Trivers and Chomsky on Deception

The following is a conversation between Noam Chomsky, famous linguist and political dissenter, and Robert Trivers, evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist. Trivers is best known for his groundbreaking work in reciprocal altruism, self-deception, parent-offspring conflict dynamics, as well as parental investment theory and the subsequent implications for sexual selection: the sex making the largest expected investment in future offspring will be proportionately more discriminating in its choice of sexual partners than the parent of the opposite sex (this is why guys will basically sleep with anything that moves...).

The first part of the conversation is monopolized by Chomsky, and is rather dry. Trivers tries to make it a bit more interesting by proposing some very interesting questions, but Chomsky kind of escapes the intellectual pursuit and concentrates instead on politics, surprise surprise...

Starting at about the 18th minute, though, Trivers starts to get more ideas in, and to relate them to the evolution of self-deceptive mechanisms. Unfortunately there is not a lot of work done on this subject yet, but it seems to me this field could be very productive because there are many instances in which it is rather easy to imagine how a mechanism that deceives its host could produce a great evolutionary advantage for itself, even at the expense of the host: you!

Think of having children as the perfect example: it is not in any one individual's best interest to have children, since they produce a higher cost than any benefit the parent might derive from them. The benefit doesn't go to the individual: it goes to the genes that get to replicate themselves in the next generation. That we normally think children are worth all the pain and sacrifice we may have to go through speaks volumes about this self-deceptive mechanism, I think.

Anyway, here is the video:

Some of the best books by Trivers are Social Evolution, Natural Selection and Social Theory, Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements.
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Finger Eleven

I've fallen way behind on the music world this past semester, but while driving the other day I accidentally heard part of a song that just screamed "finger eleven!" to me. I happen to have a pretty good ear when it comes to recognizing musical styles and subtle sounds embedded in the background of music, so I went home, looked for them, and sure enough, they're coming out with a new album.

If you don't know them, Finger Eleven is a Canadian band that hits the full spectrum between super mellow and hardcore heavy, as you can probably tell from the small selection in the playlist below. Unfortunately, there are no videos for many of their best songs, so you'll just have to visit their site to listen to more of their stuff if you're interested.

By the way, Drag Me Down is an awesome song if you like to go out running and need the motivation to keep a good pace.

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Holier Than Thou Bullsh*t

I've had my share of problems with Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama for quite some time now, and it looks as though Penn & Teller seem to share some of that attitude, although it seems for some quite different reasons.

Mother Theresa, and the catholic church in general, have been responsible for the spread of the HIV virus to an estimated 4 or 5 million innocent and gullible people in India and the African continent, since they advocate religious views against the use of birth control, even though no respectable scholar believes in natural law theory any longer. Yep, they're willing to sacrifice the health and lives of millions of people just to secure their own tickets to heaven... how noble...

Did you know that Gandhi was, for a while, categorically opposed to 'western' medicine? That's right, so when his wife got really sick at some point, Gandhi would not allow her access to western medicine; she died as a result of the lack of medical treatment. A few years later (two or three, I can't remember now), Gandhi himself got pretty sick as well, and wouldn't you know it, he was quite ready to invite western medicine back into his life and survived as a result. Yeah, he was totally willing to sacrifice others for his principles, but not himself... What a saint! Did you also know that he used to complain about how much he detested his wife's appearance? He used to complain she looked like a cow. And yes, he used to sleep with multiple teenage girls every night, but not with his wife... after all, she looked like a cow...

And my problems with the Dalai Lama might be more based on a difference of attitude and personal philosophy than on any facts about his actions, so I either have not much to say about this, or a blog entry would simply not be enough.

In any case, the entertaining video below shows that Mother Theresa, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama, despite the good things they might have done at some point, were also pretty big assholes and con artists.

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Maternal Instincts

This is a pretty amazing and movie story about a leopard that kills a baboon to eat and discovers that the baboon has a one-day old baby... It really makes you wonder what goes through the leopard's mind, doesn't it?

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Daniel Tammet: The Boy with the Incredible Brain

This is a little documentary on Daniel Tammet, a savant man who can perfectly recite the sequence of pi up to the 22,500th decimal point, who seems to be able to beat the house in Vegas (at least once), who passes scientific tests conducted by the great V.S. Ramachandran, and who can learn new languages in a week.

Tammet's memory, however, does not seem to be what we normally think of as memory: storing massive bits of information in our brain. It seems Tammet's ability might be partially explained by synaesthesia, a condition in which two or more sensory neural pathways work together to produce novel kinds of experiences: associating specific numbers with colors, tasting sounds, feeling smells, and so on.

