the grave. I never got around to reading it....

Oh, and I'm not afraid to say it: Wilson's Consilience was a stupid book

I did not like that book at all. I found Wilson's style grating, though, which made it very difficult to engage with his ideas. Actually, I don't think I managed to finish it.
posted by mr_roboto at 2:21 PM on April 7, 2008

"I don't think feminist theory is how Middle-English poetry works, or that postmodernist koans can teach you how to mine the aesthetics of language. Were the majority of poetry courses actually about said poetry and prosody, instead of force-feeding literature to political ideologies and philosophical trends, your claim would be true. Till then, people who create novels, poems, and plays might feel there are better places to be."

What tripe. Feminist theory (to ignore your invented "post-modern koans") is to, say, a Middle-English ballad as an MRI is to a head: it is a way of looking that will show part of the whole. A feminist reading can reveal unexamined gender assumptions, or how identity was constructed, but does not and cannot show the full range of interpretations possible, or even necessarily show how contemporary people thought or felt about a piece. An MRI shows a head as it exists, but cannot give the full picture of the person whose head it is. Both are tools for analysis.

Further, as anyone who's had more than a couple English classes should know, ideologies and philosophies are rarely taught as the total universal view of all work, rather they are taught as tools for examination, giving understand that would not necessarily be accessible without a greater context in which to place the work. Those ideologies are valued based on the insight that they create: Marxist readings of texts do open up new narratives, new explanations, new nuance in works that are not explicitly Marxist. Does that mean the every story is a war between classes or should be viewed with a historical economics perspective? Or even that it's the best way to view everything? No.

As for this essay, while I found it interesting, it fundamentally failed to overcome the easiest objection to the relativization of knowledge, that we cannot know all the blind spots we have due to our cultures, and it also failed to give me any real insight into an alternative from biology. If a biological view of fiction is so valuable, what insights would it provide aside from "OH hai guys we iz all hu-manz"?
posted by klangklangston at 3:04 PM on April 7, 2008 [6 favorites]

Oh, and to both bio- and cult- determinism genocides, remember that bad outcomes from ideas do not necessarily make the ideas unsound, just those practices.
posted by klangklangston at 3:08 PM on April 7, 2008

Biopolitics have helped produce some of the planet's shittiest governments and historical events.

This is exactly the reason I defend culture against all comers.

Stalin had no use at all for biological determinism. He gave his blessings and full support to a crackpot named Lysenko who seemed to think that you could somehow "teach" grain to produce higher yields.

His emphasis on culture didn't produce a warm and humane society, to put it mildly.

(which is not to say that y'all are like Stalin, of course.)
posted by jason's_planet at 3:39 PM on April 7, 2008

Yeah, I think if you are going to blame Hitler on Social Darwinism and on believing that certain things are "natural," and they should guide us, then you have to blame Mao and Stalin on believing that you can change human nature by changing culture.

It is not inevitable that believing we have biological tendencies that shape culture means idolizing and reifying the status quo and oppressing women and people from non-Western cultures and supporting "progress" at all costs.

In fact, many evolutionary psychologists critique modern life based on how it mismatches our evolved tendencies: for example, their critique around the "mommy wars" is that they miss the point.

Women didn't evolve to stay home alone with multiple children-- nor did they evolve to work away from their kids. We all evolved to work with kids nearby much of the time; women worked with young children in slings or swaddled nearby and with lots of extended family for support. Social policy built around this would recognize the need for family leave, decent childcare and women's work: it wouldn't send the women home and the men to the office.

I think there are many other examples of how a biological perspective can shed light on cultural debates without privileging Western cultures or supporting "progress at all costs." In fact, this one suggests that tribal cultures do better at a key aspect of child-rearing!
posted by Maias at 3:42 PM on April 7, 2008

Maias: the problem w/some evolutionary psychology as I see it, however, is it often falls under "just so" thinking. It's a topic that's been covered before on other mefi threads, but I thought it worth mentioning how problematic evolutionary psychology can become if not scrutinized more carefully.
posted by ornate insect at 3:49 PM on April 7, 2008

I'm not familiar with Louis Menand, but I've never taken an English class that explicitly or implicitly neglected the root of the "human condition" in basic biological human needs and psychology.

Certainly, there is a focus in many humanities classes on art and literature's ability to overcome, pervert and/or generally transcend biological imperatives, but that is very much at the heart of the study of humanities, a source of its dignity, and a far more dynamic phenomena than the author's childish concession that "humans like stories."

As for beef with post-structuralism, this is the very challenge the author looks for, tho not in the form he'd hope to find it. Poststructuralism tends to assert that of course human language is subject to biological necessity and idiosyncrasy. But this is seen as an obstacle for the technologies of language and reason, rather than a firm place to set truth. If humanity must try to see itself clearly through a tool (language) that is based in the trappings of human existence, it is inevitably doomed to subjectivity. If anything, the purpose of postmodern literature is to try to map the ever-shifting relevance and "reality" created by those different facets of biological humanity: reason, emotion, hunger, mortality, psychology, sociology, etc., albeit with a firm concession that there is no ultimate objectivity to fully level or connect these aspects of humanity.

So, yeah. This guy sucks.
posted by es_de_bah at 4:16 PM on April 7, 2008

The main problem with evolutionary psychology is that there's almost nothing known about the behavior of early humans. I mean, for all we know, during the day babies could've been buried in the ground with only their heads sticking out and watched over by doddering oldies while the parents went hunting and gathering. Probably not, but we just don't know. Until some major breakthrough occurs all this faddish fiddlefaddle about what stone age humans can tell us about our modern lives will be nothing but twattle.

Most evolutionary psychologist, mind you, are fully aware of this.
posted by Kattullus at 4:17 PM on April 7, 2008

klangklangston: What tripe. Feminist theory (to ignore your invented "post-modern koans") is to, say, a Middle-English ballad as an MRI is to a head: it is a way of looking that will show part of the whole. [...] Both are tools for analysis.

To me, talking about the cultural values encoded into a poem is a little like talking about the data encoded onto a hard drive. Examining the plaintext, the data, with tools designed for political science, is fine; but to produce a new poem, or a new hard drive, it's better to study the vehicle, the process of encoding, and all the techne behind it. Not to sunder the message and vehicle completely, but our word "poetry" comes from the Greek word to make, "poein," and in academic climes that prefer to discuss everything about a poem except how it's made, I'm not sure we're really talking about poetry at all.
posted by kid ichorous at 4:27 PM on April 7, 2008

And, at least in English, my experience is that this nuts and bolts talk has been specialized away into MFAs and workshops. Yet lit courses in ancient and foreign languages still seemed to take the more structural approach, focusing on tropes, rhetoric, and technique - all in all, it seemed they had more respect for the language.
posted by kid ichorous at 4:31 PM on April 7, 2008

And let's not Godwin around this. Cultural and economic determinism has also been the cause of many bloody oppressions in history.

