Hair and Natural Selection

I'm guessing this has occurred to most people at some point or another, although maybe it hasn't given my very tenuous and inaccurate grasp of what an ordinary human mind is like.

Doesn't it seem like evolution is ridiculously precise? Like, ridiculously? I've been wondering for a while about what the evolutionary purpose of human hair was, especially given how it's so localized to the head and the crotch. The crotch makes a lot of sense for logistical reasons we won't get into here, but the head is just confusing. But then I realized this morning that it was there for a practical purpose- protecting the head from sunburn. The reason for the color of hair is melanin, which is the pigment in the skin that protects from sunburn. That's a beneficial trait for evolution to give us, yes?

But the corollary of that would be that an entire segment of the human population would have to have been wiped out because they weren't well adapted to something that would kill a bald person. I can't think of anything that would only kill bald people except for a serial killer who only killed bald people.

This leads me to speculate that there was an evil, bald child-abusing caveman in the Great Rift Valley, and that two things happened as a consequence. First, his own child was turned sociopathic by a traumatic upbringing and went on to kill all the prematurely bald people before they reproduced. Next, his other victims forced early cavemen to select for genes that made us associate baldness with creepy child molesters and cartoonish supervillains.

Also, I just realized that having hair on our head protects us from UV rays which give us skin cancer, which is probably a much better explanation than the one I just suggested. But I don't think we should rule out my hypothesis just yet.

War is Heck.

This worries me.

Not just because of the fact that Iraq veterans are being fucked over by the bucketful, which is troubling enough as it is. Not just because of the economic burden that today's students are going to have to bear once we sober up and start having to pay into our parents' social security.

What I'm worried about is that being so detached from Iraq now is going to make war more palatable to the already war prone country that we are. And let's face facts, folks- we are war prone. Even if you think most of the wars we've fought have been good ones, you still have to admit we've fought a hell of a lot of them in our scant two-and-a-half-odd centuries as a nation. A generation from now, our children are going to look at the crippled economy we threw up into their waiting hands and they're not going to know what to do with it. Hopefully, they'll deal with it by amping up funding for science in schools and universities and use it to start developing and exporting consumer goods.

Or they might look at America's unbelievable military might and ask themselves, "how can we turn this into grocery money?" And since they've been raised by a generation that won't be able to teach them what it's like to be personally impacted by war, it's entirely possible that they'll answer that question the same way the Mongols did. When that happens, I sincerely hope they blame the state of the economy on their parents and not on foreigners.

"Baby Mama"? Really, Fox?

"Michelle Obama Looks for a New Introduction"

First off, I'd like to extend a hearty congratulations to Fox for being the 21st century's answer to J. Edgar Hoover, sans the laudable crime-fighting record.

That said, it absolutely pisses me off (though it doesn't particularly surprise me) that Michelle Obama has become the target of such disgustingly cliched attacks. It amazes me that the same predictably prejudiced cards have been played over and over again for more than two centuries, and that the sort of people who play them still haven't stopped trying. You almost have to admire their audacity.

For one thing, if Michelle Obama were in fact an "Angry Black Woman", I'd say it's her motherfucking prerogative. I mean, granted, she had the luxury of spending only four years of her life in under Jim Crow, but I'm pretty sure it took more than a few weeks for that shit to wear off. Seriously, she's a black woman who grew up in Chicago's south side back then, and managed to pull off Harvard Law regardless. Think about how much she could have accomplished if she didn't have to deal with the burdens of her race, gender and social class. If reparations happened, they'd pretty much have to give her Disneyland.

But more important is the fact that she's being portrayed not just as a passionate firebrand but as an "Angry Black Woman". It was unscrupulous and underhanded for the right to go after Bill Clinton because of his failings as a husband that didn't really have anything to do with his administrative ability, but setting aside the harm it did him personally, it was mostly just petty. Cashing in on racial prejudice for political reasons, on the other hand, is just scummy and repulsive. It's a time honored tradition among bigots to deny black Americans their due on the grounds that they'll be some kind of threat if given power. Apparently, it's a tradition that the conservative columnists who've attacked Michelle Obama are proud to uphold. I suppose it's some kind of a consolation that they're trying to drag Obama down more because he's liberal than because he's black. But frankly, it's not very much of one.

I Haz A Body!

