Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny (in Education)

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" refers to embryological parallelism, the idea that the development of any individual organism strongly parallels that organism's evolutionary history.  For example, in mammalian embryos, the backbone appears very early, followed by other neural developments in the order that they first appeared in mammalian macro-evolution.  The cerebrum is the last brain structure to develop in the individual human, as it is the newest structure in macro-evolutionary terms.  

If we look at whale embryos, legs begin to develop before retracting back into the body cavity.  Hair also develops briefly, but whale embryos lose this hair at further stages.  Birds have fingers at early stages of development, but these eventually fuse to form wings.  Birds also possess the genes for teeth, but these genes have been "turned off", and teeth never develop in birds.  Both human and monkey embryos briefly have tails to reflect our be-tailed common ancestor, but this tail disappears abruptly in humans, whereas it continues growing in monkeys.  This all correlates strongly with both genetic, mathematical models and the fossil record.

I find the parallelism between macro-evolutionary history, individual organismic development, and mathematically modelable genetic histories endlessly fascinating, and I am obsessed with reconciling and systematizing these phenomena.  But, I do not know enough about the subject right now; it is something that I would like to explore in depth in the future.  

For now, I'd like to see how such a model could be applied to education: that is, the educational development of the individual student recapitulates the macro-history of human knowledge.

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Searching for Oskar Schindler

<Cross-posted to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

I considered titling this post a more academic "Rejoinders to a Utilitarian Framework for Evaluating the Morality of Abortion" but thought better when I realized how many lines that would take up.  

First, I'd like to say thank you to Erik Kain at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen for agreeing to guest-post my recent offerings on abortion to that excellent blog and allowing me to receive excellent feedback from its excellent commentariat (167 responses as of press time).  

I'd also like to thank Jeremy Stangroom for setting up a forum to examine this and other difficult ethical dilemmas with some philosophical rigor and for engaging my argument and providing the kind of feedback that allowed me to refine it for publication.  Now on to the rejoinders:

1.  The first concern, raised by many many commenters, which I would like to address here is that the pro-life movement is generally dastardly and underhanded and engages in rhetorical bait-and-switch, moving of goalposts, demonizing their opponents, and all sorts of other trickery and tomfoolery.

This is true.  Some of them do, and these elements usually command a disproportionate amount of media attention, just as some in the pro-choice camp debate dishonestly as well and are well-publicized for it.  One of the many fundamental problems with the abortion issue in the United States is in the way it is construed: one side hates life, the other side hates choice.  This leads to one side arguing as if life is the only consideration when de facto it isn't and one side arguing that choice is the only consideration when de facto it isn't.  I constructed my matrix under the assumption that both positions were valid (by virtue of being widely held) and that any thoughtful, democratic examination of the issue required weighing the concerns of each party against each other.

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Practical Taoism

Now that we know who you are... I know who I am. I'm not a mistake! It all makes sense. In a comic, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain's going to be? He's the exact opposite of the hero, and most time's they're friends, like you and me. I should've known way back when. You know why, David? Because of the kids. They called me Mr. Glass.

The American discourse is often constructed as a series of binary and antagonistic opposites.  One of which I am particularly fond is the progress vs. tradition binary, which forms a base on which other binaries stand: atheism vs. belief for example; urban vs. rural; electronic media vs. print media; walkable cities vs. suburbs; or rock music vs. classical music.  There are countless examples, and these are all part of a greater false dichotomy, for in between progress and tradition lies not antagonism but symbiosis.  

All the things we think of as traditional are traditional because something changed.  For example, we value antique furniture, old houses, and black and white movies as traditional because now we have Ikea, mass-produced homes, and Avatar.  The frontier, the Western Movie, and Manifest Destiny serve as components of our national mythology because the American West is now criss-crossed with highways and Internet cables and peppered with fast food restaurants and Wal-marts.  Indeed, there would be no tradition without change.  The very concept would be meaningless.  It helps to remember this when we imagine an idyllic and rosy past that does not exist outside of our modern framing.