Sure. That's why open societies exercise caution when it comes to making any claim that can't be substantiated based on purely pragmatic grounds. That's why human rights was invented. Of course, that has nothing to do with economic determinism, which is really a branch of naturism/scientism when it's consciously pursued. Or if it's Libertarian, it's merely stupid. But from the perspective of a contemporary, free-er, society, cultural rationales work well because we don't have to accept them. I don't have to believe that God wants me to do X and in fact, it is illegal for most liberal democracies to influence me based on this.

Stalin had no use at all for biological determinism. He gave his blessings and full support to a crackpot named Lysenko who seemed to think that you could somehow "teach" grain to produce higher yields.

His emphasis on culture didn't produce a warm and humane society, to put it mildly

That's just biological determinism with particularly shitty biology.
posted by mobunited at 5:11 PM on April 7, 2008

Danger Will Robinson! Contemporary evolutionary theory is built on a three-legged tripod of Natural Selection, statistics and genetics. Kick out one leg of the three and the whole edifice tumbles. Cultural entities are not genes are don't necessarily behave like genes. Therefore, the notion that we can use a theory that is strongly robust for describing the behavior of genes in order to describe cultural innovations has some serious problems.

Genes are just information. Digital information, in fact, in both the natural and computerized forms. (I think the jury's still out on whether reality is digital or continuous, but genes being digital makes it easier.) The fact that someone took the information in the human genome, made a big picture, and stuck it on the internet with a Creative Commons license illustrates that information is substrate-invariant - whether we discuss a book, a text file, or an MP3, we may still discuss information.

Therefore, there is no validity to insisting on DNA as a necessity for evolution. Lifeforms from other planets would almost definitely have evolved different gene-analogues that are not DNA to represent their information. Their information would be represented differently, translated into various manifestations (as your DNA is variously manifested both as the human organism and the sperm/egg organism) who knows how, subjected to different mutational and selective processes, and perpetuated in odd fashions, yet evolution would still take place.

Now, why are restricting ourselves to Earth life and little green men? Cultures, companies, churches, and so on are manifestations of information; information represented in the form of books, memories, corporate manuals, blueprints, mythologies, org charts, and bits. They're subject to selection and mutation. Companies go out of business, cultures adapt and vanish, churches change their dogmas, and so on. They propagate and attempt to perpetuate themselves.

What, then, exempts these entities from evolution? It's easy with biological life. The various aspects of evolution I mentioned are easy to point out. The information's stored in the DNA, it mutates when hit by radiation and so on, and it perpetuates itself by creating more biological life. The fact that in other domains these aspects take on harder-to-describe and multitudinous forms (the information of a culture manifests itself in cities, roads, and thumbtacks, and a culture may perpetuate itself by the production and indoctrination of children, or by the assimilation of immigrants) does not mean that they are not present.

Information, perpetuating itself and mutating in the face of selective pressures. That's what evolves. I could, in fact, take out the qualifiers and just write "Information is what evolves," but it would take a few more paragraphs and get into some trivialities. I certainly don't think that the body of science behind biological evolution universalizes, but I also certainly don't think there are no commonalities.

It's interesting reading attempts to define life. I think in the future that's going to be looked on as a silly question.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 5:22 PM on April 7, 2008

I'm not sure "genes are just information," TheOnlyCoolTim, or rather, as a metaphor, the reality (of the bioinformatic constraints on genetic code) is more complicated. After all, information denotes something static and non-reciprocal, but if genes are info they are a special kind of info that interacts over time with the environmental info that they come into contact with. This is why biology does not reduce to genetics: there are morpho-genetic elements of phenotypic plasticity, elements of evo-devo, that are not strictly genetic. I would say genes are like information in some ways, but much more elastic that that concept (information) traditionally entails.
posted by ornate insect at 5:47 PM on April 7, 2008

mobunited: Sure. That's why open societies exercise caution when it comes to making any claim that can't be substantiated based on purely pragmatic grounds. That's why human rights was invented. Of course, that has nothing to do with economic determinism, which is really a branch of naturism/scientism when it's consciously pursued.

Ahh, but we are not talking about naturism/scientism. We are talking about (in your terms) "culture-dominant types" which would include economic determinism, vs "Nature" (sic) or "the truths of biology." Either your argument is so sloppy that you don't know what it is from hour to hour, or you are intentionally trying to change the terms of the argument to wheedle your way out from a tight spot.

If your beef is with "scientism," that discussion is two doors down the hall starting from radically different starting positions.

To be blunt, the "culture-dominant types" are, with a handful of exceptions, a bunch of pasty privileged white men asserting their universal view of human nature on the world. For them to shriek in horror at the potential social abuses of the natural sciences, after having created horror after horror, is rank hypocricy.

That's just biological determinism with particularly shitty biology.

Bullshit. Stalinist science explicitly denied the possibility the biological determinism. Lysenko produced shitty biology because his theories had to start with dialectical materialism as a mechanism for biological change.

Which is a good point to turn the argument back on you. Science doesn't exist on its own as a value-neutral endeavor, it is driven by culture and interpreted via culture. When do the culture-dominant types step up and take responsibility for the ideologies that made Lysenko, Galton and Mengele?

You are right that the term 'evolution' refers to a biological concept affirmed by genetics and shit, but I think it is fair to also use it to describe 'things that evolve'. Or are you suggesting that 'cultural entities' cannot evolve in any sense of the word? Please excuse my general understanding of the term being informed by biology.

Well, yes. Cultural entities can "evolve" in the broadest sense of the word. So can a rock left exposed to the weather. My personal belief is that the use of "evolution" in this context leads to the sloppy thinking that cultural entities are analogous to phenotypes, and cultural change is analagous to natural selection.

In fact, one of the ways in which an intelligent designer has been falsified is by testing exactly this analogy. Treat the family of 19th century brass insturments as analogous to a family of organisms. Treat designed features as analogous to phenotypes. Subject both to the same statistical methods used to infer relationships of common ancestry. The cladistic trees of brass insturments are radically different from cladistic trees of biological organisms. This provides strong evidence for the theory that the key mechanisms of cultural innovation (adoption and appropriation) are radically different from the key mechanisms of biological evolution (descent with modification and natural selection).

ornate insect: After all, information denotes something static and non-reciprocal, but if genes are info they are a special kind of info that interacts over time with the environmental info that they come into contact with.

This hasn't been true since Turing.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:26 PM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

When you use the term culture-dominant (and, I expect, biology-dominant), what sort of dominance are you referring to? Are 'culturalists' dominating biologists by an exercise of power (let's call this a power-domination)? or is one party claiming that considerations within their field are somehow 'more true' than considerations in the other (let's call this positivism-domination)?

If it's the latter, it appears that your framework for considering the question is also involved in asserting your position. Doesn't that suggest to you that considerations of what is 'true' and 'more true' are irrelevant, or that the matter of which types of factors/conditions 'dominate' human experience cannot be settled positivistically because there is no real answer to that question which isn't implicated in something like uh culture?
posted by Shakeer at 6:39 PM on April 7, 2008

Shakeer: When you use the term culture-dominant (and, I expect, biology-dominant), what sort of dominance are you referring to?

