Dave Badtke’s Blog

When we get together during the holidays with family and friends, one thing naturally leads to another — generational catching up, drink, food, song, games, photos, long walks — until we arrive at discussions that involve the state of affairs, which can be challenging, for we try to focus on things we want to explore while navigating around stressful deep pits that wreak havoc.

No matter how these discussions worked for you — my hope is that they were pleasant and thoughtful — you, like I, were probably exposed to a range of intelligences that made the holidays more memorable.

Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Model

And when thinking of multiple intelligences, Howard Gardner is our go-to psychologist who has long been recognized as the person who can help us understand the complexity of intelligence, which, by his definition, consists of the ability to create, solve and discover:

• the ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in a culture;
• a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life;
• the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge.

With this as his foundation, Gardner, who started with seven intelligences in his 1993 Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice, believes now that there were nine different intelligences on display during our Thanksgiving holiday:

HOWARD GARDNER’S NINE MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES:

1. Linguistic Intelligence: the capacity to use language to express what’s on your mind and to understand other people. Any kind of writer, orator, speaker, lawyer, or other person for whom language is an important stock in trade has great linguistic intelligence.

2. Logical/Mathematical Intelligence: the capacity to understand the underlying principles of some kind of causal system, the way a scientist or a logician does; or to manipulate numbers, quantities, and operations, the way a mathematician does.

3. Musical Rhythmic Intelligence: the capacity to think in music; to be able to hear patterns, recognize them, and perhaps manipulate them. People who have strong musical intelligence don’t just remember music easily, they can’t get it out of their minds, it’s so omnipresent.

4. Bodily/Kinesthetic Intelligence: the capacity to use your whole body or parts of your body (your hands, your fingers, your arms) to solve a problem, make something, or put on some kind of production. The most evident examples are people in athletics or the performing arts, particularly dancing or acting.

5. Spatial Intelligence: the ability to represent the spatial world internally in your mind — the way a sailor or airplane pilot navigates the large spatial world, or the way a chess player or sculptor represents a more circumscribed spatial world. Spatial intelligence can be used in the arts or in the sciences.

6. Naturalist Intelligence: the ability to discriminate among living things (plants, animals) and sensitivity to other features of the natural world (clouds, rock configurations). This ability was clearly of value in our evolutionary past as hunters, gatherers, and farmers; it continues to be central in such roles as botanist or chef.

7. Intrapersonal Intelligence: having an understanding of yourself; knowing who you are, what you can do, what you want to do, how you react to things, which things to avoid, and which things to gravitate toward. We are drawn to people who have a good understanding of themselves. They tend to know what they can and can’t do, and to know where to go if they need help.

8. Interpersonal Intelligence: the ability to understand other people. It’s an ability we all need, but is especially important for teachers, clinicians, salespersons, or politicians — anybody who deals with other people.

9. Existential Intelligence: the ability and proclivity to pose (and ponder) questions about life, death, and ultimate realities.

A few articles in the New York Times that might be of interest:

1) The same U.S. agency, DARPA, that initially funded the development of the internet is now offering a half-million dollars, to be awarded on 11/11/11, to an organization that will research stellar exploration. Are you interested?

Unfortunately, since gravity is so weak, some 36 orders of magnitude — 36 powers of 10 — weaker than the atomic force holding atoms together, objects in our Milky Way are very, very far away. Indeed, the nearest star beyond our Sun is Alpha Centauri, approximately 4.3 light years or 25 trillion miles from Earth.

Interstellar travel is a tall order. It would take Voyager 1, humanity’s fastest artifact, now traveling 38,000 miles an hour relative to the Sun, more than 70,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, if it were headed in that direction.

2) A team of scientists has discovered single-celled fossils that are 3.4 billion years old, which is only a billion years after the formation of Earth. This is surprising for many reasons, not the least of which derives from the modern definition of a planet, which is a body large enough to clear its orbit of debris. This is one of the reasons Pluto, too small to accomplish this, was demoted from its planet status.  But this also means that Earth was being constantly bombarded during the first billion years, a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment, that created an environment so hot that life was not possible.

