Seth’s blog

In 2004, anthropologists discovered fossils of tiny human ancestors on an Indonesian island. Called micropygmies, they were about three feet tall. Their brains were smaller than chimpanzee brains. They appeared to be descended from Hmo erectus rather than Homo sapiens.

They survived until about 20,000 years ago — which was impressive, since Homo sapiens reached nearby islands about 50,000 years ago. Why didn’t the Homo sapiens kill off the micropygmies? Jared Diamond was puzzled by this:

The discoverers of the Flores micropygmies conclude that they survived on Flores until at least 18,000 years ago (1, 2). To me, that is the most astonishing finding, even more astonishing than the micropygmies’ existence. We know that full-sized H. sapiens reached Australia and New Guinea through Indonesia by 46,000 years ago, that most of the large mammals of Australia then promptly went extinct (probably in part exterminated by H. sapiens), and that the first arrival of behaviorally modern H. sapiens on all other islands and continents in the world was accompanied by similar waves of extinction/extermination. We also know that humans have exterminated competing humans even more assiduously than they have exterminated large nonhuman mammals. How could the micropygmies have survived the onslaught of H. sapiens?

One could perhaps seek a parallel in the peaceful modern coexistence of full-sized sapiens and pygmy sapiens in the Congo and Philippines, based on complementary economies, with pygmy hunter-gatherers trading forest products to full-sized sapiens farmers. But full-sized sapiens hunter-gatherers 18,000 years ago would have been much too similar economically to micropygmy hunter-gatherers to permit coexistence based on complementary economies and trade. One could also invoke the continued coexistence of chimpanzees and humans in Africa, based on chimps being economically too different from us to compete (very doubtful for micropygmies), and on chimps being too dangerous to be worth hunting (probably true for micropygmies). Then, one could point to the reported survival of the pygmy stegodont elephants on Flores until 12,000 years ago (1, 2): If stegodonts survived so long in the presence of H. sapiens, why not micropygmies as well? Finally, one might suggest that all of the recent dates for stegodonts and micropygmies on Flores are in error [despite the evidence presented in (1) and (2)], and that both stegodonts and micropygmies became extinct 46,000 years ago within a century of H. sapiens‘ arrival on Flores. All of these analogies and suggestions strike me as implausible: I just can’t conceive of a long temporal overlap of sapiens and erectus, and I am reluctant to believe that all of the dates in (1) and (2) are wrong. Hence I don’t know what to make of the reported coexistence.

Yes, I know, when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. But I think Diamond is quite wrong about the nature of Homo sapiens economies 50,000 years ago. To Diamond, the big change was the invention of agriculture. Before that, hunter-gatherer; after that, farmer and occupational specialization. I believe there were vast economic changes long before agriculture — it took a long time to evolve language, and that didn’t start until there was already plenty of trading. By 50,000 years ago, I’m sure there was lots of specialization (Person A makes/knows X, Person B makes/knows Y), giving the Homo sapiens all sorts of tools and other useful expertise that the micropygmies didn’t have. They both hunted and gathered but much larger brains and a vast amount of expertise would have been for naught if they didn’t hunt and gather different foods. Homo erectus did not have anything like human language, as far as I can tell; therefore they didn’t have lots of trading or expertise. The two groups could co-exist because their foods were different. I suspect the H. sapiens, able to hunt really large animals, thought small animals, which supported the micropygmies, a waste of time.

In poor countries, cellphones have a big anti-poverty effect:

Jan Chipchase and his user-research colleagues at Nokia can rattle off example upon example of the cellphone’s ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached. There’s the live-in housekeeper in China who was more or less an indentured servant until she got a cellphone so that new customers could call and book her services. Or the porter who spent his days hanging around outside of department stores and construction sites hoping to be hired to carry other people’s loads but now, with a cellphone, can go only where the jobs are. . . . Over several years, his research team has spoken to rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them say more or less the same thing: their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cellphone.

This is exactly the effect I propose that the very first words had: They helped two traders find each other. Having a word for knife made it much easier for the person who had a knife to trade to find someone who wanted a knife. I was in Guatemala when I ran out of contact-lens solution. Not knowing the Spanish term for it, it was extremely hard to find. Once I knew the Spanish term, it was very easy to find. In a Guatemalan market, I heard a man shout “toothpaste” (in Spanish) over and over. He was selling toothpaste.

I think the first words were also the first names; You became identified by the name of what you were good at making (and therefore had to trade, since you made many of them). This information spread, like a cellphone signal, from tower to tower: From one person to another. If you were Mr. X, and someone wanted X, and they said so (”X?”), someone would point them to you. All it took were single words.