Well, if you notice, I quote it's use by mobunited as a self-description. I'm assuming, based on his self-description, is that it refers to people in the humanities who are reluctant to consider theories from biology as informative on their work. His reason for not considering biology is out of a squeamishness regarding politically bad men saying politically bad things about politically disadvantaged people. My point, is that this squeamishness is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

My view, is that the nature/nurture dichotomy is a load of bunk, and at least biology and psychology have gone to more holistic models that consider both.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:57 PM on April 7, 2008

This is exactly the reason I defend culture against all comers.

Come, now, nasreddin-- you defend culture not because you believe you're right on the facts, but rather because you dislike the ends should you be wrong?
posted by Kwantsar at 7:23 PM on April 7, 2008

NATURE EVERYWHERE soon turns into reinforcement of existing sexual and racial hierarchies.

As opposed to CULTURE EVERYWHERE.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 7:45 PM on April 7, 2008 [2 favorites]

Kwantsar, that seems pretty reasonable to me. I personally could give a fig if Darwinism is right, and I don't really care that ID people think they're right. I just find the fallout of the two philosophies, the stories that they allow us to tell about ourselves, to be interesting, and I prefer the political outcomes associated with Darwin to the ones associated with intelligent design. But it's not a truth question, it's a question of what the stories/supposed truths produce.
posted by hank_14 at 9:28 PM on April 7, 2008

We did this already.
posted by afu at 10:43 PM on April 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

Hmm. There are some good points being made in this thread, and maybe KirkJobSluder is right about cultural determinism. I may have to reconsider.

Come, now, nasreddin-- you defend culture not because you believe you're right on the facts, but rather because you dislike the ends should you be wrong?

No, it's not the ends I dislike--it's the kind of argumentation that proponents of biological determinism end up using. The evolutionary psychology I've been exposed to, for instance, argues that present-day American gender norms (blondes hotter than brunettes; women are passive) are evolutionarily determined, which as a historian I find grotesquely ignorant and offensive.
posted by nasreddin at 10:59 PM on April 7, 2008

This is exactly the reason I defend culture against all comers. NATURE EVERYWHERE soon turns into reinforcement of existing sexual and racial hierarchies.

What a foolish comment, when sexual and racial hierarchies are social, cultural constructs in the first place, and bigoted scientists who use "science" to argue for their prejudices quickly find their ideas and reputations taken apart by other much more competent scientists, if not by their own stupidity. Can the humanities majors please go back to doing what it was they were doing before claiming expertise in scientific matters?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:01 PM on April 7, 2008

What a foolish comment, when sexual and racial hierarchies are social, cultural constructs in the first place, and bigoted scientists who use "science" to argue for their prejudices quickly find their ideas and reputations taken apart by other much more competent scientists, if not by their own stupidity. Can the humanities majors please go back to doing what it was they were doing before claiming expertise in scientific matters?

This comment makes no sense. Please take your spit-flecked strawman and go fight it somewhere else.
posted by nasreddin at 11:04 PM on April 7, 2008

It's no strawman, and your capitalized hyperbole is still nonsense.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:09 PM on April 7, 2008

In fact, one of the ways in which an intelligent designer has been falsified is by testing exactly this analogy. Treat the family of 19th century brass insturments as analogous to a family of organisms. Treat designed features as analogous to phenotypes. Subject both to the same statistical methods used to infer relationships of common ancestry. The cladistic trees of brass insturments are radically different from cladistic trees of biological organisms. This provides strong evidence for the theory that the key mechanisms of cultural innovation (adoption and appropriation) are radically different from the key mechanisms of biological evolution (descent with modification and natural selection).

Any chance you got a link to that? It sounds like a cool paper.
posted by afu at 11:15 PM on April 7, 2008

Oooh, can I second afu's request?
posted by hank_14 at 11:18 PM on April 7, 2008

There's a tendency among people who have learned a lot, or perhaps been taught a lot, to hasten to use labels and try and sort things into boxes, because those labels and boxes can serve as markers we can gesture at in passing in our headlong rush to get to what we see as the core of our argument, as givens, to save time. This is regrettable, I think. It too often hinders thinking, rather than helping it. We end up arguing about words instead of thinking about how things actually are.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:27 AM on April 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Found it

Phylogenetics and Material Cultural Evolution (pdf)
posted by afu at 1:04 AM on April 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Thanks, afu!
posted by hank_14 at 1:23 AM on April 8, 2008

As a linguist, I find this whole debate illogical, beginning with Boyd's rant (which is a well done version of a rant I've read a thousand times if I've read it once). I find the casual dismissal of "science" (what I think is really pissing off people like Boyd) among my more benighted humanities colleagues equally silly (I was once warned not to include sound spectography in a book because "people will see graphs and think it's science," which is a Bad Thing in some circles)

Holism, my friends. There is a forest. It includes many trees. They are all made of wood. Some of them are made of light wood, some of heavy wood. All burn, but at different rates. All die. All reproduce. There are people in the woods. They live under different trees. They make different kinds of fires because of the differences between the wood in their local trees. They trade their wood with other groups of humans and learn different fire-making tricks in the process.

What is so hard about that? Franz Boas made a much more sophisticated consilience argument than Wilson ever did, in the 1920s and 30s.
posted by fourcheesemac at 5:19 AM on April 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Ah, that's what I get for commenting and leaving. But to answer KirkJobSluder's question a tad late,

Why? Do you automatically assume that an astronomer would be unwilling to consider methods out side of her field?

Yes, insofar as they are an astronomer and concerned with generating scientific knowledge. Insofar as they are a person, then no, certainly they could be competent teachers of literature. But astrology as a vocation is far more interesting from a literary perspective than astronomy; I think the insights an astrologer would have about how people react to certain signs and riddles would be very useful.

At any rate, the original analogy was a bad one, I was just pointing out that it was weak any way you look at it.
posted by voltairemodern at 5:41 AM on April 8, 2008

KirkJobSluder: Which is a good point to turn the argument back on you. Science doesn't exist on its own as a value-neutral endeavor, it is driven by culture and interpreted via culture. When do the culture-dominant types step up and take responsibility for the ideologies that made Lysenko, Galton and Mengele?

Uh... what are you trying to say here? If I'm reading you right you're saying that since scientists have to take responsibility for all the bad things done in the name of science, culture-dominant types have to take responsibility for all the things done in the name of culture. Which makes no sense since society doesn't lay the demand on scientists that they take responsibility for all that's been done in the name of science. Do I misunderstand what you're saying?

