Recently on his show, Bill Maher discussed the Big Bang Theory with Fran Lebowitz; it was apparent to me watching that it is an idea he is uncomfortable with. According to Maher's distillation of it, all the stars, all the galaxies, all the matter in the universe, once existed in a superdense space "smaller than a marble" and then exploded almost fourteen billion years ago. Maher's discomfort with the Big Bang Theory, a picture of the universe accepted by almost everyone in the physics community, was signalled by his choice of the word "theory" for an idea that most everyone educated believes and by his comment that people smarter than him believe in it and so he chooses to accept their belief as correct, even though (it is implied) he finds the idea difficult to understand. I believe Maher's description of the Big Bang to be misleading but, because I shared his misconception about it myself until relatively recently, I think my new understanding of the Big Bang worth communicating to my audience, small as it is. In this post I wish to talk about the Big Bang, and then about nature vs. nurture, and then about the supposed differences between male and female brains. If another topic occurs to me worth discussing, I will discuss that as well.
A while ago I wrote a post called "Concerning the Universe" in which I talked about whether the universe is infinite in size or not, and some implications that follow if it is indeed infinite, in particular the idea that if the universe is infinite, that there must be an infinite number of Earths exactly like this one and a larger infinity of Earths only slightly different from this one. This seems like an absurd consequence of cosmology and probability but it follows logically from a small set of premises. The consensus among physicists is hard to pin down but, despite arguments such as the one I made, I think many physicists believe the universe to be infinite. These same physicists believe in the Big Bang Theory. Immediately however a contradiction or paradox arises. If the universe was once point-like, "smaller than a marble", and is now infinite, at some point in time it went from being finite in size to being infinite in size. How can we conceptualise such a transition? I would contend that we cannot conceptualise such a change because it is impossible. If the universe is infinite in size now, it must always have been infinite in size. The contrary statement is also valid. If the universe was finite once, it must still be finite now. Admittedly, the second possibility seems more plausible than the first but it is the first I wish to discuss in this post.
If the universe was infinite in size at the beginning of time, how can we make sense of the notion that it was once extraordinarily dense? How can we parse the idea that it is 'expanding'? To answer these questions, we need some understanding of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. I don't pretend to fully or even partially comprehend General Relativity but I know enough to say that this theory supposes that space itself is expanding. Imagine that, at the moment the Big Bang occurred, we picked out two points in space one meter apart. These two points would today be billions of light years away from each other, not so much because objects located at these points have travelled to their current positions but because the space between them has expanded. We can visualise it this way. Suppose space is an infinitely large sheet of rubber and that machines are located at one meter intervals from each other all designed to pull and stretch the rubber. These machines can distend the fabric of the universe and, as the mathematical thought experiment known as "Hilbert's hotel" demonstrates, there is always room for a machine to move away from its neighbouring machines. Infinity can, in a sense, get bigger. This resolution of the paradox occurred to me sometime after I had written the post "Concerning the Universe", thanks partly to Youtube clips about General Relativity, and I feel dopey that I hadn't worked it out until then. The public itself is confused about this issue. Some of the blame for this state of affairs can be attributed to science communicators like Neil Degrasse Tyson for failing to make it clear that, if the universe is infinitely large now, it must have been infinitely large when the Big Bang occurred. Their failure is why Maher made his mistake. Serious physicists understand better however. The theme to the sitcom The Big Bang Theory begins: "The whole universe was in a hot dense state". There is nothing in the song to suggest that the universe was small, let alone "smaller than a marble".
It sometimes seems to me that the general public and even scientifically minded intellectuals can miss the forest for the trees. I want now to turn to the debate between those who favour nature and those who favour nurture as the principal explanations of human and animal behaviour. I am a big fan of the television show Baby Chimp Rescue, a show that expresses profound truths relevant to the nature/nurture debate in a way that is unobtrusive, surreptitious, without fanfare. This show concerns a group of chimpanzee infants, originally victims of the pet trade in Liberia, who are cared for by some human conservationists who hope to return them to the jungle. A running thread in the show is that the baby chimps must be taught the skills they need to survive in the wild. In a recent episode, an anecdote is told about another group of captive chimpanzees who were returned to the rainforest. To the surprise of their caregivers, they kept falling out of the trees – they had never learnt how to climb trees or to brachiate. Baby chimps must be taught, or must teach themselves, to climb. Similarly, the show portrays how the baby chimps must be taught to be afraid of snakes: a short sequence shows a young chimp, who had failed to learn his lesson from the tutelage of his human minders, playing with the artificial snake he is supposed to be scared of. The show's lesson (one of its lessons) is that chimpanzee behaviours such as nut-cracking, nest-building, fear of snakes, and even brachiation are learned behaviours rather than innate instincts. This runs counter to the common, received wisdom that even if humans often learn behaviours (such as how to drive cars), the behaviours of animals are instinctual, genetic. In particular, it is often asserted that all creatures are born with an innate fear of snakes and Baby Chimp Rescue proves this assertion wrong.
