Facts, Paradigms, Narratives, History and Hotels

After re-looking at Neanderthal/ Denisovan/ modern human evolution and what people have to say, I see clearly that on the one hand you have a set of gradually unfolding baseline facts and then you have the narratives constructed around those facts. In this particular case, the evidence consists of DNA sequences, fossils, skull measurements, dispersal patterns, language roots etc and a lot of this evidence is older, in the past, not directly observable in the present even though it is still physical evidence.

Not all physical evidence and experience complies with a test of being able to observe it in the moment. In fact, much of our knowledge is inferred in a Sherlock Holmes kind of way: tree rings, ice cores, C14 dating, spectrometry, glacial topography etc and this makes it really fun as guys figure out, for example, how the Little Ice Age drove the Greenland Vikings to extinction or what elements are burning in far away stars.

For a long while there was a strong competition in human evolution theory between multi-regional and out of Africa. The advent of DNA dating and DNA studies has been a game changer, changing the story for both groups but for the most part, validating the out of Africa model. This validation comes as a percent of the truth, if 97% of some human genomes can be shown to result from an out of Africa model, then this theory is 97% correct. 97% is pretty good.

It is the evidence itself that has changed the game, as ultimately the theories have to reflect the most parsiminous use of the facts, i.e. the most practical interpretation, see Occam’s Razor, the assumption that the simplest explanation is better than more convoluted explanations, i.e. shortest path. The stories that take the evidence, the facts and construct the most plausible use of them, end up being the top theories. These things then have to be demonstrated, to have any widespread validity. This then separates the wheat from the chafe, as the theories that remain become more a matter of belief, not anything demonstrated at higher percentages.

To be fair here, the field of speculation needs to remain wide open; deduction has to have a place in the development of new theories. Therefore, people have to believe things not yet demonstrated. Here there is some cross-over in the scientific method with straight up faith. Faith however, never requires any actual proof.

And sometimes politics over rides any parsimony and vocal, emotional groups swing the story away from the facts for socio-political-religious-ideological motivations.

Anything could be demonstrated but until it is, it is just talk. Some, like Carl Sagan say “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. Sure, but the field for this is totally wide open. And the field of discovery should be wide open but at some point theories have to be able to be put to a test. Sometimes tests are not available in one’s lifetime, like microscopes, telescopes, chemistry/ DNA etc, the physical environment has to be able to be probed in  a way that will show certain theories correct or not. If the physical evidence conforms to the theory, then things can be said to be true. Maybe in the future instruments and technology will be developed like in Star Trek to show that string theory is true, that multiple alternate realities exist simultaneously side by side. Maybe we could go into the future or the past through a wormhole? Maybe not. Things at the maybe level stay at the maybe level until proven otherwise. That’s why they call it science fiction.

Along the way what ends up happening is a jockeying for position, to construct the most plausible, highly explanatory model. Some people get closer than others. Some are driven more by a priori assumptions; other stay focused more on what the facts say themselves. A range of stories start to emerge and then people give their allegiance to these stories and then start to shoe-horn evidence into the story versus letting the evidence itself drive the story.

This demonstrates how scientific truth unfolds, how all knowledge unfolds, as according to Thomas S. Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There is a dominant paradigm and people seek to work within that at all costs, even if they ultimately are wrong, in geology: catastrophism vs. plate tectonics. Once a new paradigm comes, a new story, a new narrative gains precedence, then people start shoveling everything into that.

This is how human understanding has unfolded ever since written history. We only know up to the level of the best theories of our time. And in all likelihood, new theories in the future will put the puzzle together differently. When you have creatures like us with big brains and curious minds, we’ll keep pecking away at the status quo, like KDB 007, seeking the truth, curious about this or that or what might be, what alternate explanations might pan out. This is how people developed the bow and arrow etc, how all of technology has come to where it is today. The upshot, people do the best they can with what they’ve got at the time they are alive. The only way action can be taken is from the basis of the current platform. The unknown comes into focus out of the known, that is the only way we can operate and base our thoughts and actions. The known is the cumulative truth of theories that work.

Does this mean therefore that since understanding and knowledge are developmental, evolving, that what exists in the present is false and relative? There can be no truth value because what people have thought to be true has been shown not to be? That there are no facts because facts have been shown to be malleable and subject to politics? That this is really about story telling and the notion of physically demonstrated facts is just another myth? That science is equivalent to religion?