Also, while I'm at it, arguing about which is more to blame, humanism or science, for crackpot nonsense like Stalinism or Nazism, is an especially fruitless sort of endeavour.
posted by Kattullus at 6:31 AM on April 8, 2008

Examining the plaintext, the data, with tools designed for political science, is fine; but to produce a new poem, or a new hard drive, it's better to study the vehicle, the process of encoding, and all the techne behind it. Not to sunder the message and vehicle completely, but our word "poetry" comes from the Greek word to make, "poein," and in academic climes that prefer to discuss everything about a poem except how it's made, I'm not sure we're really talking about poetry at all.

Putting aside the strangeness of the "encoding" metaphor, which Shakeer has already poked at, I think your problem is that you're looking at poetry as a poet, but lit crit classes are for academic poetry readers, and while academic readers may be poets, the categories do not overlap. Students of English literature aren't really interested in making more poems - they want to study the ones they're looking at, in the finest detail, so they'll use different theories as lenses to try and "magnify" different aspects of the text - for example, feminist theory to highlight gender in a Middle-English poem, however out of place that might seem. (I can actually speak to this one, since I did a Medieval Lit specialization for my Honors English major, and proto-feminism is very useful for yoinking out the gender stuff. If you just assume, "Oh, ancient dead dudes, no one cares about teh wimmens," then you sort of skim over it all, but if you go in specifically looking at how women are treated in the text then you start seeing some fascinating and often surprisingly complicated gender dynamics - c.f. Chaucer's Wife of Bath. Anyway, aside.)

Dead and foreign language lit classes tend to go into mechanics more just because the students aren't as fluent, so they need more work with the basics ... that said, if you're in lit classes where you're studying poetry and the mechanics are never being studied at all -- wow, those aren't very good lit classes. They aren't representative of the field at all.
posted by bettafish at 8:48 AM on April 8, 2008

nasredin: No, it's not the ends I dislike--it's the kind of argumentation that proponents of biological determinism end up using.

Who in this discussion is advocating biological determinism. What I'm advocating is that the biological sciences can certainly inform the humanities. For example, ecology and botany can suggest that critical changes happened to the cultures of Minos, England, and Easter Island about the same time that population reached a critical mass and old growth forests were depleted. Botany can also provide some critical insight into the scope of agricultural trade at various points of the Roman Empire.

Kattullus: Also, while I'm at it, arguing about which is more to blame, humanism or science, for crackpot nonsense like Stalinism or Nazism, is an especially fruitless sort of endeavour.

Oh, I fully agree with this. But this is exactly the kind of crackpot nonsense that nasredin and mobunited are peddling in order to justify a squeamishness of the humanities in regards to biology. My response to this to two-fold:

1) The humanities for the most part is the bully pulpit for ethnocentrism, sexism, and cultural imperialism. Systematic prejudice and bias are foundational to the study of the humanities at almost every liberal arts academy. For champions of the humanities to treat biology as a potentially corrupting influence is the pot calling the kettle black.

2) Science is also a messy, political, and culturally embedded system. Members of the humanities can't get away with passing the buck on problems like Social Darwinism, miscegenation laws, Nazism, or Soviet science, because these need to be understood as profoundly shaped by the political ideologies and literature of their time.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:49 AM on April 8, 2008

"Systematic prejudice and bias are foundational to the study of the humanities at almost every liberal arts academy."

This seems a bit of a stretch: occasional definitely, implicit possibly, but systematic?

If that's how one is to describe "almost every liberal arts academy," how is one to describe, oh, the KKK, for instance?

On another, hopefully related note, where does all this disciplinary anxiety in the academy (this constant need to patrol a subject's borders) stem from?

It seems like it works people up for a hidden reason, and that may be that it signals a loss of power or control of how and what we digest information-wise. After all, the overwhelming tendency for some time now, both inside and outside the academy, is that information (useful, useless, technical, empirical, theoretical, reasonably strightforward, nomothetic, ideographic, qualitative, quantitative, what have you) both streams at us continually and continues to grow (in quantity, if not in quality or usefulness) at an alarming, even overwhelming pace.

Hence, overload, anxiety, a tendency to re-classify our "knowledge system" the way a person w/too much stuff alphabetizes his books or re-arranges the dishes. One thinker, Nicholas Maxwell, thinks the overemphasis on information-for-its own-sake is having debilitating results on our culture at large--and that science needs to stop pretending (at the institutional level) that its mission of neutral fact-finding has not in fact spawned a kind of societal neurosis. He wants, from what I understand, for us to re-think the academy from top to bottom: to make it more responsive to our needs as a society in crisis.
posted by ornate insect at 11:43 AM on April 8, 2008

This paragraph from the conclusion of Phylogenetics and Material Cultural Evolution seems particularly germane to this discussion:

While it is tempting to attribute the patterns we discover in culture to the same causal processes that operate in nature, cultural systems present greater complexity than their biological counterparts and call for the development of novel approaches to historical inference.

[thanks afu!]
posted by Kattullus at 11:58 AM on April 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

ornate insect: This seems a bit of a stretch: occasional definitely, implicit possibly, but systematic?

As long as points of view from outside of the usual suspects of European art, literature and theory are marginalized into "something studies" departments, and included only in token numbers in the core discourse of a field, no, that is not at all a stretch. And the best you can say for the academy on this matter is that there is an impotent awareness of the problem that has led to sluggish change since the 1960s. If you look beyond the current struggle for change, institutions of higher education have been notoriously conservative maintainers of the status quo.

Without having read the book, I'd be skeptical of Maxwell's hypothesis because the mission of science isn't "neutral fact-finding." Neutral facts are just data. The goal of science is to create generalizations that allow us to understand aggregations of facts.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:03 PM on April 8, 2008

kirkjobsluder--Maxwell has been writing cogently, although not somewhat controversial, about the role of science in society at large for some 30 years, so please give his arguments the benfit of a closer look.

Your parsing my paraphrase in order to make a cursory case about Maxwell suggests my argument about all of us on this thread (and at large) is correct in some way:

we are impatient w/just how much information is out there on any given topic, and how all that info. both naturally changes the "nature" of traditional topics/subjects, but also with how ill-quipped we are, no matter how ploymathic or erudite we are, for the info-verse we now live in.

As to your first point: the real battle for social justice, civil rights, and cultural recognition will not, and does not, occur in the academy. The revolution will not be theorized. So pinning one's hopes for a less prejudiced world on the academy just begs the question.

If anything, the academy tends to be more forward-thinking and inclusive (generally) on matters of race, class, gender and ethnicity that the "outside" world (workspace, mediascape, subway, mall, gas station, bar, neighborhood, social function).
posted by ornate insect at 12:22 PM on April 8, 2008

Maxwell's website might be of interest here.
posted by ornate insect at 12:28 PM on April 8, 2008

ornate insect: As to your first point: the real battle for social justice, civil rights, and cultural recognition will not, and does not, occur in the academy. The revolution will not be theorized. So pinning one's hopes for a less prejudiced world on the academy just begs the question.

Well, I've not said or implied this. I'm trying to make this as simple and as focused as possible. My first claim is simply this: the humanities can't be corrupted by the influence of human biology, because the humanities as a collection of disciplines is already corrupted by a historic legacy of being the study of "great works" by "great men."

