Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, epilogue

This is the epilogue to a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie Jurassic World. The whole series of posts in order is the following:

1. An extended look at the role played by clothing in depicting personal transformation in the movie.
2. An expansion of our analysis, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.
3. An examination of survival, evolution, rationality, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.
4. An epilogue defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.

I realize now that I did not explain at all why I picked the title for this series of posts on Jurassic World. It is of course meant to call to mind Edmund Burke’s classic critique of the French Revolution, which has the much more elaborate title Reflections on the Revolution in France, And on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris.

Burke is sometimes caricatured as being an arch-conservative and stick-in-the-mud, but it is important to realize that in the context of his society, he was actually rather on the progressive wing. Burke was a supporter of the American freedom struggle, a champion of the rights of the Irish (he was of Irish descent himself), and vehemently opposed to the East India Company’s depredations in India. And yet, he was fundamentally opposed to the French Revolution, because he saw in it the release of forces deeper and more dangerous than those unleashed by any other revolution: rationalism, utterly convinced of its own correctness and of the total mistakenness of all other positions, willing to overthrow everything that came before it in the name of a new world order founded on pure reason unencumbered by primitive inherited idiocies.

What happens on Isla Nublar is a revolution in that sense: a full overturning of the existing order (a re-volvo) and the institution of a new system based on different principles.

Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, part three

This is the third of a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie Jurassic World. The whole series of posts in order is the following:

1. An extended look at the role played by clothing in depicting personal transformation in the movie.
2. An expansion of our analysis, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.
3. An examination of survival, evolution, rationality, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.
4. An epilogue defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.

In the previous installations of this series, I first wrote about the hugely significant role clothing plays in understanding the transformations of individuals in Jurassic World. I then expanded on the idea of clothing to enclosures in general, which led naturally to relations of power and dominance, which were then contrasted with relations of trust and understanding (familial relations) and with relations of unification for survival (conjugal relations). It is now time to naturally move from conjugal relations to the theme of evolution, which of course underpins the entire Jurassic Park franchise.

Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, part two

This is the second of a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie Jurassic World. The whole series of posts in order is the following:

1. An extended look at the role played by clothing in depicting personal transformation in the movie.
2. An expansion of our analysis, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.
3. An examination of survival, evolution, rationality, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.
4. An epilogue defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.

Last time, we took a very close look at some of the significant ways in which clothing works in Jurassic World. I will avoid diving into such detail this time around, as I have a vast range of topics to cover. (Need I say that this will be massively full of spoilers if you haven’t seen the movie?)

2. Enclosures

I’m thinking of enclosures fairly broadly here as any sort of covering that affords protection from the elements. In this sense, clothing is of course a kind of enclosure protecting human skin: the shedding of clothing is the discarding of a layer of insulation. But there are a number of other such enclosures in the film: the gyroball, for instance, literally encloses the two boys in a protective shell as they travel through the park—

Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar, part one

This is the first of a three-part series of posts, titled “Reflections on the Revolution in Isla Nublar”, interpreting the movie Jurassic World. The whole series of posts in order is the following:

1. An extended look at the role played by clothing in depicting personal transformation in the movie.
2. An expansion of our analysis, from clothing through enclosures to social relations structured by power, understanding, and survival.
3. An examination of survival, evolution, rationality, and the (non-)distinction between the real and the virtual.
4. An epilogue defending my choice of title, and offering some final thoughts.

I haven’t blogged for a regrettably long time, so I figured I would mark my return to the scene by reflecting on a movie that hasn’t done too badly for itself this summer: Jurassic World. Given my obsession with dinosaurs (par for the course for anyone who saw Spielberg’s original miracle), this experience was particularly fun for me.

I suppose it needs no spoiler warning to say that Jurassic World is about (yet another) dinosaur going crazy on a theme-park island, with lots of humans dying gruesomely while the protagonists make it through with all body parts intact and with an increase in their wisdom. But what struck me even while watching the movie was that it very artfully sets up a number of structural polarities, only to dissolve some of them—but not all!—into an even more complex jumble. Postmodern neopaleontology? Bring it on!

What I will do now is look at a few motifs that are repeated throughout the film, creating striking parallels and generating resonances.

Resilience and complex systems

Another article in SEED Magazine, by Carl Folk, on the ecological term resilience applied to other complex systems like the global economy. The author defines resilience as "the capacity of a system—be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy—to deal with change and continue to develop," in other words, to respond to perturbations and even catastrophes in innovative ways.