For instance, what ordinary people would see as the black and white picture on the top right might be seen by a synaesthete as the green and red picture below it. For many forms of visual synaesthesia you can apply exactly the same logic used for color blindness tests to come up with an interesting and revealing set of possible findings.

So, instead of 'remembering' bits of information, as it superficially appears, it seems Tammet's mind travels through a mental landscape of shapes and visual cues that order his experience as some sort of organized whole.

This condition might help us understand in some cases why some people are as successful and brilliant as they seem to be in particular situations. The great physicist Richard Feynman, for instance, seems not to have explicitly known he was a synaesthete, but he did wonder how other people might experience equations differently from him. In What Do You Care What Other People Think?, he mentioned the following:

When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.

Makes you wonder about other historical geniuses, doesn't it?

I might be a bit of a synaesthete myself: when confronted with complex mathematical equations I have a very vivid experience of absolute fear, ha ha ha

Click here to take a test from the BBC to see your own level of synaesthesia, and here for the regular BBC page where the test came from.

Click here and here for professional papers on synaesthesia by V.S. Ramachandran.
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A Friend's Cancer: Good for Your Health

I want a leukemia buddy!

What kind of cancer buddy do you want?
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The Big Question - Dawkins: Why Are We Here?

This is a nice little documentary, narrated by Richard Dawkins, that explains the basic process of natural selection as the primary mechanism of evolution, and how this "blind watchmaker" has created something unprecedented in the history of the world: beings with the ability to perform forward-looking and purposive thinking, capable of escaping the shackles of natural selection, and able to create meaning and purpose to their own lives.

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A Love Story in Three Pictures

Penn & Teller: The Truck

In this fun clip, Penn drives a massively heavy truck over poor little Teller's body without killing him... Can you figure out how they did it before they show you?

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72 Virgins?

I don't quite get the fascination with virgins (shouldn't experience count for something?), but this dude makes some rather interesting points:

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Human Behavior Experiments

I'm a pretty happy guy, and I love sharing the happiness I find online with whoever might be interested. That's why this blog is filled with what I think is awesome and exciting stuff that I hope inspires people to further educate themselves. I've received some feedback suggesting this has already happened in some modest and not so modest measure a few times already, which is awesome...

Today's entry, however, deals with the darker side of humanity. The videos below are sequences of a documentary entitled Human Behavior Experiments, followed by some lively discussion, which deals with the idea that being situated in specific circumstances has a very significant influence, almost deterministic at times, on the behavior of the people involved.

Through the use of well documented psychological research dating back to the 1960's and 70's, the documentary challenges the conventional wisdom that there is a certain unchanging essence to who we are, and that there are certain things we would never do, no matter what the circumstances. As it turns out, however, it seems that we can't be judges of what we might do without actually having actually been in the situation in question; a very disconcerting and disturbing prospect indeed.

The following is an interview of Dr. Phillip Zimbardo (from the Stanford Prison Experiment) conducted by Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptic's Society, for the Skepticality podcast discussing these issues further, as well as Zimbardo's latest book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

After having watched this, can you honestly say you would never do what many of these people did? How would you know?
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Flying Frogs and Lizards

This is a pretty cool video of amphibians and a few reptiles and the gradual process of adaptation to their environment as it relates to flying/gliding, both as protection from predators and possibly as a way to catch their own prey. It's evolution on the making, with some really cool visuals.

(If you can't handle watching snakes, DO NOT play this video.)

I'm not crazy about the description of increasing 'perfection,' since it mistakenly implies the idea of foresight and teleology in the evolutionary process, but I guess it does play a bit of a poetic role...
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Defenders of Marriage

This is a pretty great song by Roy Zimmerman (the guy who gave us Creation 101), this time covering the subject of gay marriage, that despicable attempt by gay people to undermine family values by... err... entering socially sanctioned monogamous relationships and becoming families... errr... never mind...

Catchy tune, right?
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Need a translator?

This woman can translate whatever you tell her into multiple languages. Not exactly politically correct, but that's precisely what makes it so great.

The funny thing is that she really does capture the idiosyncrasies of the sounds of all these different languages, isn't it?
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Touch My Penis! You won't regret it...

The title totally got your attention, didn't it? And the fact that you're reading this implies that you're curious... don't deny it. You can't help it, I know. But more than my penis, this entry is really about bonobo chimps. Sorry to tease and disappoint...

Bonobos, along with pan troglodyte (the chimpanzees that everyone is familiar with) are our closest evolutionary relatives. The members of this primarily matriarchal species are capable of exhibiting many human-like characteristics, such as altruism, empathy, compassion, forgiveness, sensitivity, kindness, generosity and many other amiable traits, and they possess these character traits, in some cases, to a larger degree than humans do (the ability to forgive might be one of these).