3) “The Kids Are Not All Right,” Joel Bakan writes, because these times are not like previous times. While each older generation tends to believe that the younger generation doesn’t measure up, the corporate culture that has evolved during the past 30 years is definitely a change from the past. The push to recognize corporations as “people” using legal arguments that have been so effective in the development of human rights has created an ethical dilemma because corporations have ever-increasing power whereas other groups that historically lacked rights — African Americans, women, children — lacked power. And corporations’ power to influence us, as we’ll see in my English 1 class during our discussion of advertisements, has had a profound influence on how our children think and behave.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson with Chaser the Border Collie

If you haven’t heard about Chaser the Border Collie, you’ll be amazed. The link is to a short segment on ABC or you can find the complete video on NOVA’s website.

And if you have heard about him, I’d like you to contemplate how amazing Chaser is.  Here’s a dog who is able to associate arbitrary names, at least from Chaser’s POV since he doesn’t speak English, with stuffed toys, which are equally arbitrary from his POV.

Could you do this? Not knowing the context of the object you’re seeing, would you then be able to associate an equally arbitrary name with this object, and do this a thousand times over?

Sure you could, and probably in less time than Chaser — but maybe not.

Since a metaphor is a substitution that replaces one thing for another, Chaser is clearly a champion metaphor machine. It’ll be interesting to see how this research helps us understand and model the nature of animal thought.

I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question even though I know you know the answer. But, according to this University of Rochester study, maybe we don’t understand how really, really important Mom is if she was stressed out during her pregnancy, and considering yourself — really — how could she not have been:

Published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, the study represents the first direct human evidence that fetuses exposed to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol may have trouble paying attention or solving problems later on. But what may be more intriguing is the study’s second finding that this negative link disappears almost entirely if the mother forges a secure connection with her baby.

So the good news for babies to be is that Mom can help repair the damage. On the other hand, if you find yourself unable to concentrate and are forever struggling with insoluble problems, maybe Mom’s handy so that you can blame her for not sufficiently connecting with you when you were a baby. I’m sure she’ll appreciate the feedback, especially if you just moved back home to live with her because you lost your job or are trying to save money to pay off your student loans.

As an English teacher who practiced physics in his previous life, I find the conflict between science and religion odd since a scientist has faith that reason can explain the origin and evolution of the natural world while a theologian reasons that faith in a higher power is a necessary foundation for moral behavior. While the scientist needs to be moral, his science is almost always silent on ethics, and while the theologian constructs his ethics on a reasoned framework of religious beliefs, he does not use faith to engineer a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii nor guide the surgeon’s knife cutting out cancer.

On this controversy I’ve tended to agree with the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould who felt that the argument between science and religion was moot:

But no battle exists between science and religion — the two most separate spheres of human need. A titanic struggle occurs, always has, always will, between questioning and authority, free inquiry and frozen dogma — but the institutions representing these poles are not science and religion. These struggles occur within each field, not primarily across disciplines. The general ethic of science leads to greater openness, but we have our fossils, often in positions of great power. Organized religion, as an arm of state power so frequently in history, has tended to rigidity — but theologies have also spearheaded social revolution. . . . Henry Ward Beecher, America’s premiere pulpiteer during Darwin’s century, defended evolution as God’s way in a striking commercial metaphor: “Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail” — better, that is to ordain general laws of change than to make each species by separate fiat. (From Gould’s essay “Knight takes Bishop”)

Wholesale design, design that reuses fundamental components for economy’s sake while changing external features like the number of eyes and legs and fingers and toes, is the way living creatures have evolved. On the other hand, retail design, for which there is no scientific evidence, would focus considerable and unique effort on creating different species. A  PC and Mac, two significant retail developments, started out completely differently. While they both leveraged computer technology, they used different hardware and ran different software. It’s only over time that the two became more alike than different as efficiencies and competition forced them to become similar rather than different.

Evolution, however, works in the opposite direction. Built from shared DNA blocks, life started out the same and gradually became different as genetic variations and natural selection worked their way to our current time. As a result, there’s no chance now that an ant will become a human even though both share DNA that started on its evolutionary journey some 3.5 billion years ago, about one billion years after Earth formed.