So what does this mean? For one,

"systems are understood to be in constant flux, highly unpredictable, and self-organizing with feedbacks across multiple scales in time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmark features of complexity."

This ability of a complex system to adapt to variations does not necessarily mean that such adaptation is smooth or predictable. Indeed, the non-linearity of feedback loops means that complex systems can behave in what seems erratic (from the perspective of a linear model). This includes wild oscillations between dramatically different positions, such as a lake fluctuating between hyperoxygenation and algal bloom, or for that matter the Earth going from polar regions covered in dense vegetation (as during the Mesozoic era) to iced-over tropical regions (Snowball Earth).

The risks of interconnectedness

This is a tremendously interesting article in SEED Magazine, titled "On Early Warning Signs", by George Sugihara that draws on the author's background in biology to depict some of the limitations of the modern tendency to use linear systems (plus perturbations) to model fundamentally non-linear systems. Among other things, non-linear systems show high levels of interconnectedness that tends to fluctuate (technically heteroskedasticity), which makes predicting their behavior using linear models very difficult.

The author further notes:

"Leading up to the crash, there was a marked increase in homogeneity among institutions, both in their revenue-generating strategies as well as in their risk-management strategies, thus increasing correlation among funds and across countries—an early warning. Indeed, with regard to risk management through diversification, it is ironic that diversification became so extreme that diversification was lost: Everyone owning part of everything creates complete homogeneity. Reducing risk by increasing portfolio diversity makes sense for each individual institution, but if everyone does it, it creates huge group or system-wide risk. Mathematically, such homogeneity leads to increased connectivity in the financial system, and the number and strength of these linkages grow as homogeneity increases. Thus, the consequence of increasing connectivity is to destabilize a generic complex system: Each institution becomes more affected by the balance sheets of neighboring institutions than by its own."

An interesting analogy drawn from nature, this time from plants and pollinators:

"[T]he same hierarchical structure that promotes biodiversity in plant-animal cooperative networks may increase the risk of large-scale systemic failures: Mutualism facilitates greater biodiversity, but it also creates the potential for many contingent species to go extinct, particularly if large, well-connected generalists—certain large banks, for instance—disappear. It becomes an argument for the “too big to fail” policy, in which the size of the company’s Facebook network matters more than the size of its balance sheet."

Very interesting stuff.

Incredibly beautiful

I don't have words to express how beautiful I find this. So calm, serene, soothing, uplifting. And the music too!

autumn by the lake from Bart van der Gaag on Vimeo.

I was half-expecting Elrond to come riding out of the mist. Take a few minutes out of your day and watch this, full screen, headphones on, cellphones off. Truly stunning.

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I found the words sung in Stelka Sabotinova's haunting voice here:

Is the fishing industry humane?

There's a lot of noise these days about the unsustainable nature of the meat-and-dairy industry, particularly in the United States. Such criticisms target the vast amount of resources that the meat-and-dairy industry consumes, the utterly shocking conditions under which most animals are housed, and the unhealthily high level of antibiotics and other chemicals being pumped into these creatures to maximize their yield. There are clearly serious issues at stake here, although there are no straightforward non-ideological answers.

But what happens under water? What sorts of practices are employed by the fishing industry? How sustainable are our massive yields? Peter Singer's terrifying article called "If Fish Could Scream" argues that our current practices are morally indefensible and ecologically utterly unsustainable.

Natural versus artificial, part trois (with maps!)

An awesome piece from Wired, this time with some pretty stellar maps, that further call into question the divide between the natural and the artificial. Titled "How Mankind Remade Nature," the article is a summary of two ecologists' proposal that we're really entering a new era, that the Holocene age has passed and that we're now in the Anthropocene age.

To illustrate their point, they have produced a series of maps that are similar to the biome maps you can find in geography textbooks (that classify the earth into rainforest, grassland, desert, and whatnot)—except that they have classified the earth based on actual land use patterns. Two such maps, one for 1700 and the other for 2000, show how much we have transformed the earth in just three hundred years. South Asia is especially vivid on this map. In 1700, it was covered mostly in semi-natural woodlands, which were certainly being used by humans, but only lightly. By 2000, though, almost all of the region was covered with agricultural land. The ecologists have called these new kinds of land uses "anthromes," because they are anthropological biomes.

Such a profound change in the nature of the vegetation and land use (coupled with the staggering loss of ecological diversity that is natural (no pun intended) when woodland is cut down and converted into monoculture cropland), the authors argue, is just as radical than earlier geological transitional periods.