Biological functions are the coolest things ev4r, if you think about it. We tend to spend so much of our lives thinking of ourselves as beings that exist abstractly, immaterially, as souls or minds that are somehow more important than rocks because they don't exist as matter. Then we do things like eating, sleeping, sweating and so many other things that'll probably seem hilarious to the aliens when they make their way over here. It makes me laugh to think that this species that's so obsessed with the meaning of its existence can still think it's been designed for some profound purpose when its breath smells the way it does every morning. This body that's capable of love is cripplingly dependent on shoving plant matter into and out of itself on a daily basis, and that's pretty hilarious. You need to be reminded every now and then that you're made of meat like so much else in this meat-ridden world. It makes you humble, keeps you grounded. Get it? Meat? Grounded? Fine, be like that.

"The Subject Is Too Great..."

"But we mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius became the canned goods of intellectuals... the cheap mental stimulants of alienation, the cant and rant of pipsqueaks about inauthenticity and forlornness. I can't accept this foolish dreariness. We are talking about the whole life of mankind. The subject is too great, too deep for such weakness, cowardice- too deep, too great, Shapiro. It torments me to insanity that you should be so misled. A merely aesthetic critique of modern history! After the wars and mass killings! You are too intelligent for this. You inherited rich blood. Your father peddled apples."
-Saul Bellow's "Herzog"

I love this quote and put it on my profile. I spend the vast majority of my life trying in vain to get myself out of the shallow existential mire I'm usually in despite knowing about, despite having been exposed to real suffering. Feeling pain is, for fairly self-evident reasons, no fun at all. But give yourself an appropriate level of detachment, enough so you feel the pain through empathy rather than nerve endings, and immense and intense suffering becomes as therapeutic and comforting in its horror as pleasure can be if not more so. When you feel your conscience pang you acutely and feel its purifying sting, it positively stuns you that you- that anyone at all- could find so much to worry about in the fact that modern life is dreary and/or disenchanting and/or disillusioning. Because really, when 25,000 people are dying of starvation on a daily basis, who gives a shit about existential ennui. I feel bad for people who've never wanted to cut their throat for good reasons as opposed to postmodern ones. You need to have felt or even at least witnessed that kind of pain in order to know how to properly use a brain or a heart.

Whipped Cream Goes On Everything!

I bought a can of whipped cream for the first time in about three years last week. I bought it to try strawberries and cream for the first time, and I'm already through and just bought a new one today. I'm in love. It works with anything that has more than five grams of sugar in it. I've tried it with strawberries, bananas, chocolate milk, plain milk, ice cream, nutella on toast, PB&J, granola, waffles, iced tea, hot tea, ginger ale, peanut butter cups, apple juice, cookies...

I've also squeezed it directly into my throat. Just once. Okay, more like three times. But not in the same day, in my defense! And if any of you tell me you've never done this, you're either a filthy liar or missing out on one of life's great milestones on par with your first experiences with true love, religious experience, Firefly on DVD or all of the above.

Slice of Life #1

I woke up today feeling kind of glum, 'cause though I may be an upper-middle class college goer in the first world with a fully functional Wii, believe me when I say I got troubles. So I drive over the George St. Co-op to buy myself some Green & Black's chocolate ice cream so I can O.D. on it while I watch Netflix' copy of The Young Frankenstein for the first time, and when I get back and park in my designated spot outside my building, I see a little stray cat passing by. Now, I am what my friends call a "people watcher"- if I'm walking down the street, or picking up take-out, or standing on a checkout line, I like to observe people, note their mannerisms and quirks. I usually flit from subject to subject but sometimes I zone out and fixate, and if people know you're looking directly at them, it creeps them out. And you wouldn't think so, but if you tell them you're just doing it to learn more about the human condition, it only creeps them out more.

Apparently it creeps out cats, too. It's a shame because I was hoping I could at least observe animals with some degree of impunity, but no. The cat pretty much reacted in the exact same way a human would- he noticed me with a startled glance, kept walking for a moment, did the quick over-the-shoulder double-take and then hustled away in a hurried power-walk with a kind of "what the fuck was up with that guy?" look on his face. I'm a little impressed by this whole display- if you think about it (and I do), a double take is really a pretty psychologically complex behavior. I'm guessing.

Anyway, I'm normally okay with the fact that most people have a firmer grasp of etiquette than me and that I weird out people occasionally by just doing what I normally do, but I was hoping cats were less anal-retentive about that kind of thing. Apparently they know more about the nuances of social behavior than I do, which is frankly a bit of a slap in the face to accept. I was a little tempted to explain myself to him, but even if I could get over the language barrier issue, one of the few things creepier than telling people you're observing them for academic reasons is to say you're staring at them 'cause they're adorable.

In any case, I'm just a little more convinced than before that opposable thumbs are all that's keeping them from being our evil overlords.

