Sexual Orientation: Spectral

Ooh, here's one I haven't heard before. I was reading an article the other day about wild courses taught on college campuses and came across this one: "What are the political ramifications of identifying as gay, lesbian, straight, bi, queer, asexual, spectral, or something else?"

And what the heck is a "spectral sexual orientation?" It is the orientation one chooses when one wishes to be intimidating to straight society, a "threatening spectre feared by the heterosexual mainstream."

I don't know many spectrals anymore-- I'm probably too old-- but it's still a fun label.

Intelligent Design and The Legend of the Lone Scientist

If you've ever read a copy of Science or Nature, you will notice that the papers they publish have long lists of contributors and participants. Science, especially biological science, is such a complex discipline that it takes four or five minds to hold everything there is to know about even the simplest details of taxonomy, or immune response, or the evolutionary emergence of vision. You'll see the phrase "a team led by," but the leader rarely takes more than half the credit for the discovery. It takes teams of scientists all working the right direction to have enough ideas, and enough insight to make those ideas meaningful, to conduct useful research.

I once observed that one of the interesting distinctions in a bookstore is that between the "science" and "religion" sections: the science section is more or less harmonious; other than a few mis-shelved products, all of the books agree with one another: chemists agree on the underlying physics that makes chemistry meaningful; biologists agree on the underlying chemistry that makes biology work; zoologists agree on the common descent illustrated by biology to make their own output meaningful. In contrast, in the religion section, there is no agreement: thousands of books with chapters on the meaning of life, the origins of morality, the purpose of existence, and so forth, and they not only disagree with one another, but they do so with surprising vehemence.

Both of these issues are highlighted in the books published by the Intelligent Design movement. Wells's Icons of Evolution and Behe's Darwin's Black Box disagree on just about everything. Dembski's The Design Revolution has little in common with Wells. Most of the books in ID don't even purport to do science: they purport to uncover "problems" in evolutionary biology, most of which aren't really problems and the rest of which are avenues of fruitful naturalistic research. These are all "researchers" going off on their own wild goose chases, ignoring everyone else's goose in the process.

But they're also all one-man shows. There's no research team, no corrective influence of other minds going "No, don't write that, there's no research to back that up," no group dynamic leading to meaningful output. Every single book that the ID people claim with "demolish Darwinism" is a single jeremiad from a single mind, without collaboration or cooperation from others.

Cdesign Proponentsist writers are stuck in the 1950s idea of a single discoverer landing on a key piece of information so critical to discourse that he simply must let it out. ID writers claim that they have to "go around" the mainstream science institutions because science is blind to their discovery, but that's nonsense: if what they had to say was compelling and evidentiary, it would converge with all the knowledge we have already.

And it would be useful.

Is a Hivemind Becoming A Necessity?

One of the less important points in my post entitled Intelligent Design and The Legend of the Lone Scientist is that scientific research these days involves thinking about things in such a broad manner that it takes more than one head to get headaround on any given project. While there have been a number of recent research projects that have been done by one man, they're projects that are done at the one-man scale, and most of the ones I can think of are in zoology or taxonomy. Anything deeper and you're talking teams.

But teams are by definition wasteful. There's an upper bound to how much input the core thought of a team can be distributed among its members, and how useful adding additional people to the team can be. Ultimately, you end up with a circumstance in which more people make for less meaningful work; they become a drag on the system as their ideas require more winnowing to reach the really good ones.

We have effectively tapped out the ideas within reach of a single mind; we are now researching the ideas that are within reach of a team of human beings. We have added tools to improve filtration, winnowing, and so forth: wikis, fora, email, and so forth allow teams to improve their responsiveness and capabilities, but there's only so much that these extensions to hands, eyes, and voices can do.

We're eventually going to face problems that require so much thought that either the machines will do it and we'll just try to understand what they came up with, or we'll become part of the machine and use its storage and automation all the more efficiently. One of the reasons for the hyberbolic growth curve in knowledge has been the growth of knowledge management, from oral histories to written words to indexed libraries to digital collections, wikis, and search engines. There is a limit, however, to even what a team can accomplish with these tools, limits imposed by the borders of flesh. Either we will hit those limits and stop, or we will penetrate those borders and become hive.