My second claim is simply this: science is a cultural system, and systems such as Social Darwinism, Nazi Science and Evolutionary Psychology need to be criticized not only as scientific claims, but as folklore, literature, history and political phenomena as well.

I don't expect people from the humanities to lead the revolution. But gawsh if I couldn't do without additional parochialism based on some vague moral paranoia.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:17 PM on April 8, 2008

But astrology as a vocation is far more interesting from a literary perspective than astronomy; I think the insights an astrologer would have about how people react to certain signs and riddles would be very useful.

Robert Pinsky: I was thinking of writing a poem about a pair of tube socks...
Madam Cleo: Nooooo, mon! That boy be all wrong for you! Kick his ass to the curb and go wit' "The Shirt!"
Pinsky: Brilliant. Thanks as always, Madam.
Madam Cleo: That'll be 2.99 a minute.
posted by kid ichorous at 1:29 PM on April 8, 2008

As to kid ichorous argument that literary criticism means nothing to writers (which he starts with here, I'd like to say that the writers I know love academia and are immensely flattered when their work is interpreted by scholars. Typical is this sentiment from Neil Gaiman: "I’ve always had a healthy respect for academia. Even when I'm puzzled by it, it treats art like it matters. And for those of us who make art, that’s a fine thing to experience." - From an introduction to a collection of essays on Gaiman's Sandman reposted today in his blog.
posted by Kattullus at 1:35 PM on April 8, 2008

kirkjobsluder-- where is the harm in being "a historic legacy of being the study of 'great works' by 'great men.' " ?? Are we to settle for a historic legacy of mediocre works by mediocre men, or a historic legacy of slipshod, unremarkable works by cranks and diletantes? Or perhaps we should just read textbooks written by anaoymous academic hacks? Perhaps this fear of greatness does everyone a disservice, and it distorts rather than helps change the very real legacies of historical oppression that are at large in the world.

The greatest revolutionary leaders the world has known found inspiration in the works of those giants whose shoulders they stood upon, my cliche notwithstanding. This constant race to the bottom (defining the possibilities for change according to a syllabus) through sociological-speak is its own form of insidious oppression: it oppresses by patronizing students from being able to make up their own minds, and with its lack of pluralistic imagination.

The "humanities" cannot be corrupted. People can be corrupted. The "humanities" and the "sciences" are just 19th century terms semantically bloated beyond all recognition.

Can science and pseudoscience be used as a "cultural system" of oppression? Surely they can, but it also seems like an especially remote concern in today's age. I'm far more afraid of how science is used in the corporate or military complex labratory than I am about how it's taught to undergraduates.
posted by ornate insect at 1:37 PM on April 8, 2008

ornate insect: where is the harm in being "a historic legacy of being the study of 'great works' by 'great men.' " Are we to settle for a historic legacy of mediocre works by mediocre men, or a historic legacy of slipshod, unremarkable works by cranks and diletantes? Or perhaps we should just read textbooks written by anaoymous academic hacks? Perhaps this fear of greatness does everyone a disservice, and it distorts rather than helps change the very real legacies of historical oppression that are at large in the world.

The problem here is that "great works" really doesn't mean works of artistic, technical or thematic merit, and "great men" doesn't mean a diverse selection of artists, writers and thinkers who had some interesting ideas. What it has meant is an indoctrination into the arts and letters in support of the dominant politics of a given nation.

It's never been a meritocracy and isn't now. The honest openly admit this, and either struggle to get previously overlooked works onto the menu, or rail about how multiculturalism is undermining the traditional goals of higher education.

Can science and pseudoscience be used as a "cultural system" of oppression? Surely they can, but it also seems like an especially remote concern in today's age. I'm far more afraid of how science is used in the corporate or military complex labratory than I am about how it's taught to undergraduates.

I think it's silly to think that these things stay in the laboratory. Published research on plant genetics is quickly implemented by Monsanto in the fields, which influences what you will eat for dinner tonight and how much you pay for it. Claims made about gender differences in learning are being implemented in a school near you. Claims made about energy production, costs, and side effects is influencing the energy and economic policy through much of Europe.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 2:30 PM on April 8, 2008

kirkjobsluder--you seem well meaning enough, but also tend to reduce everything to a power struggle in such a way that all distinctions are flattened beyond recognition. For instance, "indoctrination into the arts and letters" implies academia is little more than an intellectual boot camp: c'mon, please admit that this is a caricature. It's one thing to say that academia has blind spots, quite another to pretend it is incapable of all self-criticism or all self-improvement. "The honest admit this," implies that it is dishonest not to share your single-mided fixation with canonical recognition? If academia is really as bad and unresponsive as you seem to believe, why bother with reform at all--would it not make more sense to argue for starting one's own academy?

As to the labratory comment, please re-read what I wrote. I said the worry was in corporate/military labs, implying that what comes out of those labs is the worry. Why would I be worried if the labwork remained in the lab? There's nothing complicated here. I think we agree.
posted by ornate insect at 2:46 PM on April 8, 2008

Kattullus: As to kid ichorous argument that literary criticism means nothing to writers...

I didn't say that. I said that certain popular types of literary criticism are of far less use to writers and poets than to the critics themselves. I never said that every sort of criticism lacks merit, but I also think it's untenable (and very postmodern?) to claim that every sort of criticism is equally illuminating on every subject.

There are those who go to poetry like archaeologists sifting through Incan ruins, wondering at what sorts of people made them, what their diet was like, and so on; then there are people who go like smug tourists, looking to stand over the ruins of a primitive culture and reflect on the superiority of their own; and then there are those who go like architects and masons, focusing on the stonework and the angles, and wondering what the Incas can teach them about the craft.

Now, I know, these categories are broad, and I don't think most people inhabit only one and never experience the others. But I do think they illustrate the difference between using poetry indirectly as a way to really talk about culture, which is what a lot of scholarship appears to do, and talking directly about the mechanics of poetry for poetry's sake. Mary Kinzie would be a good example of the third class.

Since you've thrown out one example of a writer making nice with the scholars (which does sound sincere, but is also the politically sensible thing to do), and in homage to your handle, I'll see your Gaiman and raise you Yeats as a counterexample:

All shuffle there, all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk their way?
from The Scholars
posted by kid ichorous at 4:06 PM on April 8, 2008

ornate insect: Well, you seem well-meaning enough but you seem to like to pull things out of the context of the discussion in order to make caricature yourself. I already explicitly said that those institutions are engaged in a "struggle for change." But if it is "not a Godwin" to say that contemporary human biology needs to be considered by its historic legacies, then why should we hold humanities departments to a different standard and ignore how they were shaped by their historic missions?

And it's not a "single-minded fixation." It's just a symptom that you chose to focus on, primarily because I refused to bite on your red herring of departments not being the core of the revolution. But it's a very visible symptom because it is one common way in which the conservative ideology of the university has been expressed and in which the desire for a more conservative university is expressed today.

