Learn a language in 2016, Britons are urged

The British Council has urged people to learn a new language in 2016. Fair enough, it’s a good idea in itself, and such promotion is part of what the BC does. But is it really a good idea for most people? What do they gain from it?

As pointed out in the article, it can make holidays more fun, enabling you to interact with the world around you rather than simply observe it. The advantages of this range from simply asking where the bathroom is or buying a ticket at the railway station, to the less practical but far more interesting ability to read the local newspapers and hear what people are talking about. Understanding what is going on around you and learning what matters to people are a far better way of getting to know a place than just reading the guide book and staring at churches.

A language is a route into a culture, the literature is has produced, the way it is currently moving, how it thinks and behaves, its moral values and personal assumptions. All of this can be quite fascinating and instructive.

A language is an unusual addition to a CV in England, and so can be attractive to an employer. Attractiveness to employers is a very good thing indeed.

There has long been a kind of understanding among English people that any foreigner worth talking to already speaks English. This is true up to a point, but not much of a point. English is the lingua franca of business, culture, politics, communications, and most things that matter to people around the world, but there are a lot of things going on in other languages that we miss, and might not want to miss.

Learning languages is, then, in my opinion, an excellent thing. I make my living helping people to do it, after all. But there is another side to the question.

Learning a language talks a very long time. Several months of immersion, or years of classroom study, to acquire basic competence, and basic competence is rarely enough for anything more than a tourist. As I frequently have to point out, half a language is no use to anyone, so unless you can achieve the right level of competence you are unfortunately wasting your time.

In Spain, professionals and aspiring professionals know that they must have a high level of communicative competence in English, and they work hard to achieve it, and their parents spend a lot of money to help them achieve it. The Spanish education system only aims at providing a B1 level, which is not an independent user level, and is no use to an employer. It might just do for a traveller. In any case, it usually fails to provide even that, which is great for my business, but not so great for the average Spanish student, who can’t afford private tuition over a period of years, or may not realize until it’s too late that what he’s been promised by his high school is not enough.

For a Spanish teenager with ambition, or for their parents, the effort and the investment are certainly worth making. For a young English person, possibly not, unless you have a very specific professional goal in mind, such as diplomacy.

So do listen to the British Council and learn a language this year. You really will be opening up all the possibilities that they offer, but be aware of the time and effort, and money, it will involve. Also, once you learn one language, and open up a culture you were barely aware of, you won’t want to stop.

But that, I imagine, is where the real fun lies.

Some Curious Facts about the Origin of the Lakes

I have written again and again about the lakes, and I return to them because I keep discovering new things to enjoy and to learn about them. Every summer I find new paths, new hills, new places to enjoy, even new villages which I bring within my range by starting earlier and riding harder.

And then there are the eternal spots on the banks, where the water is at its best, high points on the hills, from which the views are at their most spectacular, the people-less woods filled with croaking frogs, or squirrels jumping from tree to tree, the quiet places that seem to breathe slowly and calmly as though the world did yoga there.

There is always more to discover, and more to learn. And recently I’ve been trying to find out a little more about the geology of the area, because people ask, and I like to have answers.

The whole region is formed from limestone rocks. An awful lot of geology seems to be about calcium, water and carbon dioxide*, in fact:

The geological formations of Ruidera are, chemically speaking, based on the process of precipitation and dissolving of the carbonates (essentialloy calcite). The conditions for precipitating and dissolving of CaCO3 depend on the relatively high level of Calcium Ca2+ and (H2CO3) ions, or of the carbonate (HCO3-) respectively in the water. The dissolution of a calcareous sediment or of limestone in water with a given level of CO2 can be described by the following reactions:
 

·        Ca2+ + HCO3-  --> CaCO3 + H+.                

·        H2O + CO2 --> H2CO3  y CaCO3 + H2CO3 --> Ca2+ + 2HCO3- 

The chemical process of dissolution or precipitation of CaCO3 depends, among other things, on the following factors:    

·       The carbon dioxide (CO2) content. 

·       The pH of the water: A low pH value favours the dissolving of  CaCO3, and vice versa.  