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On Reciprocal Altruism

For a long time Darwinism struggled to adequately explain altruism, or, what appeared to be the giving of gifts or services with no expected return.  When the concept of reciprocal altruism was first proposed, many who believed in the goodness of humankind revolted; for how can our goodness be based in selfishness?  It was simply too glib to say that generosity evolved because of reciprocity.  But the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.  One can be truly altruistic and still get a competitive advantage because of that altruism.  For the religious, this could even be couched in the language of theology and construed as God's reward for good behavior.  

So, some questions for religious people: why oppose Darwinian explanations for human behavior?  Does studying physics or geology diminish the beauty of nature?  Does understanding how a zygote works make me love my daughter any less?  Does accepting that generosity builds community invalidate goodness itself?    

Peter Boettke's Economic Meta-analysis

Termite cathedral = spontaneous orderFrom Peter Boettke at the Coordination Problem blog:

I often use a 2 x 2 matrix to communicate to students the different schools of thought in economics.  The rows reflect the problem situation we are find ourselves in (simple or complex), the columns reflect the outcome of our interactions (order or disorder).  Neoclassical economics is found in the simple/order cell; Keynesian and market failure theory is found in the complex/disorder cell; Marxism and critics of economics are found in the simple/disorder cell.  What does that leave?  The complex/order cell and that is the intellectual home of the Classical economists such as Smith-Say, the Austrian school from Menger to Mises to Kirzner, and the New Institutional school of Alchian, Buchanan, Coase, Demsetz, North, Olson, Ostrom, Smith, Tullock and Williamson, etc.

The Austrians occupy a central place in this cell because they emphasize not only the cognitive limitations of man, but also the complications of uncertainty, time, and I think importantly modifications to our core understanding of money and capital.  Money is non-neutral, and the capital structure in an economy consists of combination of heterogeneous capital goods that multiple-specific uses.  Once these propositions are included in the analysis, along with other messy aspects of the real world, our understanding of market theory and the price system shifts drastically.  Nothing can be treated as given.  Everything must fall out of the analysis of exchange and production.  Economic analysis is about economic forces at work, not the analysis of situations after those forces have done their job.

The traditional perfect market versus market failure debate is stale --- the perfect market folks don't tell us how the story of the market unfolds, and the imperfect market folks stop the story short right when it is getting interesting.  Journalist can understand this simple characterization of economic ideas, but economists should know better.  Back in the late 1940s, Kenneth Boulding (John Bates Clark Medal winner in 1949) actually raised this issue in his review of Samuelson's Foundations in the JPE.  Boulding wondered if the flawless precision of mathematical economics would prove impotent in terms of dealing with the real world in comparison with the literary vagueness of classical economics and economic sociology.  Not many listened to Boulding, and instead of doing messynomics in the sense of complex/order cell, we got a stale debate between simple/order and complex/disorder. And it still is going on today.

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Social Networks and the Bystander Effect

Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant New Yorker piece, "Small Change", on how the Civil Rights Movement could never have been accomplished with Facebook and Twitter, reminds me of the murder of Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect; basically the more witnesses there are to some horrible event, the less likely it is that any one witness will intervene.  

The basic premise is that, for example, if there is a man dying on the street and there is one witness, there is a 90% chance that that witness will stop to help the dying man; if there are two witnesses, each will stop to help 40% of the time, totalling an 80% chance that the man will be helped; with three witnesses, each will help 25% of the time, totalling 75%; with four witnesses, each will help 15% of the time, totalling 60%; five witnesses, 10%, totalling 50%; 6, 7%, 42%; 7, 5%, 35%; 10, 1%, 10%, etc. 