It wasn't about bean counting books at all, it was about how the university has historically defined its self as a way to indoctrinate young professionals into a dominant ideology. Take the long view, and go back 300 years to when you couldn't get a degree without taking an oath to king and church. And on the other side, you can take the long view and see how a patent medicine pamphlet, Onania, triggered an international paranoia about masturbation that profoundly shaped the way we talk and think about sex.

But of course, this isn't just about universities, it is also about writers, publishers, editors, art museums, television studios, and bloggers. So why should the arts and letters fear Stephen Pinker when they got Hitchins, a best selling author and critic, expressing the opinion that women just are not funny? Racists and sexists don't need a rationale from human biology in order to say bad things about minorities and women. They already do, and have for many years.

As to the laboratory comment, please re-read what I wrote. I said the worry was in corporate/military labs, implying that what comes out of those labs is the worry. Why would I be worried if the labwork remained in the lab? There's nothing complicated here. I think we agree.

So yeah, I suppose that it's a good thing to worry about bunker-busting bombs and ultrasonic jet fighters. But that's another red herring, is it not? Instead, the concern seems to be about the potential intersection between the biological sciences and the humanities. I'd point out that the advertising industry has been employing psychologists since the 1950s. We are talking about the brain-and-guts traditions of Watson, James and Skinner, rather than the philosophy-literary traditions of Freud and Jung. So at some level, those who make it their business to engage in the deconstruction and critique of literary and media artifacts need to deal with the theories embedded in them.

And to me the total rejection of human biology by literature seems rather odd to me compared to the visual arts. There is a strong trend in the visual arts towards making use of theories about perception.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 5:19 AM on April 9, 2008

kirkjobsluder: you're going off the rails, and it's impossible to keep up.

You talk about "the conservative ideology of the university" as if it were as real and unambiguous as the price of concrete, and the result is that you seem to be saying "the conservative ideology of the universe."

According to your argument, and I confess I find it difficult to follow, this amorphous and insidious entity (conservative ideology) is omnipresent: everywhere and anywhere in history, space and time. Such an inflexible view makes for a difficult dialogue, to put it mildly, since you get to change the goal posts everytime.

I'm not a pollyanna about "progress," but I'm also not willing to throw out the possibility that, in the main, and despite your histrionic pessimism and the cranky old antiquated dinosaurs like Hitchens who still roam the earth, most educated people (people who come out of the university "system" more or less intact and unindoctrinated) are an improvement in their views on (and knolwedge of) these topics than those who emerged from that same "system" 300 years ago.
posted by ornate insect at 9:22 AM on April 9, 2008

ornate insect: No sir, you are the one that is off the rails and histrionic. I'm trying to keep this discussion focused. Here are the goalposts again:

1) If human biology has a moral stain due to historic and current examples of bias (as was claimed by naseddin and mobsunited), so do the humanities which have, until recently been a bully pulpit for sexism and ethnocentrism.

2) Science is a political and culturally embedded process. So the humanities actually have quite a bit to say about what kinds of science gets done, and how theories are brought into public discourse. Developments in human biology over the last 150 years on their own are not responsible for Social Darwinism, Nazi Science, miscegenation laws or Evolutionary Psychology.

Of course things have gotten better over the last few generations. I don't know how much more explicitly I need to say that academic institutions have struggled with these issues, continue to struggle and make progress.

But, until quite recently in history, academia really was an "intellectual boot camp." (Many very influential people argue that it should be again.) This is not "everywhere and anywhere in history, space and time." This is a specific claim about the explicit mission of universities well from their origins as seminaries into the 20th century. And given that universities didn't just educate professors, but also have been responsible for educating teachers, writers, editors, lawyers, politicians, TV and film producers, and managers, the impact of "liberal arts education" has been broader than just literary theories used to talk about poems.

My point is not that the humanities are bad, or that no one should seek a degree in English or Comparative Lit. because of the historic and current bias in those fields. My point is that someone who is critical of the bias in his or her own back yard, has no reason to fear the potential for bias from another field. And well, I find it quite silly to wail about "biopolitics" while keeping Freud as a darling for literary analysis.

One order of dinosaur is quite alive and well in the present day. And Hitchens cracks the best seller list, and gets a regular byline in some of the most widely circulated periodicals in the United States. That hardly makes him antiquated. Even though I disagree with him on many issues, I usually find him to be a good read.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:09 PM on April 9, 2008

kirkjobsluder--

I'm not sure I have any idea whatsoever what you and I are supposed to be talking about, so I'll just address your post point-by-point:

If human biology has a moral stain

I have no idea what a moral stain is. Is it something that can be removed with soda water? And should I pay attention to the awkward "human" you've prefixed biology with here? Is there some significance to the phrase "human biology" I'm missing, b/c "human biology" is not a discipline I'm familiar with (I've heard of medicine).

due to historic and current examples of bias (as was claimed by naseddin and mobsunited)

Can we just stick to what you think, and why you think what you think matters? It might save us both a headache.

so do the humanities which have, until recently been a bully pulpit for sexism and ethnocentrism.

Now I'm really lost, biology is stained, humanity is stained, the humanities are stained: there's more crypto-theology here than I care for. Must everything be a choice between the pristine and the stained? Is this really the slight little metaphorical wrinkle through which you are spinning all this stuff out? Is it not possible that to say "biology is stained" or "the humanities are stained" is just so much rhetorical fluff, full of stain and fury, signifying nothing?

Science is a political and culturally embedded process.

Everything is a political and culturally embedded process. Is "science" somehow more so? What is the significance of this embededment? Is it just something that should be acknowledged, like that circles are round and grass green? Saying something is embedded in culture is saying...precisely nothing. If you resist your temptation for vague generalities, and speak instead of the detailed ways you see this embeddedment manifesting itself, it would be more helpful to discern what you're trying to say.

So the humanities actually have quite a bit to say about what kinds of science gets done, and how theories are brought into public discourse.

The word "so" usually implies a logical connection w/what preceded it. How does the statement "Science is a political and culturally embedded process" (a non-sequitor if ever there was one) lead to the statement that follows it? Also, and this is important, how do "the humanities" say anything? The word "humanities" is a really strange and not especially helpful word: the very word is antiquated and musty in such a way that I'm surprised it appeals to you. And then there's that phrase "public discourse," what does that mean? Do academics actually inform this thing called public discourse? Their influence seems minimal at best. For better and worse. The whole idea of "public discourse" seems slippery and not especially helpful: does it include television, metafilter, the BBC, itunes, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, General Electric, Sesame Street, what? Is there really any such thing as "public discourse"?

Developments in human biology over the last 150 years on their own are not responsible for Social Darwinism, Nazi Science, miscegenation laws or Evolutionary Psychology.

Presumably you are trotting these out for scare purposes, but I fail to see how they're relevant. News flash: science gets abused by non-scientists of dubious ethical and political leanings. This would hardly be argued by me or most anyone else.

