Complexities

One of the most insidious tendencies in human nature is the way we gravitate toward simple answers to complicated questions.

I got started thinking about this because of a paper out of Stanford University that appeared this week in Science Advances, about the role that plumes of Saharan dust play in hurricane intensity and rainfall quantity.  This kind of thing is all done now using computer models, and to say the problem is mathematically complex is a stunning understatement.  The scientists have to try to work out the interactions between blobs of air that can move in three dimensions, that vary in temperature, humidity, pressure, and speed, in relation to dust particles of different sizes, shapes, and compositions, at different altitudes, and see if they can figure out how that will affect the barometric pressure, windspeed, and rainfall of storms once they reach land.

It's why weather prediction is still so difficult in general; weather is an exceedingly complex system.  This accounts for my kneejerk furious reaction when I hear someone say, "I should be a meteorologist, it's the only profession where you can be wrong three-quarters of the time and still get paid!"  (Hurr hurr.)  Or, like I actually heard someone say in a school board budget meeting -- "Why do the science teachers need an expensive weather station?  If I want to know what the weather is, I just look out the damn window."  (Hurr hurr hurr durr.)

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NOAA]

It takes some self-awareness to realize you're pretty much completely ignorant about a topic, and considerable effort to remedy it, which probably explains why so many people like to pretend the world is simple.  So much easier to pick a solution that appeals to you -- especially one that doesn't require you to revise any of your preconceived notions -- and forthwith stop thinking.

Honestly, any time you hear "All we need to do is...", you should be on your guard.

The topic cropped up again a couple of days ago in a post from the wonderful author Lisa Lee Curtis, who took on addressing a meme that's been going around showing a trash-covered street with graffiti on the walls, in an obviously poor neighborhood, and the caption, "Democrats want us to believe they can clean up the environment, yet they can't even clean up their own district and streets."  Lisa does a brilliant takedown of the claim and the mindset behind it, and you should read it in its entirety (you can find it at the link provided), but one bit in particular stood out: "Democrats didn't do this.  Greed did this and continues to do this.  This isn't a partisan crisis, this is a human crisis, and you're playing armchair quarterback to something that isn't a fucking game."

But it's appealing to land on a simple solution, isn't it?  Whatever the issue is, find a one-liner of an answer and call it good.  It's the Democrats' fault.  It's the Republicans' fault.  It's the fault of irresponsible young people.  It's the fault of hidebound, conservative older people.  It's the fault of (fill in the blank): Black people, Muslims, Jews, atheists, the poor, LGBTQ+ people... whoever your favorite scapegoat is.

You know what?  It's time to grow up and stop being so damn lazy.  The world is full of complexities, which might suck, but last I checked, reality doesn't care if you think it sucks.  Learn about all sides of the issue, not just the one that comes from your preferred partisan news source, before you form an opinion.

And look, it's okay not to have an opinion about some things.  It's perfectly all right to say, "I just don't know enough about this topic that anything I could say about it would be relevant."  Work to learn about what's going on in the world, do your best to understand, but when something is truly beyond you -- like the mathematics of meteorological forecasting is for me -- then have a little humility and admit that you don't know enough to weigh in.

Oh, and for cryin' in the sink, don't spout off about subjects where you're completely ignorant and can't be bothered to learn.  There's a name for willful ignorance, you know.

It's called "stupidity."

Keep in mind the quote from H. L. Mencken: "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time.  There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."

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Thy fearful symmetry

Everyone knows that most living things are symmetrical, and the vast majority of them bilaterally symmetrical (i.e. a single line down the midsection divides the organism into two mirror-image pieces).  A few are radial -- where any line through the center point divides it in half -- such as jellyfish and sea anemones.  Even symmetrical organisms like ourselves aren't perfectly so; our hearts and spleens are displaced from the midline toward the left, the appendix to the right, and so forth.  But by and large, we -- and the vast majority of living things -- have some kind of overall symmetry.