·       Temperature: The dissolution of  CaCO3 in pure water decreases with an increase of temperature. 

It turns out- I finally got round to looking up the history of the area- that the current lakes are only about 10,000 years old. Our ancestors knew only the river, and earlier there were similar formations at higher levels, the remains of which can still be seen rising above the banks in some places. The Cave of Montesinos, which Cervantes riffed on brilliantly in the Quijote, and the Grieta del Toro, were once part of that system, but are now 100m above it.

The most curious thing, it seems to me, is that, while the banks of the lakes are being eroded away by the water**, they are also being created by it. The karstic formations which form the banks and the divisions between the lakes in much of the system are deposited directly by precipitation of the calcium compounds from the water, which is very rich in them, presumably from having come down from the mountains to the east which are made of them. So while the gentle flow is widening and deepening its own channels and basins, it is also building them up around it. Which will win, over time, will, I imagine, depend on the rate of flow and the exact concentrations of minerals and carbonates in the water. History suggests erosion will win.

*My previous experience of geology, derived from walking in the hills with a friend at University who was studying the subject, suggested it was mostly about drinking beer and whacking things with a hammer before laughing maniacally and jotting strange figures on maps. I now realize there is more to it than that.

**Although they are described as lakes, they are part of the river system, and there is a continuous, though usually very gentle, flow throughout the system, enough to coause erosion over time. And karstic rocks are very soft.

Reading the American Election

I haz had ice-cream

The blog Neuroself, written by Peter Freed, who is, I think, a psychiatrist as well as a psychotherapist, is always interesting for anyone who is fascinated by the human mind. He has live-blogged the US Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates, and very interesting it’s been. He has been looking at the body language to try to learn about the state of mind of the candidates and, as or more importantly still, to try to predict how the audience will react to the paralinguistic communication. Most of what was said wasn’t especially interesting or memorable in itself, but the behaviour of the candidates, the impression their bodies left, will be remembered and may influence voting. (I didn’t watch any of the debates, I’m quoting my sources.)

I am not American, do not live there, do not expect whoever wins to invade Britain or Spain, or to solve the world’s economic problems- the rest of us will do that, eventually- so it is for me only of sporting interest who wins and who loses. Neither of them impresses me. They both look like politicians to me. Different types of politician, very different, but politicians nonetheless.

I don’t know Peter Freed’s politics, if he has any. He appears to be doing a clinical analysis with no partisan intent. In italics are his comments, all from the final debate between Obama and Romney on the 22^nd inst.

It’s common wisdom in psychotherapy and policing alike that the willingness of someone to talk depends on the autonomic nervous system status of the questioner.

I wish he had clarified in what sense the correlation goes, and how it works. Also, why it was relevant here.

3. Mouth moistness: blood (and plasma) moves to muscles during high sympathetic tone. It moves to the internal organs and mucus membranes in parasympathetic tone. Mouth dryness is therefore a sign of sympathetic tone – whoever’s mouth is dryer is losing.

I could have done with more explanation of that as well, but there is enough to know what is happening when one or other changes tone in that way. What he doesn’t quite say, but I assume to be true, is that in contests like this, each combatant is aware of how the other is feeling. They both know who’s winning and who’s losing.

4. Sentence complexity: sentence complexity is governed by the prefrontal cortex, which orders, sequences, and prioritizes ideas. PFC is turned off during stress – the neurons literally have cortisol receptors that depolarize them during stress. This forces the organism back on tried and true evolutionary strategies. Sentence complexity is therefore a marker of parasympathetic tone.

This is absolutely fascinating. It is simply a physiological explanation of the fact that it is harder to think when under stress. But it gives you something quantifiable to watch for.

And do they look at their opponent first or second? In primate fights monkeys don’t look at other monkeys unless they want aid.

Humans, of course, do the same. In confrontation, they look only at the opponent if they are confident of beating him. If they look around, they aren’t happy.

Obama has the forced, memorized facial expressions of a natural beta.