Of course things have gotten better over the last few generations. I don't know how much more explicitly I need to say that academic institutions have struggled with these issues, continue to struggle and make progress.

But, until quite recently in history, academia really was an "intellectual boot camp." (Many very influential people argue that it should be again.) This is not "everywhere and anywhere in history, space and time." This is a specific claim about the explicit mission of universities well from their origins as seminaries into the 20th century. And given that universities didn't just educate professors, but also have been responsible for educating teachers, writers, editors, lawyers, politicians, TV and film producers, and managers, the impact of "liberal arts education" has been broader than just literary theories used to talk about poems.

This seems to be the meat of the argument: that universities have shaped the folks who run the world, so we should pay attention. Well, yes, of course we should. And it thus helps tremendously to point to a specific person or group of persons in order to make your argument stronger. But your argument, such as it is, seems such a big blanket, I'm not even sure whether I understand it enough to agree or disagree. It may not be coherent enough to even be wrong.

My point is not that the humanities are bad, or that no one should seek a degree in English or Comparative Lit. because of the historic and current bias in those fields. My point is that someone who is critical of the bias in his or her own back yard, has no reason to fear the potential for bias from another field. And well, I find it quite silly to wail about "biopolitics" while keeping Freud as a darling for literary analysis.

I did not actually read the whole article this diary is about, but until now I was not aware we were talking about it in the posts you and I have been exchanging. I glanced at the article and thought it was largely asinine. Are you trying to argue against the article or something else?

One order of dinosaur is quite alive and well in the present day. And Hitchens cracks the best seller list, and gets a regular byline in some of the most widely circulated periodicals in the United States. That hardly makes him antiquated. Even though I disagree with him on many issues, I usually find him to be a good read.

Is this whole thing about Hitchens? Look, kjs, I can't possibly be expected to comment on everything your supposedly "focused" argument takes on, but its bombast seems misplaced and shopworn. My own take on what you are saying, to the extent that I get it, and I mostly don't, is that you are just mostly prattling on--this way and that--occasionaly dropping a familiar buzzword, and then trying to tie it all up with something resembling an expository point. And the irony of it all is that we probably agree on any given topic far more than we disagree, but you seem incapable of just saying what you want to say concisely and clearly. It's a muddle.
posted by ornate insect at 2:16 PM on April 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

ornate insect: With all due respect. At this point in time, I'm forced to conclude that you are not really interested in finding a mutual common ground. The behaviors that lead me to this conclusion are that you've copied fragments out of context, asked hostile questions that were answered in the next phrase, chose to rhetorically challenge phrases based on your own ignorance that could have been answered by a quick search, ignored points of common ground, raised numerous rhetorical strawmen, chose to take individual examples out of context and ask if they are the central point, and called references back to the previous exchanges in the discussion non-sequitors.

At the risk of metaphorically entertaining a pig by wrestling with it:
Up-thread, nasreddin and mobunited (sorry for misspelling that multiple times) made the argument that:
1: The study of human biology in the past has led to "some of the planet's shittiest governments and historical events."
2: People who study human culture are best served by avoiding discussion of human biology.

These are the arguments my counter-thesis was intended to address. And I've tried as much as possible to stay focused on that counter-argument. No, I'm not making a big claim about human society, culture, etc., etc.. If you are really baffled as to why I use phrases like "moral stain" or enumerate a list of problematic movements in history, go back and read the whole discussion again.

So here are two questions to see if we just can't agree to agree.

Do you agree or disagree that disciplines that study human culture have in the past and sometimes today support racism and sexism?

Do you agree or disagree that disciplines that study human culture can critique the study of human biology as rhetoric, literature, folklore, history, etc., etc.?
posted by KirkJobSluder at 4:35 PM on April 9, 2008

Ornate, I'd be careful of attacking KirkJobSluder for prattling on or being unfocused—to this observer, it looks just the opposite.

To reiterate for KJS, since you seem to have missed his point wildly and I can't imagine him coming back to wade through your morass again:

1) KJS felt that nasreddin and mobunited were unfairly tarring biological science, SPECIFICALLY AS IT APPLIES TO THE STUDY OF THE BIOLOGY OF HUMANS, by arguing that it led to Nazism et al. He proposed this as an "If" statement, noting that he disagrees.

2) In disagreeing, KJS argued that it was fallacious to assume that it was endemic to science, as the same biases can be found in humanities—ethnocentrism, most prominently.

3) KJS argues that science should be placed in a historical context, and that context is informed by the contemporary humanities work.

Your reply both missed his fairly uncontroversial points, and flailed about wildly, substituting prickly swipes for any sort of cogent reply. More heat than light.

Trust me, I know from whence regarding dickish tirades when arguing against something I should simply read more carefully.
posted by klangklangston at 4:43 PM on April 9, 2008

Shoulda previewed.
posted by klangklangston at 4:44 PM on April 9, 2008

Sorry gotta flame:

I did not actually read the whole article this diary is about, but until now I was not aware we were talking about it in the posts you and I have been exchanging. I glanced at the article and thought it was largely asinine. Are you trying to argue against the article or something else?

By the festering crabs of jove, it's taken you this long to realize that you are fucking off topic, and that perhaps this discussion may be (in spite of many hints) not entirely about you, and that perhaps the reason you don't get what is going on is because, like a total ignorant n00b and yobo, you didn't read the linked post or the rest of the discussion?

And what is with that whole post of sophomoric stupid? Trying to play gotcha on "humanities" and "human biology"? Asking rhetorical questions that are answered in the next sentence?

I'm a professional in an interdisciplinary field where questions about merging human science and culture are important. I'm willing to treat you as a professional as well. I know my shit. I'll treat you as if you know yours. But if you decide to rip apart our discourse phrase by decontextualized phrase, trying to find hidden meanings to match your agenda, all along asking, "What is this? What is this?" (An entirely rhetorical question because if you are doing that, you are not honestly interested in the answer.) Well, that's just being an asshat.

And, I'll tell you as a person who did his dissertation on that kind of micro-level discourse analysis; the meaning of a conversation isn't found on that level of focus. If you don't understand what a person is saying by listening in context, across many utterances and phrases so you get the pragmatics of the discourse, you won't understand by putting a single phrase under a microscope. You won't see usernames as references to earlier messages that provide context. You'll see Social Darwinism as a scare drop rather than an elaboration of an earlier discussion upthread. You'll wonder why I say something that to you is obvious, not thinking that perhaps it wasn't so obvious given the framing of another argument. You'll try to shoehorn all of the messages into your own agenda. You'll get fooled that novel conjunctions of words must either be awkward or have some hidden meaning. And after you've made a complete ass of yourself, you'll bother to ask, "Are you trying to argue against the article or something else?"
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:42 PM on April 9, 2008

hank14:

I personally could give a fig if Darwinism is right, and I don't really care that ID people think they're right . . . and I prefer the political outcomes associated with Darwin to the ones associated with intelligent design.

