Who are we? Don't ask our neurons, they're a bunch of idiots. And don't answer with your gut, because your gut isn't even human.

As the philosopher Daniel Dennett likes to remind us, each one of us is made up of trillions and trillions of living organisms (we call them 'cells'), and not a single one of these living things that make us up has any idea who we are, or even cares.

Take a moment to let that sink in.

Now, don't blame the cells for not caring; they are all living organisms and thus have their own metabolism, their own respiration, and their own reproduction to manage.  They don't have the time to worry about the bigger picture.  Nor do they have the mental capacity.  Even neurons--the living organisms that do our thinking for us--are quite dumb, when considered on an individual level.  Even though it is our neurons that allow us to think and learn, no individual neuron can think or learn.  Each one follows very simple rules of behavior: basically if a certain number of its neighbors are firing, they fire too.  That's it.  And yet somehow, out of all those mindless firings of neurons, a mind emerges--a mind that can even write a blog post about the neurons mindlessly making a mind.

Three stupid neurons.

More than human.
It gets even weirder.  A good proportion of the cells that make us up aren't even human!  Before I tell you what percentage, I invite you to take a guess: What percentage of the cells in our body are human cells?  90%? 70%? 50%?  So far, you're way off.  (Are your neurons even firing correctly?  Sheesh.)  Truth is, human cells are the in the minority amongst humans, by a long shot.

Human cells comprise only about 10% of the 100 trillion cells in a human.  10%.  The rest of the cells in our body are mostly bacteria, which generally take up residence in our gut.  Far from being invasive, our bacterial friends are an integral part of our digestive system, breaking down food and passing along the energy and vitamins to us after they're done with them.

Are you the same "you" that you were 10 years ago?
Biologically speaking, not exactly.  The living organisms that make us up generally do not live long enough to see us grow old.  Our body may grown and develop at a steady, slow pace, but that is due to a complex flux of cells dying and new cells being born to take their place (here's a nice NYT article on this).  The skin that covers your entire body--the thing that makes you look like "you" with your dimples and wrinkles and all--is not even the same skin you had two weeks ago.  The stable patterns in our skin, including our fingerprints and dimples and wrinkles and all, are sort of like traffic jams that persist even after all individual the cars that started the jam travel on down the road.

Down another level, they say that most of the atoms and molecules that make up the cells are replaced by other atoms (of the same variety) every year or so.  Since the new atoms are functionally equivalent to the old atoms, we would never know the difference.

So what are we to make of this?
So, if the neurons that make us think are all stupid, and the cells that make us up are dying all the time, how do we think?  How do we persist?

Part of what makes this all so mysterious is that we are so far removed from the microscopic level of the goings-on of our body that we have no sense of how the micro-level goings-on give rise to the macro-patterns of our daily life.  But there are some systems in nature where the levels are not so far removed, and so we can learn something about this mystery by studying them.  I will briefly introduce you to two of them: slime molds, and ant colonies.

Slime molds
The slime mold may be one of the grossest organisms on earth, but it is also one of the most fascinating.  We humans like to think of our life cycle in terms of our whole body, not our cells, but the life cycle of the slime mold doesn't work like that.

The slime mold spends much of its life as a single-celled organism, not unlike an amoeba, generally sliming around.  But there comes a point in the life cycle where tens of thousands of individual cells come together and act like one big organism.  First this aggregate organism looks like a slug, slithering around, eating, sliming, and doing whatever it is slugs like to do.  Then during it's reproductive stage the slime mold self-organizes into a mushroom-like stalk, releasing new spores into the surrounding environment and starting the whole process over again.

Although individual slime mold cells are just about as dumb as our individual neurons, the aggregate of slime mold cells can be pretty darned smart.  For example, they can find their way through a complicated maze to get to food:

Ant colonies
Although ants may be smarter than slime mold cells, they are still pretty dumb.  What I mean by that is that ants follow a very simple algorithm for guiding their behavior, a very simple decision-making procedure based entirely on pheromones.

If, in their walking around, an ant happens to cross paths with another ant, they give each other an antennae high-five and sniff out the pheromones.  There is a pheromone that signal one of a few basic meanings: "I found food" and one for "I'm working on the hive" and another for "there's a threat to the colony".  If they sniff the pheromone for "I found food", then they head in the direction that ant was coming from, repeating the process with other ants, until it ultimately finds the food.  This is not much different than our dumb neurons' algorithm of "if my neighbors are firing, I will too".

Now, despite being made up of dumb ants, an ant colony is pretty darned smart.  For instance, they can solve the complicated problem of allocating the optimal number of ants to various food sources at various distances with varying amounts of food.  (here's a nice TED talk on the emergent intelligence of ant colonies)


Also, ant colonies persist for decades, even though the individual ants generally die after several months or at most a few years.  (The queen is the exception to this rule, she's around for up to 21 years).

So, ant colonies and slime molds each give us insight on how a form of intelligence can emerge from the collective behavior of dumb individuals, much like mindless neurons can collectively make a mind. They also lend insight onto the persistence problem, how we can be around for decades when most of our cells are long dead by then.

The bigger picture.
Now that we've seen there's no real magic to how we can be composed out of a bunch of dumb organisms but still be relatively smart, there are more questions to consider.  Should we feel bad if we scratch our cheek and kill thousands if not millions of living organisms?  Is it possible that individual humans could be part of some larger system that is even smarter than any individual humans?  If so, should that system feel bad if it happens to "scratch it's cheek" and wipe out thousands if not millions of humans?  And what should we call that system?  I propose that we call this hypothetical system "Frank."  Frank, if you're listening, please don't scratch your cheek!!!