Given the clear scientific evidence for evolution that is as solid as the evidence supporting physics and biology, it was a mystery to me why evolution is such a controversial topic in the US. Certainly there are scientists who approach their field with a theologian’s zeal, claiming that anyone who is religious is a nut job, and there are theologians who feel that faith can explain the natural world, claiming that anyone who denies the guiding hand of God(s) is a nut job, but such extremists should, for the most part, be ignored since they pronounce on rather than participate in the science-religion dialog.

This conflict was a mystery until I came across Robert Wright’s essay in The New York Times in which he references theologian William Paley’s claim, made a few years before Darwin’s birth, that a watch is like a living creature, like an ant. And since a watch is designed, so must be an ant. Here’s an extended quote dealing with the controversy and Paley.

But believers aren’t the only ones who could use some adapting. If there is to be peace between religion and science, some of the more strident atheists will need to make their own concessions to logic.

They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism. (Darwin himself, though not a believer, said as much.) And they might even grant that natural selection’s intrinsic creative power — something they’ve been known to stress in other contexts — adds at least an iota of plausibility to this remotely creative god.

And, god-talk aside, these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of “higher purpose” is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it.

There is an episode in intellectual history that makes the point. It’s familiar to biologists because it is sometimes used — wrongly, I think — to illustrate the opposite point. Indeed, that use is what led Richard Dawkins, one of the most vocal atheist biologists, to allude to it in the title of one of his books: “The Blind Watchmaker.”

The story involves William Paley, a British theologian who, a few years before Darwin was born, tried to use living creatures as evidence for the existence of a designer.

If you’re walking across a field and you find a pocket watch, Paley said, you know it’s in a different category from the rocks lying around it: it’s a product of design, with a complex functionality that doesn’t just happen by accident. Well, he continued, organisms are like pocket watches — too complexly functional to be an accident. So they must have a designer — God.

As Mr. Dawkins pointed out, we can now explain the origin of organisms without positing a god. Yet Mr. Dawkins also conceded something to Paley that gets too little attention: The complex functionality of an organism does demand a special kind of explanation.

The reason is that, unlike a rock, an organism has things that look as if they were designed to do something. Digestive tracts seem to exist in order to digest food. The heart seems to exist in order to pump blood.

And, actually, even once you accept that natural selection, not God, is the “designer” — the blind watchmaker, as Mr. Dawkins put it — there is a sense in which these organs do have purposes, purposes that serve the organism’s larger purpose of surviving and spreading its genes. As Daniel Dennett, the Darwinian (and atheist) philosopher, has put it, an organism’s evolutionarily infused purpose is “as real as purpose could ever be.”

So in a sense Paley was right not just in saying that organisms must come from a different creative process than rocks but also in saying that this creative process imparts a purpose (however mundane) to organisms.

Certainly both an ant and watch are chemically more complex than a rock, so finding either in a field of rocks and dirt gives one pause. If a watch must be designed by humans, doesn’t it follow that an ant must be designed as well?

This gets to the root of cause and effect, certainly, because what science does is follow the effect-cause chain back as far as it can go without adding variables, like a god, over which it has no control. And so the issue for a scientist is the problem of creating a model that can explain both the ant and human. This is evolution’s accomplishment, but this is not to say that nature is not designed. Coming across a watch lying next to an ant colony causes us to ponder both the workings of the watch and the complexity of the ant colony, created by cooperating insects little bigger than a speck of lint on your jacket. The inspired design, however, is the respective intricacy of the ant colony and human watch. Both are marvels of design, but neither requires the hand of an intelligent designer beyond the ant and human. The purpose, however, is another topic on which, it seems, religion has much to say as it helps us, who are not ants, form ever more cooperative, moral colonies.

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books (2/26/2009), the same issue in which you’ll find Zadie Smith’s article on Obama about which I recently wrote, Tim Flannery reviews Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson’s The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. I’m a long-ago collector of beautiful small things with gossamer wings and thread-thin legs that I killed in pickle jars lined with carbontetrachloride-soaked cotton balls, carefully putting the butterflies and moths and beetles and most anything else with six to eight legs carefully in one practiced motion into the jar and screwing on the lid to watch them, my nose against the glass, perish.  So I would have preferred reading this book rather than reading about it, but at $55 ($34.65 at Amazon) I’ll wait until I get it from the library. I”m now first on the list.