True asymmetry is so unusual that when you see it, it really stands out as weird.  Consider the bizarre-looking flounder:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Peter van der Sluijs, Large flounder caught in Holland on a white background, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Flounders start out their lives as ordinary little fish, upright with symmetrically-placed eyes, fins, and so on.  But as they mature, their skulls twist and flatten, and they end up with both eyes on the same side of the head -- a great adaptation for a fish that spends its life lying flat on the seabed, and who otherwise would constantly have one eye pointing downward into the mud.

A question I've asked here before has to do with the constraints on evolution; which of the features of life on Earth are so powerfully selected for that we might expect to see them in life on other planets?  (An example of one that I suspect is strongly constrained is the placement of the sensory organs and brain near the front end of the animal, pointing in the direction it's probably moving.)  But what about symmetry?  There's no obvious reason why bilateral symmetry would be constrained, and it seems as if it might just be a holdover from the fact that our earliest ancestors happened to be bilateral, so we (with a few stand-out exceptions) have inherited it down through the eons from them.

What about symmetry in general, however?  If we went to another life-bearing planet, would we find symmetrical organisms, even if they differ in the type of symmetry from ours?

The answer, judging from a paper that appeared this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by a team led by Iain Johnston of the University of Bergen, appears to be yes.

What Johnston and his team did was analyze the concept of symmetry from the perspective of information theory -- not looking at functional advantages of symmetry, but how much information it takes to encode it.  There are certainly some advantages -- one that comes to mind is symmetrically-placed eyes allows for depth perception and binocular vision -- but it's hard to imagine that's a powerful enough evolutionary driver to account for symmetry in general.  The Johnston et al. research, however, takes a different approach; what if the ubiquity of symmetry is caused by the fact that it's much easier to program into the genetics?

The authors write:

Engineers routinely design systems to be modular and symmetric in order to increase robustness to perturbations and to facilitate alterations at a later date.  Biological structures also frequently exhibit modularity and symmetry, but the origin of such trends is much less well understood.  It can be tempting to assume—by analogy to engineering design—that symmetry and modularity arise from natural selection.  However, evolution, unlike engineers, cannot plan ahead, and so these traits must also afford some immediate selective advantage which is hard to reconcile with the breadth of systems where symmetry is observed.  Here we introduce an alternative nonadaptive hypothesis based on an algorithmic picture of evolution.  It suggests that symmetric structures preferentially arise not just due to natural selection but also because they require less specific information to encode and are therefore much more likely to appear as phenotypic variation through random mutations.  Arguments from algorithmic information theory can formalize this intuition, leading to the prediction that many genotype–phenotype maps are exponentially biased toward phenotypes with low descriptional complexity.

Which is a fascinating idea.  It's also one with some analogous features in other realms of physiology.  Why, for example, do men have nipples?  They're completely non-functional other than as chest adornments.  If you buy intelligent design, it's hard to see what an intelligent designer was thinking here.  But it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of coding simplicity.  It's far easier to have a genetic code that takes the same embryonic tissue, regardless of gender, and modifies it in one direction (toward functional breasts and nipples) in females and another (toward non-functional nipples) in males.  It would take a great deal more information-containing code to have a completely separate set of instructions for males and females.  (The same is true for the reproductive organs -- males and females start out with identical tissue, which under the influence of hormones diverges as development proceeds, resulting in pairs of very different organs that came from the same original tissue -- clitoris and penis, ovaries and testicles, labia and scrotum, and so on.)

So symmetry in general seems to have a significant enough advantage that we'd be likely to find it on other worlds.  Now, whether our own bilateral symmetry has some advantage of its own isn't clear; if we landed on the planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, would we find human-ish creatures like the aliens on Star Trek, who all looked like people wearing rubber masks (because they were)?  Or is it possible that we'd find something like H. P. Lovecraft's "Elder Things," which had five-way symmetry?

And note that even though the rest of its body has five-way symmetry, the artist drew it with bilateral wings. We're so used to bilateral symmetry that it's hard to imagine an animal with a different sort. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Українська: Представник_Старців (фанатський малюнок)]

So that's our fascinating bit of research for today; coding simplicity as an evolutionary driver.  It's a compelling idea, isn't it?  Perhaps life out there in the universe is way more similar to living things down here on Earth than we might have thought.  Think of that next time you're looking up at the stars -- maybe someone not so very different from you is looking back in this direction and thinking, "I wonder who might live on the planets orbiting that little star."