Perhaps the most interesting thing about bonobos is that everything revolves around sex. Sex is the social glue that keeps bonobo society together: they use it as a form of greeting (what I've always dreamed of...), for confrontation avoidance, post-confrontation reconciliation, as a form of favor exchange, and as the ultimate stress reliever. Nothing is taboo for them; they engage in every imaginable sexual configuration: homo, hetero and group sex; they french kiss, engage in oral sex, genital rubbing and penis fencing; there is no discrimination on the basis of gender, age (neither infant nor old), genetic relatedness (though females do not usually engage in sexual intercourse with their adult sons), and they go at it for hours at a time on a daily basis!

But before we get to the sexual stuff, why don't we become a bit more familiar with bonobos and with our close relatedness: in this moving presentation, Susan Savage-Rumbaugh asks whether uniquely human traits, and other animals' behaviors, are hardwired by species. Then she rolls a video that makes you think: maybe not. The bonobo apes she works with understand spoken English. One follows her instructions to take a cigarette lighter from her pocket and use it to start a fire. Bonobos are shown making tools, drawing symbols to communicate, and playing Pac-Man -- all tasks learned just by watching (maybe one day she'll graduate from Pac-Man to Halo?). Maybe it's not always biology that causes a species to act as it does, she suggests. Maybe it's cultural exposure to how things are done.

So, back to the 'touch my penis' reference. The following is an episode of In Conversation, in which Robyn Williams speaks with the lovely and incredibly charismatic Vanessa Woods, who has been working with bonobos in the Congo. The conversation is one you can't afford to miss: it's both educational and incredibly fun!

And for the mesmerizing lecture given by Jane Goodall (mentioned at the beginning of the audio above) you can listen to it here.

Monkeys rock!
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Colbert and the Ten Commandments

In this hilarious and classic interview, Stephen Colbert interviews congressman Lynn Westmoreland, from Georgia's 8th district (Georgia, go figure...), who co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

While attempting to justify his view, Westmoreland asks the rhetorical question "what better place could you have something like that than in a judicial building or in a courthouse?" He sets himself up, I know... but Colbert is actually nice and gives him a chance to redeem himself, and so he asks "can you think of any better building to put the ten commandments in than in a public building?" and the answer is a flat out no... Funny, I would have thought that, I don't know, a church might qualify!!!

In any case, the true genius and brilliance comes at the very end of the clip, when Colbert asks the killer question that buries Westmoreland and shows him for the hypocrite and the idiot that he is. I won't give away the ending, but it is absolutely hysterical.

Get More: Comedy Central,Funny Videos,Funny TV Shows

It scares me sometimes to think that people as simple-minded and narrow-minded as this dude, and who have absolutely no understanding of political philosophy, or the importance of the separation of church and state, or of the Bill of Rights, are the ones in political power...
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James Watson: The Double Helix and Today's DNA Mysteries

Nobel laureate James Watson opens TED2005 with the frank and funny story of how he and his partner, Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA (and won the Noble Prize in Medicine in 1962 as a result).

The tale is full of colorful details: How Watson had planned to be an ornithologist until Schroedinger's book What Is Life? transformed him into a geneticist. The painful rejections he suffered along the way, first from Caltech and then from a certain girl. And finally, how the basic DNA model ultimately came together in just a few hours.

Watson finishes with one of the topics currently making him tick: the search for genetic bases for major illnesses.

For an interview of Watson, along with E.O. Wilson, discussing the legacy of Charles Darwin, check out this previous entry.

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Earth: Pale Blue Dot

The following clip from Cosmos shows the greatly missed Carl Sagan describing the pale blue dot in the picture: Earth, and kind of puts things in both a humble and a life-affirming perspective, showing us simultaneously how alone we are in the universe and how much we depend on each other and should embrace each other.

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Weddings and Fainting

I went to a wedding this weekend, and probably came the closest out of all the guests to partake in the hilarity portrayed in this video collection, not from boredom or sickness, but due to severe sleep deprivation for the past few weeks (end of semester grading kills me).

In this case, better me than the bride or groom... By the way, congratulations Veronika and Kirill!

Ah... the absolute fear of commitment and getting married...
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Space: Staying Alive

This is the second episode of the mini-series documentary Space, narrated by Sam Neill. This episode deals with the fragile and ephemeral nature of our existence and survival in the context of the cosmos, and explores the dangers of living in our universe. Although they don't make this point explicitly, I think it's a rather nice way of finding fault with the so-called anthropic principle, which posits that this universe is a very stable and conducive place to harbor life (what theologians and even some respected cosmologists use as the philosophical justification that this universe was created with some kind of purpose and foresight). If you think about it, we are sort of imprisoned to the very narrow confines of our planet... we probably could not survive in most of the universe; that's a big waste of space, isn't it?

