Wednesday, June 11, 2008

What it means to be human

Recently, at the World Science Festival in NYC, a group of scientists and social scientists gathered together to look at the question, "What does it mean to be human?" Wired has taken the panel's answers (or lack of an answer, in the case of Paul Nurse and Harold Varmus) and condensed them for readability. Here's they are:

Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer: We do something other species can't: We remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information.

Daniel Dennett, cognitive scientist: We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. "The planet has grown a nervous system," he said.

Renee Reijo Pera, embryologist: We're uniquely human from the moment that egg and sperm fuse. A "human program" begins before the brain even begins to form.

Patricia Churchland, neuroethicist: The structure of how the human brain is arranged intrigues me. Are there unique brain structures? As far as we can understand, it's our size that is unique. What we don't find are other unique structures. There may be certain types of human-specific cells -- but as for what that means, we don't know. It's important not only to focus on us, to compare our biology and behavior to other animals.

Jim Gates, physicist: We are blessed with the ability to know our mother. We are conscious of more than our selves. And just as a child sees a mother, the species' vision clears and sees mother universe. We are getting glimmers of how we are related to space and time. We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?

Nikolas Rose, sociologist: Language and representation. We are the kind of creatures that ask those questions of ourselves. And we believe science can help answer. We've become creatures that think of ourselves as essentially biological -- and I think we're more than biological creatures. I'm not sure biology has answers.

Ian Tattersall, anthropologist: It's not "what is human," but what is unique: our extraordinary form of symbolic cognition.

Francis Collins
, geneticist: What does the genome tell us? There's surprisingly little genetic difference between human and chimpanzee. Yet clearly we're different. There's brain size and language. A language-related gene, FoxP2, evolved most rapidly in the last few million years. How did we develop empathy? Appreciate our mortality? And we should admit that there are areas that might not submit to material analysis: beauty, inspiration. We shouldn't dismiss these as epiphenomenal froth.

Harold Varmus
, physiologist: Intrigued by our ability to generate hypotheses and make measurements.

Paul Nurse
, cell biologist: Is excited about the ability of science to answer this question.

Antonio Damasio
, neuroscientist: The critical unique factor is language. Creativity. The religious and scientific impulse. And our social organization, which has developed to a prodigious degree. We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions. We're probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds. I like to think of a generator of diversity in the frontal lobe -- and those initials are G-O-D.

Out of the panelists, Nikolas Rose, I think, gave the most satisfactory answer. I also found the answer of Francis Collins, who headed the human genome project, to be satisfactory. I've always gravitated to the idea that language was what made us human. That is, anyway, what most poets will tell us. However, I don't know that that answer will hold once A.I. develops to the point of language. I wonder, is it the knowledge that we will one day die, the knowledge of our own mortality? The Christian is obliged to say that humans are made in the image of God, but what does that mean?

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Burn After Reading

After finally seeing the Cohen brother's film No Country for Old Men last week, I was delighted to see that they're coming out with a new film, Burn After Reading. Here's the trailer:




It seems like it's more in the vain of Lebowski rather than the bleak No Country.

The Right and Global Warming

I've just returned back from New York, where I didn't have a TV, so this might be old news, but I as I sat in my mom's family room where she keeps the Fox News Chanel running, well, pretty much all day, I saw this ad:



Now, I don't really like Pat Robertson, and I certainly don't like Al Sharpton, but this ad struck me for two reasons. First, and most obvious, is the non-partisan nature of the ad: we have both Republicans and Democrats getting behind a major cause. And it seems like that's been a while since that happened.

But what struck me more was Pat Robertson's presence in the ad. The Christian Right has been loathed to get behind the idea of conservationism, mostly, I think, because it has become such a political issue. To my mom, who if nothing else is a member of the Christian right, global warming smacks of Al Gore and leftists. The science of the matter (either way you look at it) doesn't interest her so much as the political nature of the problem. And I think that goes for many Americans, especially here in middle America. (Here I am reminded of my U.S. history class my sophomore year of high school, the same class in which we were forced to write an essay on why the Republican party was more biblical than the Democratic party, when I made some environmentally friendly comment and was accused by several kids of being a "tree-hugger.") S for Pat Robertson to get on board with climate change and global warming...well, that's a big deal.