But even in review the idea is fascinating that we should view ants as superorganisms, each ant being like a cell,  living for a short time, save for the queen that can live for ten years, dividing through bizarre sexuality, and working in concert to build vast villages and even harvest leaves and farm mushrooms.

As for sex, it could hardly be more bizarre, completely female save during brief mating seasons. There are even, if you can believe it, virgin births:

Ant sex seems utterly alien. Except for short periods just before the mating season, when an ant colony is reproducing, it is composed entirely of females, and among some primitive species virgin births are common. All the offspring of such virgin mothers, however, are winged males that almost invariably depart the nest. If a female ant mates, however, all of her fertilized eggs become females. In many ant societies, reproduction is the prerogative of a single individual—the queen. She mates soon after leaving her natal colony, and stores the sperm from that mating (or from multiple matings) all of her life, using it to fertilize (in some cases) millions of eggs over ten or more years.

Some ant species do not have queen ants in the strict sense. Instead, worker ants (which are all female) that have mated with a male ant become the dominant reproductive individuals. These are the gamergates, or “married workers,” and their sex life can be brutal. In one species the gamergates venture outside of the nest to attract a male, engage him in copulation, then carry him into the nest before snipping off his genitals and throwing away the rest of his body. The severed genitals continue to inseminate the gamergate for up to an hour, after which they too are discarded. The fertilized gamergates then vie for dominance, causing disruptive conflict in the nest. Sometimes an oligarchy of gamergates is established, but in other instances a single gamergate triumphs.

You might think that such an established gamergate would watch the colony carefully for signs of emerging rivals, but this is not the case. Instead it’s the worker ants that do so by taking a keen interest in the sexual status of their sisters. If they sense that one is becoming a sexually active gamergate, they will turn on her, either assaulting her or watching carefully until she produces eggs, which they promptly consume. It’s intriguing that the sterile workers play the role of monitoring and regulating the sexual life of the colony. In a stretch of the imagination, I can see parallels between this behavior and the role of policing and censuring the sex lives of the rich and famous that gossip magazines play in our own society.

Flannery suggests that we are, like ants, a superorganism, but in our case we’re “in the process of metamorphosing into the largest, most formidable superorganism of all time.” My question is, are we becoming more like the ants, or are they becoming more like us?

As if Wikipedia wasn’t already confusing enough, because one doesn’t know what to trust, now some UCSC computer scientists are coloring questionable entries orange based on a calculation of author reputation. The trouble is that various intensities of orange, which indicate the degree of unreliability, can turn up in the middle of a sentence. So what do you do then?

Check it out for yourself.

Science News reports in its July 28th issue that there appears to be a correlation between sunlight, which increases with decreasing latitude, and multiple sclerosis.

A half-century ago, doctors from Europe and North America who spent time in central Africa were struck by the absence of multiple sclerosis there. Indeed, the farther from the equator people lived, the more prevalent multiple sclerosis (MS) seemed to become. Scandinavians faced a higher risk than most other people. Thus arose the “latitude hypothesis” of MS, suggesting that a lack of direct sunshine somehow contributed to the nerve-damaging immune malfunction underlying the disease.

Although the geographical connection was strong, says Michael J. Goldacre, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford in England, “it seemed almost too obvious to be true.”

The problem with this hunch, of course, was that genes play a role as well. This was addressed by selecting Southern California twins who had been exposed to differing amounts of sun. Using a questionnaire, which seems more qualitative than quantitative, they asked about sun exposure when the twins were young. I suppose the issue was whether they preferred playing volleyball on the beach or reading. The results, though, are significant.

But a study from southern California now lends new credence to the sunshine theory of MS protection by removing a persistent confounder in such studies—the variability in people’s genes. The researchers sifted through a large database to find records of 179 sets of identical twins in which one had MS and the other didn’t. Estimating these individuals’ childhood sun exposures, the scientists found that the twins with MS on average had gotten less sun.

The study bolsters a 2003 report from Australia that associated greater sun exposure and a history of sunburns in childhood with reduced risk of MS. Also, Goldacre and his colleagues discovered in 2004 that people with MS were only half as likely as the general population to develop skin cancer—a condition linked with exposure to ultraviolet radiation.

