February 22, 2006

ADVENTURES IN IRONY
Science: It’s so...well...Complicated

by DR. WES BROWNING

Here’s your Intermittent Science and Technology News You Can Use Catch-Up Roundup.

Our first item is news that the “Radar Scope” you ordered when you were a pubescent middle school boy will soon be available at the low, low price of $1,000 per unit. To be initially distributed in the spring only to our troops in Iraq, it will detect signs of unwanted enemy breathing on the other side of thick concrete walls. The hand-held devices should be ready for peeking into girls’ locker rooms as early as 2008. In the meantime, expect it to be on your local police department’s Home Security 2006 Christmas Wish List. That’s News You Can Use!

Our remaining items belong to the “Social Science Marches On” category. A study by the Canadian Medical Association has concluded that giving homeless alcoholics up to 16 glasses of wine a day on an hourly basis can improve their health and behavior. In related news, alcoholics everywhere are saying, “We told you so” and “What part of ‘self-medication’ hadn’t you understood?” Here’s a general rule to live by: when desperate people living desperate lives say they need something, they may know more about it than the comfortably ignorant.

Of course the free wine helps in part by relieving the need to waste valuable energy scrounging for wine in other ways. It also helps create a bond between the wine providers and the wine receivers, which makes the wine receivers more accepting of other services.

Not all social bonds are good, however. A sociologist at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee has determined that the cell phone has brought too much social connection to modern life and is now increasingly a factor in domestic strife. Family life is being interrupted by work life; work life is being interrupted by family life. So the social bonding that helps an alcoholic accept help to get off the streets can also break up families, when there’s too much of it, and put moms and dads on the streets. We are complicated animals, aren’t we?

How complicated are we? Scientists are looking into it! Socio-evolutionary-anthropological scientists have been theorizing about the very evolution of the mechanism of social bonding that we all take for granted. How have we humans successfully evolved the means to bond outside of families, to create the friendships and camaraderie that tie us one-to-another and keep us from killing each other all the time — instead of only just some of the time?

The answer is truly complicated. Nature, these researchers say, has endowed some of us with “imagination” that we use to modify our own behavior for the purpose of creating bonds. Examples of this can especially be seen at Star Trek Conventions and among Goths, Raging Grannies, Filkers, and Canasta players. The imaginative people bond by sharing the products of their imaginations and through their enhanced facilities of suggestibility and geeking.

But the genius of social evolution is that every one of its successes creates more opportunity. As imagination evolved to bring some people together, those who lacked that advantage evolved mechanisms to compensate. Hence, the unimaginative have learned to bond together in what researchers refer to as “clumps” defined by shared boredom and the paraphernalia of stupidity — such as alcohol, reality TV, and designer jeans.

Further Questions and Activities:

1. List 10 ways a device that sees through walls could improve lives. Next, list 10 ways the invention of walls has already improved lives. Combine your lists. See them negate each other.

2. Get a kitchen timer. Set it for one hour. Before it goes off, make up six conclusions for future scientific sociological studies to have.

3. Here’s an experiment to try with the whole class. Use your imagination to try to bond with the student on your right. When the student on your left tries to bond with you, report him. When it’s over, who’s in detention? It’s the minorities, isn’t it?