Natural versus artificial, part deux

This 2003 article in the Atlantic by Charles C. Mann raises the truly fascinating question: is the Amazon rainforest a human artifact?

Mann begins in the grasslands of the province of Beni, Bolivia ("about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat"), where one can find

an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is [archaeologist Clark] Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. [Anthropologist William] Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

Absolutely incredible! And apparently this is by no means an isolated incident in the Americas. A new school of ecologists and archaeologists and anthropologists holds, very controversially of course, that "Indians were here far longer than previously thought, … and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind."

Needless to say, this is utterly at odds with the image of the Native American presented to me in school textbooks. There the impression is created that Native Americans (who are conveniently classified into one bucket, while the incoming Europeans are carefully distinguished on the basis of nationality, at the very least) were some sort of noble savages who lived in complete harmony in an eternal present with pristine nature. This was convenient because, on the one hand, it served to show the evil of the white man destroying this beautiful, naïve, gentle, harmonious culture, and on the other, it served as an implicit justification for the fact that the European strive for progress and perfection would lead to the overwhelming of these people who were frozen in time.

This article showed me just how incredibly simplistic and ridiculously wrong my understanding of the native inhabitants of the Americas was. Just like humans anywhere else, they were smart and sophisticated manipulators of their environments; it's just that they did so in ways so radically different from anything the Europeans had seen before that they naturally assumed that what they saw was wilderness. That, and the fact that European-transmitted diseases often travelled far, far faster than the Europeans themselves, so that even in those cases where Europeans did come into contact with Native Americans, they were likely encountering severely attenuated cultures on the verge of collapse.

The article also fascinatingly points out that this new picture of Native Americans undermines one of the cornerstones of (certain branches of) the environmental movement: that there can be "untouched" nature, and that our goal should be to restore our damaged environment to this state. But what this article suggests is that there never was such a state, and that our efforts to do so are quite artificial indeed. Or, to put it differently, and to reinforce the point I made a few days ago, the line between the natural and the artificial is rather artificial!

Natural versus artificial

This is a truly great article (yes, I occasionally read Esquire for the articles, and no, you may not parse that any way you like!) by Tom Junod on humans and ants. What I love most is the manner in which the author elevates his personal experiences in a house infested by Argentine ants to the level of a cosmic struggle (which, admittedly, it must be for him and his family), and in doing so, casts light upon the unilluminated corners of our musings on society, complexity, and consciousness. In brief, the author points out that "[E.O. Wilson's The Superorganism] proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so."

This kind of emergent complexity means that the ant colony as a whole is infinitely more intelligent than any single ant, or even a small collection of ants. The whole in this case truly is bigger than the sum of its parts, and no mereological reductionism can explain precisely "where" the "intelligence" of the ant colony resides. This is the kind of thing that makes me question naïvely reductionist theories of consciousness even when applied to the human mind.

Douglas Hofstadter's awesome Gödel, Escher, Bach has an excellent interlude called, if I remember correctly, "Ant Fugue." It deals with precisely the same situation, and indeed Hofstadter uses this as a way to argue for his own perspective on complexity and consciousness. But for now, another pretty cool excerpt from Junod:

The worst part about discovering that the ants in your house are actually emissaries of the enormous teeming brain in your backyard — is that it worsens the other worst parts, of which there are many. For example, I have found ants in my underwear. Lots of them, which I didn't find until I put the underwear on. As a person who has had ants in his underwear, however, I have to say that what makes their presence particularly irksome is not the momentary discomfort but rather the knowledge of why they're there. They're not just passing through, you see, on their way to somewhere else. They're not in your underwear by accident. They're nation-building. They're extending the range of their civilization, and they're doing it in your drawers.

Speaking of which, Abstruse Goose has a very insightful point to make on the distinction between "natural" and "artificial".

On climate change

The New York Times has published what I think is an absolutely first-rate article on climate change economics. "Building a Green Economy" by Paul Krugman goes into the details of climate change policies without losing sight of the big picture: it is just as important to understand the differences between cap-and-trade and carbon-tax policies within the US as it is to understand the effects of politics and globalization on attitudes towards climate change action in China and India and Brazil.

The article is structured well, beginning with "Environmental Econ 101", then looking at current doubts cast on climate change science itself in "Climate of Doubt", examining "The Cost of Action", studying globalization and the difficulties of coordinating action in "The China Syndrome", warning of "The Costs of Inaction", looking at different ways in which to adopt climate change-countering policies in "The Ramp versus the Big Bang", and finally examining the all-important "Political Atmosphere" which, sadly, dominates and poisons most public discourse.