We’d have to look at the role of obfuscation here and see that when competing narratives exist, the ones with less explanatory value resort to obfuscation to win the argument of dominant story. The rational mind, reason, is used to obfuscate, the difference in strength of argument is that obfuscation does not start with any solid ground; it is mostly a negative attack peppered with evidence that has no strong, inductive foundation.

I think the operating principle is to do the best you can with what you’ve got. That is what has to be used as a platform for moving onto further iterations of truth in the future. It’s evolving. If one takes the position that all is relative and therefore there is no truth or fact and therefore any explanation is as good as any other, that takes away any baseline evidence that people might use. Hypotheses have to be based on something that then is able to be shown might work, otherwise it is just talk. Thus, the multiregional guys can be shown to be coming out of particular traditions, like phrenology, the idea that skull shape indicates level of evolution and intelligence, and the whole current human evolution milieu abuts a conflict between traditional paleontology based on fossils and their measurements and the newer DNA dating. Stuff is shaking out in the wash right now.

Synthesizers and dot connectors then calibrate DNA dates with fossil dates and arrive at a more comprehensive explanation. DNA and fossil evidence calibrates the split of the human and chimp line at @ 5 million years ago. Homo erectus is at @ 2.5 million, Neanderthal @ 700,000, anatomically modern at @ 200,000, modern races at 20,000 or less etc etc

What it ends up being is a continuous refining of the story we have about who we are, why we’re here etc. The people after this story talk, fight, jockey and over time the most comprehensive view shakes out in the wash. This is what evolution is, what all science is, the cumulative best view given the results of hordes of interested people since the beginning working over the narrative and refining it. When it ends up as a house of mirrors, some fart smeller, I mean smart fella, cooks up a new paradigm: Aristotle, Newton, Einstein etc etc

I’ve seen the human evolution story unfold over my life and folks are way into it, all kinds of theories here or there. Every new jawbone somebody wants to be a new species. I see the propensities and how the shapes shift, how the dust settles and how ultimately it is just really fun and satisfying to stay tuned. The hotel thing is similar. I’m a dot connector. I see how people are jockeying for control of the story. The challenge of the hotel thing is to determine what are baseline facts? What is bluster and a priori assumptions? What is the basis for which municipal decisions will be made? This gets to the heart of ideology and how we see the world we live in. It’s more difficult when the contested evidence is mostly inside people’s heads vs. a skull or some DNA, i.e. that the evidence is socially constructed to begin with vs. a stand-alone objective fact.  

What is similar is the struggle among paradigms, the unavoidable socio-cultural aspect that goes along side by side with any search of objective understanding of our world. What ends up happening here is the social version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, it is impossible to arrive at any “fact” about human society while at the same time observing that society from the level of society itself, i.e. fish don’t know they are in a fish tank, can’t see outside it.

For the 2013 Sonoma hotel issue what strikes me is the propensity to have the discussion fall into predictable ideological places. The issue is a proxy for all other disputes between liberals and conservatives and therefore people end up saying predictable and stereotyped things. It all gets to be on automatic pilot and hence people’s general frustration with politics; it’s a black hole of unreflective, unending conflict. The bozos rule, any voice of reason is lost in a hurricane of hot air. The hotel measure is a reasonable proposition, but look at the swirling tides seeking to tear apart the simple notion of managed growth:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity. Yeats

So, from here in the shelter of my private ivory tower, if I can tell the other side is not examining what is coming out of their mouths, then I’m not either. We are all assuming our own correctness and no one gives an inch to see if there are any core principles worth looking at from the other guys. This is like so many divorce scenarios, each party is expert at blaming the other, at all costs in all cases and these partial narratives are plausible enough. But the bottom line: the process is not about any search for the truth, it is about winning or losing a battle. Everybody feels they are good and have good motivations. How could anyone really tell what is right here?

I noticed this in academia, at SRJC, particularly in history, the story always gets down to how the rich and elites are corrupt and exploit the little guys, over and over again. There is even Marxist anthropology. It’s all very plausible (like divorce dynamics) but also highly partial. And so I began to wonder, why aren’t any conservative principles given much if any weight? Surely tradition, commerce, religion etc have a solid contribution to make to humanity.