Rock-solid research has shown such a diffusion of responsibility to be a highly predictable phenomenon: in inverse proportion to the number of witnesses, we are far more likely to do the right thing if other people are not watching.  Even without modern empirical scientific research, however, spontaneously evolved cultural institutions, like the ombudsman or a neutral proxy as absolutely essential to conducting business in Japan, show that the diffusion and avoidance of responsibility is a natural part of being human.

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SIDS is Cute. AIDS is cool.

I generally have trouble comprehending a lot of visual style in Japan.  But from what I can gather, pulp generally wins the day, and the shocking stands out over neon.  That being said, I present two posters I recently saw in the clinic where my first nephew was born.  

SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is cute.

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Why Youth Leads the Recovery

source: Justice DepartmentThis week's Featured Find, an excellent Atlantic article by Dan Peck examining the long-run social costs of persistent unemployment, contains an embedded series of glourified vlogs blasting the youth of the nation for being "Followers, Not Leaders" and entitled basterds.  Au contraire, stuffy old people, WE, the youth, will lead the economic recovery, for several reasons:

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The Catholic Church: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

I'm proud to be a Catholic.  While Protestants were busy reading the Bible, addressing each other as "Goody", building barns, and milking cows, my religious ancestors were hunting down witches and heretics and setting them on fire, writing books about damning people to Hell and following through by actually damning them to hell, devising complex codes and secret societies to keep losers at bay, invading an entire region of the globe in search for a magic cup, building labyrinths, burning surviving classical texts, improving torture techniques, trying to keep a dead language alive, and otherwise founding Western civilization.  But to really appreciate how cool Catholicism is when compared to Protestantism, one need only compare Gregorian Chant to Creed.

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Myths and Facts about Pandemic H1N1/09 Influenza

The H1N1 influenza virus first occupied center stage in the years following World War I, when it was called "The Spanish Flu."  That particular strain of H1N1 went on to kill between 50 and 100 million people (3 - 6% of the global population), compared to 15 million killed in WWI.  The Spanish Flu was particularly virulent and killed young and middle-aged people disproportionately because it caused the body's own immune system to attack the body: those with stronger immune systems faced stronger symptoms and died at higher rates.  In contrast, seasonal flu outbreaks (sometimes H1N1), which kill 250,000 to 500,000 people every year, tend to disproportionately affect young children, the elderly, and those with weakened immune systems.  The recent strain of H1N1/09 influenza shares more in common with the latter, but, due to the possibility for sudden mutation, its high rate of infection, and conflicting media reports in the early days of the epidemic, it's important to separate myth from fact as we head into the winter flu season. 

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Mass-Cooperation in Common-Pool-Resource Management

Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in EconomicsMass-cooperation is a term usually reserved for internet phenomena: wikipedia and couch-surfing are two common examples.  The idea of mass-cooperation flies in the face of received economic wisdom: that humans are rational and self-interested--or, as pro-regulation types interpret it: people are cold and selfish.  This is often expressed through the parable referred to as "The Tragedy of the Commons", the lesson of which is that people are too short-sighted to plan for the future, and, if given the opportunity, will use up all of their common-pool resources due to individual self-interest trumping group-consciousness.  The tragedy of the commons paradigm has been applied to both small-scale resource pools, such as local fisheries, and large-scale resource pools, such as the world's oceans.      

Nevertheless, the recent Nobel recognition of Elinor Ostrom, whose empirical research into common-pool-resource management turns the "tragedy of the commons" trope upside down, indicates that theories of mass-cooperation are finding a mainstream audience.  For years, evolutionary game-theorists such as John Maynard Smith and Brian Skyrms have been quietly chipping away at the wall between biology and economics while authority figures have continued to justify their own intrusion into collectively-owned and managed resources via the "tragedy of the commons" allegory.  The debate between the tragedy of the commons and mass-cooperation pits the narrative against the empirical, and while there is no doubt that the former is the sexier of the two, perhaps we should pay heed to the latter when formulating solutions for tricky, controversial topics.  Ostrom's discoveries could have radical implications on how we solve problems as diverse as welfare, aid for Africa, and climate change.

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