Ultimately, Krugman's rationale for why we should pursue economic and social practices that will reduce carbon emissions is something I fully agree with:

As Harvard’s Martin Weitzman has argued in several influential papers, if there is a significant chance of utter catastrophe, that chance — rather than what is most likely to happen — should dominate cost-benefit calculations. And utter catastrophe does look like a realistic possibility, even if it is not the most likely outcome.

Weitzman argues — and I agree — that this risk of catastrophe, rather than the details of cost-benefit calculations, makes the most powerful case for strong climate policy. Current projections of global warming in the absence of action are just too close to the kinds of numbers associated with doomsday scenarios. It would be irresponsible — it’s tempting to say criminally irresponsible — not to step back from what could all too easily turn out to be the edge of a cliff.

I wonder if the desacralization of nature that has taken place over the last three hundred years has had anything to do with our blindness to what may lie ahead. (Seemingly trivial counter-example: the Ganges, the most sacred and the most polluted river in India.) I don't know if it could have prevented what happened, but I suspect a more sacralized view of nature as Nature would have made it easier for us, culturally, to respond to the crisis once we became aware of it.

On whales

I just read this wonderful article in the New York Times' magazine section, provocatively titled "Watching Whales Watch Us". I don't enjoy directly interacting with animals, but otherwise tend to be sympathetic to their plight, and am especially fond of intelligent mammals—bonobos, elephants, dolphins, and whales. One of the highlights of a recent trip to the British Museum of Natural History was seeing their life-sized model of a blue whale in a room full of extinct and surviving (but likely soon-to-be-extinct-or-endangered) terrestrial mammals. It's common knowledge that the blue whale is the largest living creature on earth, but such cold facts do little to convey the gargantuan enormity of its size: the blue whale in the museum is larger than a small herd of African elephants.

The elephant is regarded as a symbol of enormous strength, majesty, and wisdom in Indic culture, and whales would probably have been too had they been well known enough. (If you know more about whales and Indic culture, let me know!) Some species of whales are extraordinarily long-lived (just like elephants), and recent research mentioned in the article suggests that whales are capable of learning and teaching, of identifying and communicating with one another, of using tools, of cooperating in groups to tackle complex problems, and of perpetuating what can only be called culture. This list of achievements is as impressive as anything achieved by our closest simian relatives, and it's quite possible there is much more below the surface (no pun intended).

It is therefore a tragedy of Himalayan proportions that we humans have callously and, yes, inhumanly devastated global whale populations and altered their environments beyond recognition. Oceanic noise pollution is unlikely to be something that's on top of our list of things to be concerned about, but it's in fact a huge problem that is exacerbated every year by the growing number of vessels plying the seas. For creatures such as dolphins and whales whose clans are scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles of deep sea, sonar is an absolutely critical tool for navigation and communication. But oceanic noise pollution plays havoc with sonar-based communication, disrupting their complex social structures and severely impeding the animals' ability to navigate or seek prey. And this devastation wreaked by us is but a by-product of sea-based economic activity that's not even targeted at whales. I'm not going to bring up the unspeakable cruelties of large-scale whaling; I don't have the stomach for it. 

Thank goodness we're finally coming to realize exactly what it is we nearly wiped out from our oceans. It's refreshing to read that cetaceans are finally being understood as socially sophisticated, intelligent, emotional creatures that are as curious about us as we are about them. Let's hope we abandon our well-honed whale slaughtering skills and treat these gentle giants with the sympathy and respect they deserve.

To close, an excerpt from the article about one hominid-cetacean interaction that ended happily:

A female humpback was spotted in December 2005 east of the Farallon Islands, just off the coast of San Francisco. She was entangled in a web of crab-trap lines, hundreds of yards of nylon rope that had become wrapped around her mouth, torso and tail, the weight of the traps causing her to struggle to stay afloat. A rescue team arrived within a few hours and decided that the only way to save her was to dive in and cut her loose.

For an hour they cut at the lines and rope with curved knives, all the while trying to steer clear of a tail they knew could kill them with one swipe. When the whale was finally freed, the divers said, she swam around them for a time in what appeared to be joyous circles. She then came back and visited with each one of them, nudging them all gently, as if in thanks. The divers said it was the most beautiful experience they ever had. As for the diver who cut free the rope that was entangled in the whale’s mouth, her huge eye was following him the entire time, and he said that he will never be the same.