Wow. That's one of the more astonishing things I've ever seen in MetaFilter.

It's all a matter of bad politics and good politics to you? You think that the biological sciences have no real-world implications?

Who then would you rather have in charge of putting together the annual flu vaccines -- a Darwinist or someone who believed that God/Odin/Allah/whoever cooks up the flu germs every year?
posted by jason's_planet at 8:24 PM on April 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

You see, jason's planet, thanks to advances in Theory, we now know that some rather abstract/metaphysical epistemological difficulties mean that concepts such as truth, knowledge, facts, correctness, and incorrectness are COMPLETELY USELESS, excepting the correctness of this statement and the incorrectness of anyone who believes otherwise.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:36 PM on April 9, 2008

we now know that some rather abstract/metaphysical epistemological difficulties mean that concepts such as truth, knowledge, facts, correctness, and incorrectness are COMPLETELY USELESS,

Oh, yeah. I hear you there, Tim.

But what's even more jaw-dropping for me is the assertion that the deepest questions we can ask about the origins of life can be reduced to vulgar partisan ephemeralities.
posted by jason's_planet at 9:46 PM on April 9, 2008

Who then would you rather have in charge of putting together the annual flu vaccines

So in your view, the search for 'truth' is important only insofar as it usefully serves specific ends like prolonging human life against viruses? I have some of my own ideas for how human lives can be prolonged, should I go ahead and implement them so long as they correlate to some set of positively affirmed scientific 'truths'? I might even have my own ideas for some new specific ends that we should all furnish with 'truth' in order to pursue!

Do you see another level on which notions of truth, correctness, and uselessness are constructed? Personally, I think I would agree with you about vaccines, and I think we would probably side with the same sort of biology and also believe in the same answers about the origins of life. Must everybody? Why doesn't everybody? How hasn't everybody? What does that tell us about us? What does that tell us all that knowledge? Maybe those questions aren't interesting to you, but I think hank_14 was just suggesting that they were to him. In fact it's in the very bits of his response that you parsed. So I'll just quote each of the words you excluded:

I just find the fallout of the two philosophies, the stories that they allow us to tell about ourselves, to be interesting.... But it's not a truth question, it's a question of what the stories/supposed truths produce.

posted by Shakeer at 11:34 PM on April 9, 2008

If you'd like to see how constructed truth is, deny gravity and then jump out a window.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 12:20 AM on April 10, 2008

TheOnlyCoolTim: If you'd like to see how constructed truth is, deny gravity and then jump out a window.

We see phenomena happen. But the theories that we use to make sense of that phenomena are socially constructed. Newton needed algebra to develop his theory of gravity. Einstein needed both provocative experiments and mathematical transformations that were invented in the previous century. We don't have a really great theory of gravity for three bodies, only a set of algorithms that give us adequate approximations. And finally, listening to Astronomy Cast is enlightening as astronomers struggle with the relatively recent revelation that gravity isn't the dominant force over the large-structure universe.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:24 AM on April 10, 2008

kirkjobsluder--you accuse me of copying parts of your post out of context? I copied your ENTIRE post and responded point-by-point. My last post was addressing that post by you: not the diary, not the diary thread, and not the article the diary links to. I did this b/c I wanted to focus on what you were saying in your post--totally irrespective of whether or not I thought what you were saying (and again I had trouble understanding what you were saying, as I still do) was something I agreed with, disagreed with, or felt fit the context of the diary and thread. My understanding of these threads is that sometimes we are conversing post-to-post, and the reference that conversation has to the thread or diary recedes into the background. If you had wanted to re-focus yourself, all I was asking was for yout to re-focus in a way that was not so full of rhetorical confusion. My last post was mostly a criticism of your excessive rhetoric--not whatever ideas are being expressed through that rhetoric.

Do you agree or disagree that disciplines that study human culture have in the past and sometimes today support racism and sexism?

Do you agree or disagree that disciplines that study human culture can critique the study of human biology as rhetoric, literature, folklore, history, etc., etc.?

I AGREE with both these statements, but again I think the sentiments expressed in both statements are unnecessarily jargon-heavy and crudely generalized. Both statements to me seem like largely empty tautologies. I don't say this b/c I have some bone to pick with you, but rather b/c I sometimes suspect people let language do their thinking for them. I'm not at all surprised you are a professional. The irony is that the professionalization of your language has, in my estimation, prevented you from better articulating yourself.
posted by ornate insect at 12:01 PM on April 10, 2008

Theories are certainly socially constructed, as is everything man does, or at least everything man communicates, but that doesn't mean the truth of those theories is an invalid or nebulous concept or that truth is no more than a social construct.

We don't have a really great theory of gravity for three bodies, only a set of algorithms that give us adequate approximations.

"Adequate approximations" suggests a basis for the validity of truth. We may not arrive at absolute truths and depending on your epistemology that may or may not be possible, but we may certainly arrive at "adequate truths" (and even, I would think, "practically absolute truths" though you might have to confine those to the realm of math and very simple real-world manifestations of math) which agree with objective experience, where objectivity may be understood as universality. There's a desire to deny the existence of any universal experience, but that would require someone to jump out a window and not fall down. We can see that some truths are more adequate than others: relativistic motion is a more adequate truth than Newtonian motion, though I'd still call Newtonian motion true. Some truths are completely inadequate, such as any theory of gravitation that predicts I will jump out a window and fly away from the ground rather than towards it. These we may call "falsehoods." I was going to put in something about consistency here as well, and then we could talk about Goedel some, but I sort of have to get back to doing Science.

Realm of math: there are some interesting realisms that posit the whole universe is, in fact, just a realm of math, but assuming these there's still a very great deal of difficulty in asserting absolute or practically absolute truth, i.e. that the mathematical entity one is describing is identical to the mathematical entity which exists.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 12:31 PM on April 10, 2008 [1 favorite]

Well, I was trying to use the magic of computers to make a hypertext footnote or asterisk, but it looks like the proposition that Metafilter lets me do that is quite false.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 12:33 PM on April 10, 2008

ornate insect: It doesn't matter if you copy and paste the entire post, IF YOU IGNORE BOTH SENTENCE AND PARAGRAPH STRUCTURE IN THE PROCESS.

Sir, you just admitted that you are in fact, a pig only interested in engaging me in a wrestling match over rhetorical trivia. This is made clear by the fact that you call two sentences deliberately written using vocabulary that should be understood by any High School student "jargon-heavy." (And yes, "human biology" should be one of those High School standards.) If those two sentences strike you as jargon-heavy, I suggest that perhaps it is your language and preconceptions that are getting in the way of understanding. I can think of no way to make my argument in this thread more simple, and as you claim to agree, future discussion would be only more trivial.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 2:45 PM on April 10, 2008

kjs--rhetorical choices are never trivial. you chose to compare me to a pig. which is a form of latent anti-porcinism if ever there was one.
posted by ornate insect at 8:32 AM on April 11, 2008 [1 favorite]

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