The most reasonable thing I’ve heard is through Al Gore, that conservatism has been a viable strategy for human survival and survival in general. You need some to stay the same as they provide a stable baseline to return to if the dynamic adventures of liberals and modernizers don’t work out. Stasis and dynamism, punctuated equilibrium etc, these are primary forces in how species evolve. No wonder the perfect metaphor for large, unchanging stasis is “a dinosaur”. Yet they persisted for millions of years, each Tyrannosaurus like to be it’s own Goldman and Sachs on two legs.

So, an environment stays stable for X amount of time and certain stasis(s) develop and set in. Trying to change that stasis without some major punctuation event is too much like planning ahead, that would be too smart, when there is no need to be, nothing changes when all is good enough. When the sewage starts to come in the front door, then change is at a premium, then there’s a punctuation, a period of dynamism and then a new stasis sets in. Evolution itself just like Kuhns’ and Gould’s theories or vice verse. 

I do hope that humanity would be smart enough to plan ahead, to not overfish, to not pollute, cause unecessary extinctions, kill over small differences etcetera but the proof is that as a whole, we are going straight to hell and cannot pull together as a race to make smart decisions in advance of serious negative punctuations of our own making.

As far as history, conservatives and Darius Anderson (hotel developer) go, there have always been big time movers who played the system to become top dogs, creating structures and monuments both social and physical that remain as evidence of humanity’s achievements. These kind of guys built the pyramids, the Alhambra etc. They had tremendous power. And like everyone else, they seemed to tip either  to the good or the bad, to an Augustus or a Caligula, a Carnegie or a Trump, or somewhere in between.

If we look at how civilization has worked, it’s all premised on a pyramidal hierarchy of people, the 1% is built in, from the very start. There will always be more primary producers than specialized functionaries. Comfort for the rest might conform to a Jared Diamond type view where good times are not even necessarily a result of any leader’s vision but of climatic conditions and available resources. Communism in its various iterations has been an ideal to return to pre-agricultural egalitarianism but within an inherently stratified context, too many contradictions there to work on a large scale.

Bla bla bla You could see society as an ecology, that there are always less top predators than there are prey, that Social Darwinism is in some sense actually true, the true structure of human society: lions and zebras, nature, all unfolding by the waterhole, all the ideals and philosophies fine and dandy but the true master of understanding was Machiavelli.

It’s all about power and control. Any social entity that gains control will inevitably become corrupt, static and come to be in need of replacement, no matter how noble the original ideals, if change was ever made by ideals alone anyway. Entities that evolve a certain stasis are inevitably outstripped by environmental/ socio-economic changes and thus in Sonoma we have gone from the Indians coming over Beringia, wiping out the Pleistocene mega fauna, surviving drought and spotty resources as small-time bands, enslavement in the Rancho Period of Spanish/ Mexican rule, the Gold Rush, the coming of the Industrial Revolution Protestant ethic, the Resort Era, Prohibition, the Depression, the tweener doldrums of agricultural past and suburban Bay Area haven, transportation technology going from foot to horse to train to bridges to cars and trucks, the Post WW2 economic boom, ascension of the US as top dog in the world, the rise of the wine industry and elite tourism, the Real Estate Bubble etc. In all these cases there were groups of people who got the short end of the stick. Some wanted stasis, some dynamism. As the channels of history got changed, to what extent could anybody really control it?  

The question for me: what is the most plausible narrative? Looking over the big sweep of human history and from my understanding of scientific theories, I think I see a pretty plausible pattern, but what I see conforms more to a cynical, non-idealistic view, a dispassionate analysis devoid of teleological yearnings for some grand resolution of all conflict. I like to think I’m zeroing in on the structural aspects of human behavior, the capacities that make possible all the static we socially construct and then live in as if it was objective reality. People are governed by their level of comfort, by access to resources, when times are good, no boats need be rocked, when times are bad, the boat will rock itself.

In this sense, the narratives surrounding the hotel initiative are really not super important. Sonoma has already tipped to being an elite tourist town. One more hotel won’t make or break the new order. What will a successful initiative to limit large hotels do? Maybe it will make the developers double down and really go wild when they finally get the chance. This is all about what people want, preferences, not a set of hard, objective facts that a group of invested people like anthropologists and the story of human evolution come to live with as time goes by.

Western society's growth for growth's sake is  a narrative and as I see it, practically unsustainable but it will go on as long as in the short term people can be supplied with resources. At some point the difference between narrative and determinative conditions will become obvious and unavoidable. The most plausible narrative to me is to plan ahead and make do with less material stuff but in this I fear I'm way in the minority.