'Obama is a beta.' If I were a journalist, that would be my headline. But I am not interested in creating truth, rather in finding it (today, at least). I don’t wish to put words in Peter Freed’s mouth. He has made a technical interpretation of an observation of a particular gesture at a specific moment, nothing more. But I find it easy to take it as a general truth about Obama. He is a beta male, one of those who benefit by their ability to serve the leaders. They may become leaders themselves, but unless they can win, or inherit, alpha status, they are only surrogates, allowed to front for the real leader, by his gracious permission.

Many political leaders are mere figureheads, bureaucrats, with no real ability to lead. Obama is not Gordon Brown, or that Belgian chap with the glasses, but he isn’t an alpha male. Romney, perhaps.

Romney is raising his eyebrows frequently as though teaching in a caring way a young mentee. This is the behavior of a benevolent elder. Obama does not raise eyebrows as though teaching – but rather when surprised by his own ideas. This is the behavior of a talented student. In split screen, Romney seems to be higher status.

Hmmm. He knows his primatology. I wonder if Obama does.

In the split screen look at Obama’s flat forehead as he gazes at Romney. This means that cranial nerve 7 is not animating the face with nonverbal dominance signals. This studied eye contact, not automatic. I still say he’s feeling submissiveness signals from his limbic system, hypothalamus, feeding off Romney’s confidence, despite cognitively rejecting Romney’s legitimacy.

More fascinating insight into the physiology of primate confrontation and social hierarchy. This was, undoubtedly, a brutal, bloody battle. Both are fighting for something which probably means more to them than their lives, at least at that moment, and they have to convince a huge, unpredictable audience that they should live and their opponent die. The stress of these occasions must be enormous. It is only the preparation of the candidates, who have been doing this all their lives, that stopped them from screaming at each other like guests on Jerry Springer.

Jurando Bandera

There was a ceremony in the square last Sunday, a kind of 'Jura de Bandera' for civilians. I had never heard of such a thing before. They seemed to be mostly young people, and they made a weekend of it, as they were out in evening dress on Friday.

It turns out not to be such a new idea, though I don't know how old it is. The ceremony I am familiar with was carried out at the end of miltary service, and consisted of the soon-to-ex-soldiers parading around the barracks square, filing past and touching the national flag, listening to the colonel, the captain, the sergeant and some local politician droning on interminably about duty and country, and swearing to be eternally available to the nation in time of need before going off to get drunk and trying to forget the whole ghastly business.

In any case I assume it's for the young. But it looked just like the military ceremony it imitates, and there were soldiers there, a military band, and groups marching in formation with rifles and machine guns. One of them had a saw, rather than a gun, in a holster on his back. Why, I wonder? In fact I have just seen there was a whole group with tools- axes and picks- as well as the saw. From an engineering regiment, perhaps.

Military service was finally abolished in Spain about 12 years ago, so the patriotic youth no longer get the chance to swear allegiance to the flag while dressing up and having their photo taken for the local newspaper. The girls never did, of course, nor did those who were not suited or who found a way to slide out of it. I haven't found much on the origins of the civilian version, but I understand it is quite old. WHat surprises me it that there should be any demand at all for such a thing. But there is, and the human tapestry just got richer.

What Ape Means Again

I wrote a few months ago about the horrible mess that was the Ape page at Wikipedia. To sum up, it had been taken over by a group of people so terrified of appearing to leave a crack open to creationist interpretation that they refused to recognise the easily verifiable fact that ‘ape’ is used by most people in a way that excludes humans.

If you ask ‘Is Richard Dawkins an ape’*, you introduce a context in which most people, but by no means all, would say yes, but the fact remains that in general use it does not include Homo sapiens. The real point is that it isn’t a technical term, much less a taxonomic one.

It looks as though the neurotic editors at WP have finally been persuaded to relax and think intelligently about the problem. I won’t go over the points I made at the time- anyone who wants to can follow the link- but to refuse to explain what the article is actually about, and to insist hysterically that it is only allowed to mean what you want it to mean, is at best to render the article worthless (people go there seeking information, after all, and if you refuse to give it to them you might as well not bother writing it), and at worst it is umbilical subduction unworthy of anyone who calls himself a scientist.