In an earlier post, I suggested that birds, rather than being born neurologically predisposed to flight, teach themselves to fly because they are born into the world with wings. I would like to propose that most higher animals exhibit extraordinary neural plasticity and teach themselves those skills they need to survive by exploring the possible actions their bodies can undertake. Yes, newborn foals can walk almost immediately, but this is because they are born with working legs rather than congenital walking knowledge; the reason newborn humans can't walk immediately is not because they are neurologically unequipped for walking but rather because they are physically unequipped for walking. This idea, that humans and animals alike acquire all their traits from experience and the paths their physical bodies dictate, invites the question: if this is true of higher animals, is it true of all animals? Is the waggle dance of the honey bee learned or genetic? I tend to be suspicious of genetic explanations for mental phenomena; as I have said before, I cannot understand how a sequence of bases on a DNA molecule can somehow code for a protein that somehow determines a pattern of neurones in the brain that somehow translates into a 'fear of snakes'. But I could be wrong. In The Origin of Stories, Brain Boyd deploys a powerful argument for the role of inherited instincts. He argues that they reduce the space of possible exploration, that inherited mental traits direct behaviour down prescribed channels. If the human mind was indeed a tabula rasa, he argues, a human would explore the space of all possible behaviours in such an uncoordinated, random manner as to lead swiftly to that human's demise. (It has been a while since I have read The Origin of Stories so it is possible I am misrepresenting Boyd's argument. It is also possible that this argument was not original with him.) However, if we don't lose sight of the fact that humans have a long period of development, it is possible to come somewhat closer to the conclusion that the human mind starts as a blank slate. Babies babble. They experiment with their larynx, with their lips, tongue, and teeth, to make noises and eventually to imitate their parents' noises. Of course, they respond to encouragement and reinforcement, a receptivity that might be genetic, but it is possible that language acquisition is not an instinct as Steven Pinker has argued but a learned ability based on imitation. Of course, this proposal goes against Noam Chomsky's theory of Generative Grammar – but even that most admirable and loveable of linguists and activists might be wrong on occasion.
If the preceding paragraph seems a little muddled, that is because I am presenting a speculative idea about which I am myself unsure. The problem with the nature/nurture debate is that it assumes that all behaviours and mental traits arise from one or the other, from genes or from the environment: the debate is reminiscent of the ancient debate between Rationalists and Empiricists. Is it not possible that some other influence, perhaps something spiritual or mystical, has an influence? This is a possibility I shall come back to later in this post.
If we do entertain the presumption, however, that the brain is extremely plastic, this has implications for our understanding of mental differences between men and women. A hundred years ago, it was assumed by many that men were inherently more intelligent than women. Feminism, I think especially second-wave feminism, fought back against that notion and it became a grievous solecism to espouse such views. Yet today the idea that there are sex-differences between men and women has again resurfaced under the guise of 'complementarity'. Men may not be smarter than women but women and men are indeed intellectually different: they complement each other, it is suggested. I think Bret Weinstein endorses this idea –I am fairly sure that in a recent podcast he expressed the received wisdom that men are interested in things and women are interested in people. Complementarity is often presented in the following way: women are better at social, linguistic, and communicative tasks, have greater emotional intelligence, greater empathy, while men excel in abstract and mechanical tasks, such as mathematics and engineering. I believe even Bret's wife Heather has made statements in support of complementarity, a surprising position for an intelligent woman who is well versed in math and statistics to take. I think her position is founded on her strong conviction that there are natural differences between men and women, differences in neurology that result from different DNA. There is, to be sure, a little evidential support for complementarity. A few tests (but only a few) suggest "females [are] specifically found to perform slightly better in vocabulary and reading comprehension and significantly higher in speech production and essay writing. Males have been specifically found to perform better on spatial visualization, spatial perception, and mental rotation" (Wikipedia). There is also a little evidence that there is more variation of G among men than women.