If you missed the first episode, you can watch it here.

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White and Nerdy

It's always fun when a dorky white dude can get away making fun of black people, especially the 'tough gansta type', isn't it?

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Star Wars: Return of the Dorks

This clip is hilarious. A whole bunch of sexually deprived Star Wars fans assemble before the premier of one of the new installments, and Triumph the dog takes advantage of the opportunity to pick on them relentlessly, over and over again.

It's a bit of a scary prospect when these people start reproducing, huh?
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Levitt & Dubner on Freakonomics

In this Charlie Rose episode, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner, co-authors of the famous book Freakonomics, share some thoughts about the inspiration and research related to their best-selling book.

The second part of the video is a conversation between Charlie Rose and world-famous historian Francis Fukuyama, author of revolutionary book The End of History and the Last Man, on democracy and globalization.

By the way, I'm trying to work on uploading a video of an awesome and fascinating lecture by Levitt, so watch out for that soon... if I'm succesfull, but in the meantime you can always check out this lecture I posted a while back, in which he explains the structure of gangs and their similarity to McDonald's.
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The Awesomest Sentence I Read Today

This hilarious paragraph is from a student's philosophy term-paper (minus some grammatical and spelling errors):

The thing that irritates me the most about God is when people praise him for everything they do. At the Grammy awards, actors and actresses receive their awards and say "first off, I would like to thank God. He/she is the reason why I'm standing here tonight." Bullsh*t! The reason you are there tonight is because you worked hard to become an actor, or your good looks got you there... When someone goes to jail and they are being prosecuted they don't say "first off, I'd like to condemn God. If it wasn't for him I wouldn't be sitting here today."

Thanks to Ben Newberg for making the grading process funnier and less painful.
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Here Kitty Kitty...

So apparently someone got a male lion and a female tiger totally drunk and let nature take its course... the result is a liger, a gigantic cat that weighs almost a thousand pounds. If the male had been a tiger and the female a lion, the offspring would have been a tigon, which would have been a dwarf.

Update: I've been talking to my good friend about ligers, and the question came up as to who would win a battle between a liger and/or a tiger or lion... and it turns out the liger would probably lose. Why, you ask? Well, ligers are big pussies, ha ha ha

Click on this bubble to watch a more comprehensive video about ligers than the one originally posted above.

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Rat Boy: Best Prank Ever!

You are going to roll on the floor laughing after you see this amazing prank!

"Are you okay, little man?"... classic!
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Breaking the Chains: the battle to find and use my voice

As I mentioned in a previous entry, when filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street, a message was attached to his body: Ayaan Hirsi Ali was next. This was due to a film they jointly created about the status of women in Islam (you can watch the short, but extremely interesting film here).

As a Dutch parliament member, Ali worked to secure basic human rights for female Muslim immigrants. In this presentation, she shares her journey, from a forced marriage to a new life in the West, and offers some very well thought-out remarks about Islam and its situation with regard to modernity.

Is it wrong for me to think she's kind of hot?
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The Fountainhead - Howard Roark Speech

This is the famous courtroom scene from The Fountainhead in which Howard Roark defends himself. I'm not exactly very fond of Ayn Rand or the objectivist philosophy; her logic is faulty (though in very subtle ways) and her language highly inflammatory and bifurcating. Nevertheless, she is an interesting thinker, and worth knowing how to refute ;)

One thing that I always found interesting and extremely ironic whenever I met 'objectivists' is that even though Rand seems to promote individuality and creative thinking, just about every single follower of hers basically recites exactly the very same lines all the time, almost word by word. How exactly does that make them individual thinkers is simply beyond me... As far as I can tell, they are not individuals, they are blind followers of Rand who think they are individuals. Isn't that the ultimate marketing campaign?

Anyway, that's not to say there aren't a lot of very interesting and thought provoking ideas in her writings, as this clip clearly shows. Enjoy, and think about it...

