September 15, 2016 Thursday

Please scroll down below to read the bedtime story

On human apes by the storytelling chimpanzee

My view of human apes

Let me be clear at the onset of my view. I am not proud of my species which calls itself Homo sapiens.

You just need to look our sorry history of violence, warring and massacres over power, resources and religion.

I think, for the most part, the human ape thinks, acts and reproduces as do his great ape cousins (they mate, have family, have culture etc. as shown by studies of Jane Goodall, Desmond Morris and many more)

Our evolution of higher faculties

Yet, for an ape, we have come a long way forward. The journey has been slow and arduous.

The first ape like humans probably arose (quiet literally) on their two feet some 5 to 7 million years ago (that is 50,000 to 70,000 centuries ago).

The great apes as a family go back 15 million years.

Somewhere down the line we developed imagination, curiosity, the ability to consider “What if?”

These qualities of imagination, curiosity and abstract thinking are vital components of storytelling so that when developed, a mere mention or even the thought of a word can evoke artificial, imaginative or real worlds in the mind.

Other animals too have traits of intelligence

We are not certain if our cousin great apes have it or not, and if they have, to what extent it is developed.

Curiosity is certainly very common in animal kingdom. 

It is a human hubris to think that we are sole possessor of this facility.

Other animals are as curious as us including our cousin apes, cats, rodents to name a few?

Curiosity is an inquisitive thinking that involves observation, exploration, investigation, learning and finally changes in behavior.

Curiosity has survival and reproductive value which is essential for success of DNA transmission, the raison d’etre for any kind of life based on carbon and DNA.

Curiosity involves several neurological aspects such as motivation and reward, attention, memory and learning.

Our crippling shortcomings

The other thing that we humans need to be aware is that we are in the end apes and very flawed apes at that.

No doubt we have higher intelligence and contemplate abstract thinking.

Yet, our evolutionary mind uses principles that had served us well when we were hunter-gatherers in the African savannas but now do us grave injustice.

They are termed cognitive fallacies.

The list of these heuristics (mental shortcuts), biases, is devastatingly huge and long.

They become a fertile ground for the breeding of irrationality in human apes.

Worse, irrationality is highly contagious.

Classification of cognitive biases

These cognitive biases are divided into three categories:

1. Decision making and belief biases:

    There are more than 80 of these.

    One good example is the bandwagon effect or the herd mentality. This explains how easily a temple, or church or a statue gets tagged as “lucky”.

2. Social biases

    There are at least 25 of these.

    The classic one being the just-world hypothesis also known as the moral luck. It is a belief that good stuff happens to virtuous and ill happens to the diabolical, deservingly of course.

    Another good example is the Barnum effect (closely related to subjective validation) wherein an individual considers a general and a vague statement highly specific to his or her own personality.

   Example: Disciplined and self controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.

   Entire chicanery of astrology, palmistry and astrology are based on this one bias.  

3. Memory errors and biases

    There are at least 60 of them

 The peak-end rule is a suitable example. It is the assessment of any experience by an individual largely on how they felt it at its peak and at its termination.
 This has a special significance for medical procedures and surgeries.

Limitations of curiosity, logic and abstract thinking

You will realize that just being curious and having the ability of abstract thinking is not enough.

These two generally end up in giving rise to either philosophy or worse, religion.

These traits alone would very likely have us end up in creating a world view that is largely hopeful, helpful and endearing but factually incorrect.

This in fact did happen for most of the time in human history.

Added with these two, if one begins to apply logic and proofs, the brain is capable of generating powerful mathematics. 

Yet, all these devises and tools namely curiosity, imagination, logic and mathematical proofs have proved themselves deficient in curbing our remarkable ability to fool ourselves.

Experimental Science is the best tool ever devised to understand reality

The only tool and the best method that we humans came up with understanding reality is experimentation, particularly well controlled, repeatable verifiable experiments that can minimize the experimenter’s bias.

In medicine, the gold standard of drug testing for its efficacy and safety is the placebo controlled double blind clinical trial.

It is not an easy task to conduct an original experiment.

Education’s Biggest Failure

Our school education’s profoundest failure is exactly this.

It does not inculcate either questioning or original thinking or more specifically critical thinking.

We fail to teach our students the idea of how to propose a hypothesis and go about testing it.

Our schooling fails to provide to even the best outgoing student the notion of conceiving an original experiment to prove or disprove an idea.   

Only few people are good experimentalist, meaning they take care to isolate their study from events that can undue influence its outcome.

The most important aspect about the experimental findings is that it should be repeatable, verifiable by other people who repeat them under similar conditions in other places.

It is the one biggest universal failure of education system all over the world.

Education is currently seen as a way to attain professional career and job security which is not bad per se.

But something very important has been lost.

Do we encourage a student to write an original paper?

Do we encourage a student to ever lay out a plan for considering an original experiment?

In fact, in our education, do we even mention that so many unknown things remain to discover.

May be it is so that there is now so much to know that it overwhelms a young mind.

At least most young minds.

The reason for the failure of education

What prevents us from imparting the type of education we often know about, speak about but fail to carry out?