“There’s clear evidence from multiple publications to suggest this is something that’s real,” says Avery August of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, an immunologist not part of these studies. “There’s a genetic component [to MS] but also an environmental component,” he says.

In the new study, epidemiologist Thomas M. Mack and his team at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles analyzed questionnaires that the twins had completed before 1993 to obtain data on childhood sun exposure. The surveys included questions about outdoor sports and time at the beach.

The twin who spent more time outdoors had a 25 to 57 percent lower risk of developing MS, depending on the activity recorded, the researchers report in the July 24 Neurology. The people without MS had spent significantly more time than their siblings sunbathing, beachcombing, and getting out on hot days.

During childhood, it’s a trade-off between skin cancer and MS. But the effect fades after adolescence, so when you’re older there’s no excuse to sunbathe.

“This is a very sound piece of work,” Goldacre says. “Dermatologists may feel that [advice to] spend some time in the sun is not a wholly welcome message. But it’s all a matter of this being good for you in small doses.”

Curiously, the latitude effect in MS seems to fade after adolescence. While this study and earlier ones hint that ultraviolet rays set a child’s immune system on a normal course for life, they don’t prove it, August says.

Specifically, the studies don’t show how sunshine would thwart the rogue immune attacks on nerves, which cause a loss of muscle coordination in MS patients.

The Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) of northwestern Brazil speak a language that is challenging linguistic theories. John Colapinto in the April 16 issue of The New Yorker writes that linguist Dan Everett, one of the first to learn the difficult Pirahã language, has concluded that Pirahã seems to lack some of the irreducible language elements that linguists have come to expect. In “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” Everett notes the “extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture,” which are reflected in their language:

The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for ‘all,’ ‘each,’ ‘every,’ ‘most,’ or ‘few’ — terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. [For a discussion of their number concepts, see the NPR Talk of the Nation program.] Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). (Colapinto 120)

The lack of recursion is particularly vexing because, as Colapinto points out, “Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human capability.”

When I first listened to Pirahã speech at a religious site — interestingly, Everett started out as a Christian missionary who became a scientist because of his language abilities and exposure to the Pirahã — I had the impression that there were fewer sounds than one might expect, but I didn’t think that their speech sounded like singing as Everett has suggested. On the other hand, this recording was made for religious purposes, so perhaps the speaker was reading a script.

But then after listening to the excellent NPR piece on Everett, I was more fascinated. In addition to a brief discussion of the linguistic theories and the controversy Everett has stirred up, you hear the Pirahã speaking. Intriguing doesn’t begin to describe the nature of the exchanges. And then Everett demonstrates the flexibility of their language by saying a sentence, whistling it, and finally by humming the sentence. It’s amazing that these three forms convey the same information. And yes, indeed, the language does sound more like singing than speaking.

For more also see Dan Everett’s website at Illinois State.

In yesterday’s NY Times, Dennis Overbye comments on what he considers “one of the more depressing scientific papers” he has ever read:

If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the Local Group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.

Unable to see any galaxies flying away, those astronomers will not know the universe is expanding and will think instead that they are back in the static island universe of Einstein. As the authors, who are physicists, write in a paper to be published in The Journal of Relativity and Gravitation, “observers in our ‘island universe’ will be fundamentally incapable of determining the true nature of the universe.”

That the universe would become increasingly cold and lightless was suggested in 1987 by mathematician George Ellis, who wrote that even ordinary expansion “would gradually carry most galaxies too far away to be seen, setting the stage for cosmic ignorance.”

In my youth it was still thought possible that the universe might collapse back onto itself. Remember those searches for missing mass in the hope that there would be enough to pull everything back, enough for another big bang, another rebirth of the universe, another chance for Shakespeare to explore Hamlet’s motives? Alas, the dastardly data, like discovering one’s parents playing Santa Claus late on Christmas Eve, have disproved the possibility.

Worse, the existence of dark energy accelerates the expansion process, meaning that this bleak future will happen sooner, though we won’t be here on earth wondering why there are fewer galaxies in the sky than grains of sand on the beach inasmuch as the earth will be consumed by the sun in a mere 5 billion years.

But might we be somewhere?