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Overlooking simplicity

In the Tao Te Ching, Chinese philosopher (and founder of Taoism) Lao Tse writes, "To attain knowledge, add things every day; to attain wisdom, remove things every day."

There are a couple of interesting pieces to this concept.  First, that knowledge does not necessarily confer wisdom.  The implication is that knowledge (by itself) is less desirable than understanding, and understanding less desirable than wisdom.  If so, this definitely has some bearing on how science is taught in public schools -- often as a list of vocabulary words and definitions that do little more than scratch the surface of what's out there to learn.

Second, that doing a mental decluttering is better than trying to figure things out by jamming more stuff in.  Here, I'm reminded of what happens in my fiction writing when I'm at an impasse.  Slamming my fists against the obstacle almost never works; what frequently does is doing something else entirely, especially something stress-clearing like going for a run or playing with my dogs.  As counterintuitive as it might be, it seems like ceasing to think about the problem at all frees my brain up to figure out a solution.

How exactly that works on a neurophysiological level, I have no idea.

Lao Tse by Nicholas Roerich (1943) [Image is in the Public Domain]

As more support for Lao Tse's observation, consider the paper in Nature this week called, "People Systematically Overlook Subtractive Changes," by Gabrielle Adams, Benjamin Converse, Andrew Hales, and Leidy Klotz of the University of Virginia, which looked at another facet of this same issue -- that when approaching a solution to a complex problem, people often fail to consider solutions that require removing pieces of it or ceasing to do certain actions.  The authors write:

Improving objects, ideas or situations—whether a designer seeks to advance technology, a writer seeks to strengthen an argument or a manager seeks to encourage desired behaviour—requires a mental search for possible changes.  We investigated whether people are as likely to consider changes that subtract components from an object, idea or situation as they are to consider changes that add new components.  People typically consider a limited number of promising ideas in order to manage the cognitive burden of searching through all possible ideas, but this can lead them to accept adequate solutions without considering potentially superior alternatives.  Here we show that people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations.  Across eight experiments, participants were less likely to identify advantageous subtractive changes when the task did not (versus did) cue them to consider subtraction, when they had only one opportunity (versus several) to recognize the shortcomings of an additive search strategy or when they were under a higher (versus lower) cognitive load.  Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle to mitigate overburdened schedules, institutional red tape, and damaging effects on the planet.

We're so well-trained by years and years of education that the way to find a solution to a problem is to throw more stuff at it that we don't even think of looking at solutions that require simplification.

"Additive ideas come to mind quickly and easily, but subtractive ideas require more cognitive effort," study co-author Benjamin Converse said, in an interview with Science Daily.  "Because people are often moving fast and working with the first ideas that come to mind, they end up accepting additive solutions without considering subtraction at all."

Now, there's a caveat here; not all problems have simple solutions.  When I was a teacher, I used to call this the "why don't we just...?" approach.  I remember students saying, "Why don't we just use chemical reactions that absorb carbon dioxide to fix climate change?" (it's completely unfeasible to do this on a large enough scale to help), and "why don't we just pass laws protecting wilderness areas and make mass deforestation illegal?" (not only does this run afoul of private ownership and eminent domain laws, it causes problems with resource acquisition, and ignores the fact that most of the threatened wilderness in the world is outside of the United States and therefore out of our jurisdiction -- not to mention the elephant in the room of global, societally locked-in wealth inequity as the root problem).  

Complex problems rarely have simple solutions.

But the basic idea here is that the answer doesn't always lie in fixing things by doing more stuff, and the human mind doesn't tend to see those kinds of solutions as easily as ones that require further or more intense action.

So give it a try.  When you're facing a difficult problem, give a shot to a Marie-Kondo-esque simplification approach.  What could you remove (or stop doing) that might help solve the problem?  Maybe a mental decluttering would help in a lot of realms other than overcoming writers' block.

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If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]