Random Thought #1 (I expect to have a lot of these)

Here's an interesting puzzle for you sci-fi nerds out there; is there a way to break the speed of light as far as communications technology is concerned? I'm not talking about transporting things faster than the speed of light. I'm talking about communicating over distances of light years. The reason that makes a difference is because someone who's trying to come up with communication technology has a clear advantage over someone who's trying to come up with transportation technology. Specifically, if you replicate an object, it's a different object, but if you replicate a message, it's the same message, so all the problems you have with nanotech teleporters could be escaped completely when it comes to communication- if you walk through a teleporter that disassembles your body and reassembles it at another location, you don't know whether or not the other person constitutes your identity and may have your consciousness phased out in the process. You don't have that issue with communicated messages.

So if you managed to develop a computer that was sophisticated enough to store the location and momentum of every particle in, oh, let's say a solar system, and powerful enough to calculate the trajectory and motion of all those particles at the same rate that those particles themselves changed, then placed that computer about a light year or so away from the solar system whose events its gradually plotting out, then you could actually have that computer predict what messages the denizens of its designated solar system are sending and print them out as they were being, oh, let's say dropped in a certain mailbox in said solar system.

Let's set aside for a second the fact that creating a computer of this complexity would be ridiculously and impossibly difficult. And let's assume that the messages printed out on the other side would be reasonably accurate if you made the appropriate modifications to the computer's predictions to account for quantum probability. Here are my questions-

Would you be able to make this computer without actually replicating the solar system that it was designed to keep track of? Is it possible for a computer to keep track of the relative position and momentum of a system of particles if it's less complex than that system? And if not, do you think it would be possible to omit enough irrelevant details about that solar system to make it possible to keep track of it without being as complex as it? For example, I'm guessing the computer would need less detailed data about uninhabited planets than about inhabited ones, less about inanimate objects than about animate ones, and could probably omit a lot of data about vestigial biological and psychological functions. But even omitting minute details about all those things (and for that matter, limiting the computer's calculations to just one solar system out of all the kajillions out there) might make a huge difference to the computer's calculations.

All's Fair? Part 2

Setting that topic aside, let me get to the reason I started this post in the first place. Yes, part 1 was just a big, unintentional digression. You might have noticed that the title of this post- "All's Fair?"- has little or nothing to do with the content of part 1, and the reason for that is because it was going to be a musing about love and sexual morality. It's been something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and that article about hymen restoration seemed like a perfect illustration of something that doesn't often seem to occur to the people who long for a distant, idyllic past where good-old-fashioned sitcom values ruled. It seems like a lot of people, left and right, tend to make the innocuous mistake of looking at the significantly lower divorce rates in the past and in formerly colonized countries and thinking, "what the hell is it that they did right that we're doing wrong, with our ridiculous divorce rates?"

So we look to our old friend, inductive argument. We infer to the best explanation, and the obvious answer to the problem seems to be that the pseudo-Victorian sexual morality held by so many of the former colonies (and that we held ourselves until the sixties happened) is the answer, and that the degradation of old fashioned sexual values is why marriage is dying. To be perfectly honest, if I was confronted with a convincing enough sociological study that said that homosexuality, sodomy and premarital sex were actually the reason so many marriages fail and that getting rid of them would bring happiness and stability to the marriages that were left, I'd be tempted. But I submit to you that what Indian culture is doing right is- drumroll please- nothing.

Social sanctions and sexual taboos can force you stay in a marriage or make you cling desperately to your virginity, but they're not going to do anything else. Social pressure doesn't bring love into marriages that lack it (though, to be fair, time and shared experiences occasionally do). They don't make people psychologically or socially healthy who weren't before. If a study says that Indian couples get divorced less often, I think it probably means just that and nothing else. And it always amazes me that, despite that commonsensical explanation being immediately available, people are willing to go as far as they do to make social sanctions against sexuality as strong as they so often are. It stuns me that there are people out there who can understand that gay couples can be in bona fide heavens-to-betsy grade A love with a capital l-o-v-e and still say no to gay marriage. It boggles the mind that someone can understand that there are people out there who have had the experience of seeing new things in old things the way one does when in love, and had that experience because of someone of the same sex, and still say that they shouldn't have the right to a legally and socially sanctioned union because it seems icky. And the dark side of the effort to cling to our old sexual morals goes so much farther than just bans on gay marriage and surgically restored hymens. (See Saudi Arabia and its rampant, violent misogyny).

I wonder how much all the folks out there who want a return to old fashioned values really know what they're wishing for. Literature's a great treasure trove of evidence for this point; women are basically slaves and property in the Iliad (and the Old Testament for that matter), and the Tale of Genji has the title character adopting a 12-year old girl to raise as a fragile, stunted ideal wife.