You will be surprised at the answer.

It is overpopulation; too many of us human apes.

If someone were to ask me what is the key problem today, I would say that we are simply too many of us today.

India or South Asia is an extreme example but almost all the nations face this hideous calamity.

Are nation states able to provide clean air and water to their citizens?

Are they able to provide a basic housing to their citizens?

Are they able to provide even basic level healthcare to their citizens?

What about jobs?

Many argue between capitalism, socialism, mixed system and so on and so forth.

I think they keep missing the key issue.

Denial is probably the right word.

Such a populace simply cannot be given the fundamental rights as enshrined in the constitutions of most nation states. 

Most would not sit to listen to this and may get up and leave in protest.

Stating the problem

But let me make my case.

Just feeding, giving clean water and jobs is not the way we should be looking at the citizens of the world; though even that itself is a herculean task and even the most developed nation states are grappling with the problem.

I want to go beyond this.

Why has education, the process of acquiring knowledge become such a painful task for most young people?

Let us see this step by step.

For starters, every child right from a day she is born needs a decent health care and nutrition.

The idea is to get very good schooling.

Good schools are few and the race starts right here.

Only very few percentage of humans born will get good schooling.

Second step, after the school, it is the college.

The idea of scoring top percentages is to get into the best colleges.

We all know that in general in any country, including the United States, only a tiny percentage of colleges or universities offer a life enhancing and transforming program.

Good education needs great teachers.

Great and dedicated teachers are a rarity as a society can afford to pay and reward only a handful of good teachers, professors.

Following that, we have the problem of jobs or a professional career.

Here again one encounters a cut throat competition and only a few will land up with a satisfactory job.

As it is, most of us humans are average and really not very productive for a society.

In fact, most of us can be or turn out to be a burden for the society.

A planet that has fewer people, can be better educated, can be given better lives, and can be given better policing /security and a speedier and effective justice.

Crime itself will come down.

The lesser we are, the more we will care for each other.

Moreover, more productive and educated people are more likely to contribute funds not only for the resources needed to run a society but to higher pursuits of sciences and mathematics.

This idea is extremely repulsive and disgusting to nearly everybody as it goes against our biological drive, our most primal instinct.

But what needs to be done must be done.

Otherwise we will be doomed to mediocrity and worse, nightmarish suffering that is visible all around us.

Someone asked me the one biggest mistake we have made.

I think it is this.

We have allowed runaway breeding of ourselves.

If we wish all schools to impart scientific teaching and inculcate scientific methods, we need to have fewer of them very good ones with better facilities with fewer pupils to care after.

Just being a few would increase love and tolerance for each other and further our cooperation. 

Going one step further

In this context, another important pops up.

We are aware that resources are scare, may it be for education, for health, for research, for fuels, for energy.

We, if are intelligent and rational enough, must plan our death once we realize that our contribution to the society is nil.

After that, we become a parasite and a hindrance for the younger generation who exist and who are to come.

This is one of the biggest prices we are paying for the success of medicine.

Ageing and geriatric diseases are taking a huge toll on the national economies, especially of the developed world where the state bears the expenses of the early to a large extent.

Finally when the time comes, one needs to embrace death by making death peaceful, planned and curbing our greedy desire to go on and on.

Story Telling Chimpanzee

September 15, 2016

Bedtime Story


On Ralph Alpher



Ralph Alpher is a relatively obscure name considering the fact that he was a white American whose thesis dissertation was legendary for the coverage it got from the press and the print media.

Ralph was born in Washington DC in 1921 to Belarusian Jewish immigrants when America was going through post war depression.

Even as he pursued his bachelor's and masters degree at the George Washington University (GWU), he was bright enough to be working on a contract with the US navy.

All through the world war II, he helped the navy in the development of detonators, torpedoes, ship degaussing techniques and ordinance work that remained classified.

Then in 1944, at the age of 23 he joined the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) then located at Silver Spring, Maryland not far from the capital.

APL was set up by the US navy in 1942 to conduct research for developing their offensive and defensive war technology.

Ralph met Gamow at the GWU somewhere at the end of 1930s.

Gamow had defected from Soviet Union on the pretext of attending the 1933 7^th Solvay Conference in Brussels.

By 1934 he had joined the faculty of the GWU as a professor.

Both Gamow and Alpher had the idea that they had a tenable theory on the origin of elements.

Both needed each other as Gamow was a kind of celebrity famous for giving talks all over the country and outside.

Alpher on the other hand had the mathematical knowledge that Gamow needed to give a solid bearing to his theory.

Alpher dissertation was on the synthesis of the elements immediately after the Big Bang.

It is formulated on the idea of neutron capture in the immensely hot early universe.
(At the Planck time 10^-43 secs after the singularity,
the universe was 10^-33 cm across and,
the temperature was 10³² Kelvin).

Barely a second after the event, the temperature drops to 10¹⁰ Kelvin (universe had inflated to 10^19.5 cm).

This is now known as the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN).

We shall discuss the details of the dissertation in a non mathematical language in the night to follow.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.

                                                The Physical Review     April 1, 1948