October 2022 Brain Food
In which we nibble on a few knowledge snacks
To help you recover from Halloween, here are a few informational tidbits from last month that will distract you from your candy hangover. It’s all about evolution this time, the evolution of:
Cash
Emotions
Innovations
Cave bacteria
Borgs
And exploitative AI
Let’s dive in.
Science
Evolution in a dark cave. Caves, especially those isolated from the rest of the world, are evolutionary laboratories. Some cavefish, for example, are unique and their presence is restricted to a particular cave. What about cave bacteria? A study now describes a new species of bacteria found deep in a limestone cave system in northern Kyushu Island, Japan. To top it off, this bacterium - Jeongeupia sacculi sp. nov. HS-3 - does something funny:
This bacterium forms well-ordered sheets of cells, which ultimately develop into a bulbous structure that actively releases germ-like, single-celled propagules when submerged. This type of multicellularity has little precedent…
Here come the Borgs. A little over a year ago, scientists discovered Borgs. Not the Star Trek kind, but large chunks of extra-chromosomal DNA in archaea (the third domain of life, next to eukaryotes - including us - and bacteria). These Borgs, a recent study suggests, are found in Methanoperedens archaea species (as far as we know). As good Borgs are supposed to do, they have ‘assimilated’ genes for various sources that let them help their hosts with their methane metabolism.
All about innovation. Evolution is all about innovation - either by selecting for a new trait, or by selecting for the co-option of an old one to do new things better. Some of these innovations allow organisms to occupy a previously unavailable niche - finding or digesting a new food source, adapting to new temperatures, etc. These are so-called ‘key innovations’. This opinion article discusses the origin of the term, its relationship to other evolutionary events, and charts a way toward studying key innovations
Dopamine fireworks. Ever wondered what a dopamine rush looks like in your brain?
Technology
The hidden human labor behind AI. Current AI systems seem like computer magic to most of us. In reality, it’s data-wrangling and pattern-seeking on a massive scale. To do that, these AI systems need a lot of training data. Even if we leave the privacy issues aside, that training data has to be labeled and curated. Those jobs are done by underpaid and overworked ‘gig’ workers. This Noema article goes into a lot more detail about the working conditions, the fakery (people impersonating chatbots, for example), and the buzzword-slinging of the AI hype. The authors conclude:
…we urge researchers and journalists to also center low-income workers’ contributions in running the engine of “AI” and to stop misleading the public with narratives of fully autonomous machines with human-like agency. These machines are built by armies of underpaid laborers around the world.
(For even more on this, I recommend Kate Crawford’s book ‘Atlas of AI’.)
Society
Evolving emotion. When thinking about the biology of emotion, emotional expressions, and human behavior in general, we tend to see two camps. Nature, it’s all under biological control, versus nurture, it’s all a sociocultural construction. If you’ve read some of my writing, you know that I’m a fan of gray zones. Nature and nurture are not mutually exclusive and - for most traits - it’s a combination of both. So too for human emotions and their expression. This review (paywall, sorry) makes the same case. Or, in their words:
…a cultural evolutionary perspective that moves beyond a strict biology-versus-culture dichotomy. This cultural evolutionary perspective uses dual inheritance models of cultural transmission to explain how variation in emotion can arise across groups, how affect-laden information can travel throughout populations, and why people in different cultures use both similar and different emotion concepts and non-verbal expressions.
Cash flow. Imagine society without money. What do you think it would be like?
The only right answer is… “we don’t really know”. The origin and incorporation of monetary systems are - for the most part - pretty old and muddled by history (for a wildly original and mind-expanding perspective, read David Graeber’s ‘Debt’). But that doesn't mean we can’t at least get an idea. This impressive study tracks the changes in a modern hunter-gatherer culture - the Ju/’hoansi (!Kung) in southern Africa - from 1974 (no money) to today (a partial monetary economy). The tl;dr:
…gifting declines as cash is spent to increase the well-being of individual families and that gifting and sharing decrease and networks narrow. The sharing of meals and casual gifting hold fast. Substantial material inequalities develop, even between neighbors, but social, gender, and political equalities persist.
Of course, a lot of this depends on the values already present in the culture undergoing the transition as well as how the money is controlled and distributed.
Still, we can dream, can’t we?
"Society without money"? I'm trying to think if I've seen a fictional representation, though don't doubt they're out there. Of those out there, which one's the most convincing in what such a society would look like?