Later in the article, Chipchase responds to the author, who wonders if more technology is always better. “People once believed that people in other cultures might not benefit from having books either,” he says. I would go further: Not having cellphones is like not having language.

What’s art? The 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art provides an answer — whatever the work of the eighty-odd artists has in common.

The exhibit included some videos, documentaries (Spike Lee), photographs, drawings, and paintings. Most of the work, however, was everyday stuff — what artist Adam Putnam called “frugal materials” — used in unusual ways. Here are some examples:

• bird excrement (Charles Long)
• automotive paint (Daniel Martinez)
• styrofoam and resin (Jedediah Caesar)
• CDs and styrofoam balls (Jason Rhoades)
• drywall (Lisa Sigal)
• rebar and chain-link fence (Ruben Ochoa)
• printed matter (many)

Collages (e.g., Rita Ackermann) are the school-art-project example of this sort of thing. The goals of the artists seemed to be about 20% beauty, 30% emotional impact, 50% novelty. The Biennial also included old technologies used in new ways: Matt Mullican made drawings while hypnotized and then did similar drawings while not hypnotized. An outpost of Neighborhood Public Radio allowed anyone to be on the air for an hour.

As I’ve said, I believe the tendencies behind art evolved because they generated material-science research. The tendency to make art caused some people to make new things that required control of materials but weren’t obviously useful; enjoyment of art meant that others would trade for what they’d made, allowing artists to spend more time making art. A premium for novelty kept artists on their toes; it pushed them to find new ways of making things. Wandering around the Whitney Biennial, these ideas seemed easy to believe.

My observations:

1. The first task I used to measure my mental function at frequent intervals (e.g., every 30 minutes) resembled an typical cognitive psych task. It wasn’t fun and I had to push myself to do it.

2. I made another test to do the same thing based on the lessons I drew from bilboquet. It consisted of tracking circles around the screen. It was mildly fun.

3. Trying to improve the second test, I made a third test, which consisted of “tossing” the cursor from one point to another — like throwing darts. In spite of its simplicity, it was/is a lot of fun. Slightly addictive.

My theory of human evolution places great emphasis on hobbies (which at first were varieties of tool making) and job specialization. Hobbies must be fun. So that we will do them — or at least so our Stone Age ancestors would do them — they must provide pleasure. Where does this pleasure come from? The third task suggests a source: We enjoy simple hand-eye tasks with feedback where there is plenty of room for improvement. The Stone-Age hobbyist is trying to get this or that stone or piece of wood to do what he wants. The importance of job specialization — people must be able to enjoy a wide range of jobs, and the first jobs derived from hobbies — implies that the pleasure derived from hobbies must be “free-floating.” It cannot be closely tied to any particular hobby; to encourage a wide range of hobbies (= a wide range of tools) it must be generated by a wide range of hobbies. Because it is free-floating, we should be able to generate it from something quite different from a Stone-Age hobby, such as my third test. The Stone-Age hobbies we’re talking about, ur-technology, involved making things — which involves hand-eye coordination. The third test was more fun than the first two because it was closer to a Stone-Age hobby.

I don’t yet know if the third test is sensitive to flaxseed oil. I have doubts because it seems to involved only a small amount of mental computation per minute of testing. I believe flaxseed oil improves all brain function, but this test may require too much time (e.g., 20 minutes per session) to see the effect clearly. The other tests show the effect and take about 3 minutes per test. One reason balance clearly showed an effect of flaxseed oil is, I think, that it is computationally very intensive. A huge amount of computation goes on at once. A kind of averaging goes on, making systematic differences larger relative to noise.

Part 1. Part 2.

The Sharper Image has gone bankrupt and will no longer honor gift cards. In the comments section of the Consumerist post about this, several people apparently fail to understand why gift cards exist:

Another reason why cash is a better gift than gift cards.

This is just a good example why you should never buy a gift card.

Did anyone ever NOT know that gift cards are stupid?

The real lesson here, as Consumerists know, is don’t buy gift cards. They are a bad deal even if the issuer doesn’t go bankrupt.

This is the low-rent version of the deadweight cost of Christmas idea, which I discussed earlier. At the risk of stating the obvious, the perfect gift shows you know a lot about the recipient; cash shows you know nothing. A gift card shows you know a little — where the person likes to shop. They are less wasteful but less gift-like than ordinary gifts, more wasteful and more gift-like than cash. Gifts are supposed to be wasteful. This is why they are nicely wrapped. (Curiously no commenter called gifts stupid, a scam, etc.) In evolutionary terms, gift-giving traditions evolved because they increased demand for seemingly “useless” stuff. Gifts that went unused and expensive wrappings weren’t actually useless; they helped artists and artisans make a living. They were research grants for material science.