No Place to Stand
Jared Diamond once wrote a book entitled The Third Chimpanzee. It is a pretty standard piece of his writing style, which is overlong discussions of simple matters, complete non-treatment of interesting matters, and stealth innovation. The title of the book derives from the small difference in DNA structure between the chimpanzees and man. Of course, given the recent sequencing of Neandertal DNA, a more proper title would have been the fourth (or more).
Nonetheless, the title came back to my mind this morning while I was perusing the feeds. The first source of mental neutrons was an article on work by anthropologists at U Utah and U Chicago.[Link] They have the interesting thesis that the rate of human evolution has been increasing over the last 100 KY or so.
Part of what set me off here is that word “rate”. This is a matter that I have studied pretty heavily the last ten years or so, largely because of our lack of fundamental understanding of what a rate is. This lack of understanding can be found in almost any daily newspaper where rate will be used in several different ways in different articles. The other interesting thing about rates is that they are a means of changing from a discrete, punctuated representation to a continuous one, and therein lies the core of my interest, at least mathematically.
This punctuation into continuity thing is very appropriate here because what we are thinking about is mutations. What the two researchers are probably saying – and its not clear whether the muck up is their fault or the poor reportage – is that the rate is proportional to population – number of humans. Now if it is proportional to the population to the first power, then the rate results in a number of mutations that is exponential over time. This implies that whatever is causing the mutations is either volumetric or wired into humans.
But the clinker to all of this may be cockroaches, which supposedly haven’t changed in umpteen years. We think they have a bigger population than humans, so why don;t that have a high evolution rate? Maybe questions like this are why biologists and anthropologists don’t like maths?
The second article is about research done by Humboldt U and U Michigan that indicates that children’s attitudes towards learning change as they age.[Link] In particular, they found that primary students displayed little correlation (again, interpreting the reportage!) between what courses/subjects they liked and what they performed well in. By high shul, there was a good positive correlation between interest and performance, and this correlation was stronger in males than females.
The immediate question here arises on whether this is a matter of nature or nurture? How much of the correlation is caused by teacher-student interaction, or even dis-interaction. As I have mentioned in a previous blog, some of the best physicists are those with the poorest teachers.
Which brings us to the third article [Link] that talks about research at Pennsylvania State U. This research has indicated that maths ability arises from a combination of smarts (Intelligence Quotient, with all that social baggage,) attention span, and self discipline.
IOW, you can’t just be smart, you also have to be able to concentrate. I would personally offer that you have to have some special interaction between the conscious and unconscious. I know from experience that I work on maths problems while I am asleep. I might also mention Kekule’s model of Benzene, or any number of somnolent solutions.
But the interesting thing as we learn more about who and what we are as animals, is that we can’t know what we are going to be until we get there, and we won;t ever get there unless we kill ourselves off.