The idea of complementarity has become extremely popular in recent decades, among women as well as men, I think partly because it bolsters a person's sense of identity in the same way astrology does. For example, the Extreme Male Brain hypothesis of autism put forward by Simon Baron-Cohen is popular because it plays on stereotypes of male and female minds in a way that appeals to a lot of people, even women. (This theory is somewhat debunked by the work of literary criticism Naming Adult Autism by James McGrath, a book I read sometime last year.) However, there are dissenting voices. In The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, Gina Nippon argues that it makes as little sense to talk about a female brain as it does to talk about a female liver or female heart. The apparent differences between male and female brains, she argues, is a consequence of the fact that men have bigger brains on average than women and the reason men have larger brains is that they are generally bigger than women. And, no, bigger brains does not correspond to greater intelligence. Nippon argues that apparent psychological differences between men and women are entirely the result of culture, of nurture over nature. I haven't read Nippon's book (although I would like to) but my thinking and observations of the world have led me to a similar conclusion. No, a squad of female ruby players is unlikely to beat the All Blacks any time soon but there is good reason to suppose that in the future women will be as likely as men to excel at physics or mathematics, and that men who like poetry (or gossip) will not be labelled effeminate as they sometimes are today. Here in New Zealand, we currently have a female Prime Minister, a female Opposition Leader, a female Governor General, and a female Chief Justice. At his address to congress yesterday, Joe Biden was flanked by Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi. The nineteenth century idea that women are intellectually inferior to me, that women “represent the most inferior forms of human evolution” as Gustave Le Bon said in 1895, has been well and truly killed.
When we look at the world, we might naively suppose there are natural differences between men and women. An anthropologist from another planet sojourning here might suppose that women are genetically predisposed to wear skirts sometimes while men never do. Of course, intelligent terrestrials know this supposition to be false. Some trans women might think they can advertise their gender identities by wearing dresses, a 'lifestyle choice' encouraged by reading Judith Butler, but others around them will remain unconvinced. (I think Butler's theory of gender performativity actually makes sexism and stereotyping worse, but that is a topic for another post.) Almost all the outward signs we associate with a gender are the result of culture, the unconscious assimilation of stereotypes. The best bet for a true genetic psychological trait, a mental characteristic that really is the result of nature not nurture, seems to be sexual attraction: most men are only sexually attracted to women and most women are only sexually attracted to men; in fact, ordinary heterosexuals never even consider that there might be another option. Heterosexuality is so normal and widespread, and so fundamental a core idea to the currently supreme sciences of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, that it seems it just must be natural. But I would like you to consider the possibility that it is another learned behaviour. From infancy onward, we find ourselves in a world where heterosexuality is the norm. The books we read as children, the TV shows we watch, the people we encounter, our own parents, typify this heterosexual norm. Then, at puberty, we are suddenly awash with sex hormones and experience a libidinal awakening. Usually, though not always, this manifests itself in the form of wet dreams. I would argue that we have been primed by our childhood experience to direct our sexual energies along heterosexual channels. This is why I oppose the move to introduce homosexuality into children's literature, films, and TV. The PC campaign to do so is founded on the idea, promoted by the gay lobby, that people are born one way or the other. As I have said before, the Left is utterly inconsistent on this issue – on the one hand, everything is nurture, a social construction, except sexuality, which is supposed to be genetic even though, as I have argued several times in this blog, the idea of a gay gene is ridiculous. If homosexuality is introduced as an option into the lived experience of children, it is likely to encourage more young people to become gay. And I believe, I admit controversially, as I've said before, that it is better to be straight than gay. I know this is horribly un-PC but I can't help myself.
Earlier in this post, I mentioned that there is a third possible influence on the development of human minds or, we might say, human souls. Could it be nature, nurture, or the supernatural? In the previous paragraph I said that ordinarily a person's sexual awakening involves wet dreams. Despite valiant efforts by neuroscientists and psychologists, no one is any closer than Freud to understanding the purpose or function of dreams, and Freud was way off the mark. A little while ago, Sam Harris released a podcast episode in which he spoke to Ricky Gervais about dreams, trotting out the stupid but currently fashionable hypothesis that dreams are an epiphenomena that occur when short-term memories are being transferred into long term storage. Presumably, the evidence for this hypothesis is that if experimental subjects are interrupted during REM sleep, they suffer deficits of memory. This is not sufficient evidence for such a sweeping hypothesis. I don't understand the reason why we dream but then again no one does. Despite the impression people have that scientists know everything, the world is still a profoundly mysterious place.
In this post I have discussed the Big Bang, nature vs. nurture, mental differences between men and women and the role childhood environments play in informing the sexual identities of adolescents and adults. I admit the post is a little dense, a little stream-of-consciousness, but sometimes a chain of related thoughts can be entertaining. I can only hope that you were entertained. And I hope you took something from it. Until next time...
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