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Children's Books You'll Never See

And here are a few more:

• You Were an Accident
• You Are Different and That's Bad
• The Boy Who Died From Eating All His Vegetables
• Dad's New Wife Robert
• Fun Four-letter Words to Know and Share
• Hammers, Screwdrivers and Scissors: An I-Can-Do-It Book
• The Kids' Guide to Hitchhiking
• Kathy Was So Bad Her Mom Stopped Loving Her
• Curious George and the High-Voltage Fence
• All Cats Go to Hell
• The Little Sissy Who Snitched
• That's it, I'm Putting You Up for Adoption
• Grandpa Gets a Casket
• The Magic World Inside the Abandoned Refrigerator
• The Pop-Up Book of Human Anatomy
• Whining, Kicking and Crying to Get Your Way
• Things Rich Kids Have, But You Never Will
• Pop! Goes The Hamster...And Other Great Microwave Games
• Your Nightmares Are Real
• Eggs, Toilet Paper, and Your School
• Places Where Mommy and Daddy Hide Neat Things
• Oh, the Places You'll Scratch and Sniff
• Strangers Have the Best Candy
• Some Kittens Can Fly!
• Getting More Chocolate on Your Face
• Where Would You Like to Be Buried?
• The Attention Deficit Disorder Association's Book of Wild Animals of North Amer - Hey! Let's Go Ride Our Bikes!
• When Mommy and Daddy Don't Know the Answer, They Say 'God Did It'
• Garfield Gets Feline Leukemia
• What Is That Dog Doing to That Other Dog?
• Why Can't Mr. Fork and Ms. Electrical Outlet Be Friends?
• Bi-Curious George
• Testing Homemade Parachutes Using Only Your Household Pets
• The Hardy Boys, the Barbie Twins, and the Vice Squad
• Babar Meets the Taxidermist
• Start a Real-Estate Empire With the Change From Your Mom's Purse
• The Care Bears Maul Some Campers and are Shot Dead
• How to Become The Dominant Military Power In Your Elementary School
• Controlling the Playground: Respect through Fear

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GAP: For kids by kids

The GAP unveils its latest clothing line and its humanitarian efforts to employ slacker third-world country children...

I love the "help me" hand-sewn inscription on the clothes...
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Aurora Borealis

This is an awesome time-lapse video of the northern lights captured in British Columbia, Canada on September of 2006. Sadly, this video is the closest I've ever come to see this natural spectacle...

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True Romance...

Reach deep into your memory and think of the most romantic song you've ever heard. I bet it doesn't even come close to comparing to this classic:

Truly powerful, isn't it?
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Peter Singer & William Crawley

In this interesting interview with William Crawley, the famous utilitarianist Australian philosopher Peter Singer talks about some of his thoughts on euthanasia, infanticide, bestiality and pedophilia.

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The Trap - What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?

From the BBC:

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom.

Politicians promised to liberate us from the old dead hand of bureaucracy, but they have created an evermore controlling system of social management, driven by targets and numbers. Governments committed to freedom of choice have presided over a rise in inequality and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. And abroad, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the attempt to enforce freedom has led to bloody mayhem and the rise of an authoritarian anti-democratic Islamism. This, in turn, has helped inspire terrorist attacks in Britain. In response, the Government has dismantled long-standing laws designed to protect our freedom.

The Trap is a series of three films by Bafta-winning producer Adam Curtis that explains the origins of our contemporary, narrow idea of freedom.

It shows how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom. This model was derived from ideas and techniques developed by nuclear strategists during the Cold War to control the behaviour of the Soviet enemy.

Mathematicians such as John Nash developed paranoid game theories whose equations required people to be seen as selfish and isolated creatures, constantly monitoring each other suspiciously – always intent on their own advantage.

This model was then developed by genetic biologists, anthropologists, radical psychiatrists and free market economists, and has come to dominate both political thinking since the Seventies and the way people think about themselves as human beings.

However, within this simplistic idea lay the seeds of new forms of control. And what people have forgotten is that there are other ideas of freedom. We are, says Curtis, in a trap of our own making that controls us, deprives us of meaning and causes death and chaos abroad.

Episode 1


Episode 2


Episode 3 (1/3)


Episode 3 (2/3)


Episode 3 (3/3)

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Life in the Undergrowth 01

Here is the first episode of the Life in the Undergrowth series narrated by Sir David Attenborough. This one is entitled Invasion of the Land, and deals with the evolution of the small animals that evolved from the aquatic life to the terrestrial. The photography is truly amazing, and Attenborough's narrative style is as eloquent and inspiring as ever. I'll post more episodes in the near future.

Click here to watch all the episodes in this fascinating series.

Watch Out for the Snow Plow!

This video shows the same thing that happened to two of my friends on prom night: they were all dressed up in their tuxes, and in charge of getting the drinks for the after-prom festivities. They had pulled over to the side of the road for some reason, and left the windows open, when out of nowhere a snow plow sped up past them and literally buried my friends in snow. Not only was this hilarious... the drinks were nice and cold when they got there...

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