To be fair, that’s an oversimplification. It's not like people who want "old fashioned values" (whatever that means) want to annul suffrage and bring back the legal model of women as chattel. What the advocates of old sexual morality want is not so much a regression but a revision, to which I say, sounds awesome. Technically speaking, modifying our old sexual ethics until they match an ideal set of mores pretty much amounts to the same thing as building that ideal set from scratch.

And therein, dear readers, lies the rub. Here's the million dollar question. Which of our old sexual mores is the baby and which the bathwater?

Most (though not all) ethical philosophers make a distinction between what they call the right and the good: There are good things that you can do that you have a right not to do (like giving to charity) and other things that you have a right to do but are bad (like being racist). When it comes to sex, a lot of ethical philosophers are concerned with the right instead of the good when it comes to sexual ethics; what exactly constitutes consent, when is sex so unconscionably harmful that we have to criminalize it, etc.

Personally, though, it seems like the more pressing and difficult question lies with the good instead of the right. It's hard to imagine that many people, left or right, are willing to advocate the criminalization of sexual acts performed consensually and conscionably in the privacy of one's own home, but the subtler, trickier and possibly more important issue lies with what exactly constitutes "good" and "bad" sex (that is, ethically). As important as it is to worry about what sex should be legally sanctioned, it seems like there's more immediate importance to the question of what sex should be socially sanctioned. And no matter how much it seems from what I've written so far that I'm your stereotypical northeast-coast hyper-progressive denizen of a brave new world, I honestly find it hard not to suspect that the gradual relaxation of sexual taboos since suffrage has, once it crossed a certain threshold, led to women being objectified more rather than less. And then of course, there are plenty of ways we're still stuck in the fifties and are way worse off for it. (Understatements ftw!)

So what’s the optimal set of sexual morals for society to have?

To be continued.

All's Fair? Part 1

So, I look through the Times website last night and I find this article on the page- a small, out of the way link that was glaring at me like a neon light- and I'm not sure what to think. My first and predictable reaction was to shake my head in dismay. Now, don't get me wrong. This is not to pass judgment on the women who have this procedure performed, and the head-shaking isn't at them. It's at the fact that this kind of thing needs to happen at all.

I have enough faith in my friends to leave out all the relevant disclaimers about Islam being a profound and moral religion, but let's face facts- there's a reason you'll find the Quran on the Eastern Religions shelf at Barnes & Nobles despite the fact that Moses is mentioned in it more than Muhammad is. It may be part of the Judeo-Christian corpus, but most predominantly Muslim countries are former colonies and fall under the loosely defined category we call the "third world". Most of these countries have skipped over the industrial revolution altogether and are trying to find a place in the digital one with varying degrees success, but whether you're the more fortunate Turkey or UAE or mired in the there-but-for-the-grace-of-Allah hardships of Somalia or Afghanistan, you're going to deal with the fact that you just skipped over a period of your historical evolution that Europe and the Americas got to enjoy four whole centuries of. One of the nice parts of that package is that you have a sense of your culture, history and community in a way that's hard to find in the former colonial powers; I (and even Muslim Indians) grew up immersed in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and I have a relationship with them that not many people in the west have with the Iliad or the Poetic Edda or even the Bible. My relationship with the old epics is in no small part responsible for my love affairs with both philosophy and literature. But one of the dark sides of that connectedness with history is that the archaic elements of your past cling to you as tightly as the civilized ones, and a puritanical sexual morality is no small part of that. It can tear families apart.

So it's honestly hard to be judgmental of the women who get this procedure. It's hard to even think of them as being stodgy or conservative, coming from the culture that I'm from. Indian culture, and especially my generation of Indian-Americans is pretty often caught in that thorny briar patch between the old world and the new. We take half of our moral instincts from Nehru, Tagore and other progressive revolutionaries of the independence struggle, and another half from rural village ethics that give us a sense of conscience and community at their best but at their worst are willing to compromise human rights for family honor (See: Sati and the caste system). And this is despite the fact that the first world has been good to my family. Culture shock to us involves pain, fear, struggle and disorientation, but it usually lacks the bitter edge it often has for African, Middle Eastern and Latin American immigrants.

So we have a sense of what it's like to feel like your culture and your morality is in periodic conflict with the western world, but not every third-world culture is as fortunate as ours has been. Most third-world countries have had a Nehru, Atatürk, Locke or Jefferson to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern, but not all of them have. I can only imagine what it's like to be an immigrant from one of those cultures, and I don't think I'd have the courage to take a stand if I was a second-generation immigrant woman from one of those cultures. A white lie, a surgical procedure and a minor compromise of your integrity seem like a small price to pay to not be alienated from your family and community (though a well-deserved kudos and god bless to the women who do stand up).