Extra goodies:

• this article also reports on a finding that human cells even forage for food in a pattern similar to other scavengers, including sharks and um, penguins
• another video of slime mold finding the shortest path to food through a maze 
• here's a research article on the how ant colonies solve complicated problems with dumb ants

What are the lessons to learn from Columbus?

Was Columbus a hero or a villain?  

We all know that Columbus' legacy is a controversial one.  Many history books have painted him as an intrepid explorer and overlooked the facts that would paint him in a negative light.  Some Columbus scholars have admitted that he encited a devastating genocide, but dedicated no more than a sentence to that fact (see, for example, Samuel Eliot Morison).  


So which is it--was Columbus a hero or a villain?  And how do we decide?  One thing that would be important to determine is what Columbus himself thought he was doing.  Perhaps he was trying to do good.  Perhaps he did not mean to exploit and kill all those natives...maybe it was his lower officers that took things into their own hands and got out of control.  


Fortunately, we have Columbus' log, as well as the log of several of his viceroys, and so we can find some answers to this question.  This, for example, is what Columbus wrote about his first encounter with the natives:


They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.


Well, he pretty much just comes out and says that he is intentionally subjugating them and making them do whatever they wanted.  And, also according to Columbus' own words, they wanted them for two things: gold and slavery.  So he took many as slaves and set everyone else to the grueling work of looking for gold where there wasn't any to write home about.   The working conditions for finding the gold were miserable, and the penalty for not meeting one's gold quota was chopping off the hands and bleeding them to death.  

The situation was written about extensively by one of Columbus' appointed governors, Bartolome de las Casas, a young priest who initially took part in the conquest and held slaves and such, but became disgusted by the cruelty of the Spaniards.  Here he describes the working conditions for the Arawaks faced under Columbus' rule:


Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... in this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . .. and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. ... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write. ...


When Las Casas arrived in the Bahamas in 1508 he documented the unbelievable scale of the devastation:


"there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...."


And so the question of whether Columbus' behavior was villainous seems pretty settled, based on his own writings as well as accounts from his officers.  What is not yet settled, for me at least, is how Columbus justified his behavior to himself.  With his reports to the King and Queen of Spain he could talk of subjugation without needing to explain how that is a good thing.  But what was going through his head when he went to sleep each night?  Was there any recognition of the evil actions let alone remorse?  Did he think he was being a hero?  Did he, as a devout Christian, think he was saving the souls of these natives?  If so, did he somehow twist this reasoning to render his maniacal methods as somehow forgivable, even noble?  Is there a way we can ever find this out?


I don't know the answer to these questions, perhaps nobody does and nobody ever will; but I think it is an extremely important set of questions with which to struggle.  You see, Columbus is not the only instance of such a horrible turbulence between two cultures as they newly meet.  If anything, subjugation and genocide seem to be the norm of two intersecting cultures, especially in the Americas.  The same sort of despicable treatment of human beings, from slavery to torture and genocide, accompanied the missions of Cortes in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and English settlers in English Settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts with the Powhatans and Pequots.


The lessons we learn (or do not) from such conquests could make or break the survival of the Earth, if extraterrestrial beings ever pay us a visit.  Is there a way for two cultures to intersect and mutually reinforce each other, or is war and death the only inevitable outcome?  Or maybe we will one day venture out to the stars, and we could end up being Avatars, i.e., Columbus 2.0.  These are big IF's, of course, but I think it is worth thinking about how we might do things better next time, whichever end of the ordeal we end up on.


Columbus apparently went down a slippery slope, thinking it his spiritual duty to convert these natives and save their souls, which let him to thinking, how better to convert people than by the club, and what makes a better club than a sword?  By turning to the sword, Columbus ultimately succumbed to blind and arrogant self-righteousness which nothing--not the absence of gold nor the decemation of an entire people--could snap him out of.  Let's learn to avoid this in the future, what do you say, fellow humans?

coincidence?

Are You Liberative or Conserveral?

Once upon a time, there were couple mild-mannered, well-meaning political ideologies: liberalism and conservatism. Liberals would have you believe that the government should be utilized to solve problems. Conservatives would have you believe the opposite; keep the government out of our lives and we can solve our own problems. For example, the welfare system was started by the liberal FDR to allocate government money to give relief to the poor, among other things. Conservative critics hold the current welfare system up as an example of "big government" sticking its tail where it don't belong.

The distinction is not, and perhaps never was, so clear cut as either side thinks. Conservatives cry for the government to get out of their lives (e.g. taxes, gun control, welfare), while paradoxically condoning government control of much more personal things like high-stakes standardized tests, wars, drugs, abortions, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. Liberals are arguably just as self-contradictory, pushing for racial, sexual, and socioeconomic justice from up on a pedestal. For example, 72% of all university faculty are liberal, while they work in environments that continue to have severe inequalities in tenure and pay with regard to race and gender.

Recent studies in psychology have started to reveal a new picture of the distinction between conservatives and liberals. The greatest predictor for whether you are a liberal or conservative is the extent to which you feel open to new life experiences. The second greatest predictor is the number of body piercings.

Pop quiz: which of these dudes is a liberal?

Go to http://www.yourmorals.org/ and take one of the quizzes, to see where you stand (don't worry, the site is a legit research site). Far from having political origins, the distinction between liberal and conservative has more to do with one's sense of morality. Conservatives tend to value loyalty to a group, whereas liberals tend to value "fairness" amongst a group. Here is my graph, where green represents my score (blue is liberal, red is conservative):

As you can see, I'm conservrativally liberacious. And part German.