No one at all involved in trying to make some sense of that mess was disputing the taxonomy of Homo sapiens**. The whole debate was about the meaning of the word ‘ape’ in English. Dictionaries, we were told, are not a valid source for the meanings of words. Hmm. The writings of experts in the field of palaeoanthropolgy, we were told, are not valid evidence of how experts in the field use the term. Hmm. Curiouser and curiouser.

I checked a considerable number of papers written by said experts, and I found that my memory was not faulty. Most of them use ape in different ways, depending on the context of the discussion. They are quite relaxed about switching between ‘humans and other apes’ and ‘non-human apes’, ‘apes, including humans’, and other formulae, in which the word ‘ape’ is to be interpreted in different ways, sometimes within the same paragraph. Only when rigorous clarity is required do they explicitly state what they mean by ape in a particular case or, more usually, they will switch to taxonomic terms to avoid ambiguity.

So even among those who work in the fields of biology, primatology, palaeoanthropology etc, usage is free and relaxed, and this fact is easily shown to be true.  Among the general public ‘ape’ is most commonly used in a sense exclusive of humans, and this is also easily shown to be true. But try arguing that with a band of true believers who are determined that no crack will be left open by which the infidel may enter. I didn’t try to argue, I’m not stupid, but a lot of people did, and had to retire- or were banned- confused and amazed by the closed minds of those who were claiming to represent scientific truth,

John Hawks, whose blog I follow assiduously, both for his own articles and the resources and links to other papers that he provides, went even further the other day. He declared that he doesn’t think of ‘ape’, or even ‘monkey’, as including humans at all. And Palaeofreak (in Spanish), who was, as I recall, one of those who was reckless enough to try to make the same points I was making, on the WP discussion page itself, and got banned for his pains, also comments on the same subject, leading to an immensely long comment thread which is quite interesting at times although it falls into some of the same errors as the original WP thread. It's further complicated by the fact that they are actually discussing the Spanish word 'simio', which is much broader in meaning than the English 'ape', as though it meant 'ape'. Strange, but true.

*I don’t have a Dawkins fixation, it’s just that he was used as the example in the article.

**There is actually a great deal of doubt about the taxonomy of Homo sapiens, but the general relationships between extant anthropoids are clear.

On the Drinking of Meths

If this blog has failed to notice Christmas, it's because the blogger has been rather busy noticing it in person. The suckling pig was excellent, the beer suitably cold, the presents perfectly chosen and the company very agreeable. The weather has been cold and sunny, making it possible to run and ride enough to make room for the piglet, and to avoid the preparation of it. In short, Christmas as it should be. I hope readers can all say the same.

And now, in the interests o fbalance, a post about the observation of human misery.

The highest expression of human desperation is to me the drinking of meths. When exposed in London to all kinds of human life, including all kinds of human suffering, the lowest of the low, those so far lost to any possibility of a return to humanity and happiness that they could not remember being human or conceive of becoming so once again (that's how I imagined it) were the meths drinkers.

I saw them regularly in Euston Square. I wouldn't even call it misery. My impression, rightly or wrongly, was that they were beyond any experience of emotional suffering. It was a world I could observe but not imagine, as it was so far from my understanding.

The image of figures that had once been people, sipping purple fluid from glass tubes or some makeshift container, a barely discernible vapour rising from the surface, is fixed in my mind, so firmly that it is almost certainly not real. But they were there, on the grass under the trees when it was warm, on the benches when it was cold or wet. And not only in Euston Square, though that is where I remember them.

To drink meths, I imagine, indicates a resignation from life more complete than any other act, even suicide. Taking one’s own life requires an act of will, and the recognition that one could continue to live, even that one’s life has some value. The meths drinkers have nothing, and they know they have nothing. They eat at times, a few crumbs abandoned by the birds, just a reflex when the discomfort is too great. Most will not live long enough to need to eat. Their existence consists of the only pleasure that remains to them, the consumption of industrial spirit, which they know will quickly drive them mad and damage their organs beyond repair, will destroy what is left of their humanity, will reduce their human relations to being with people like them and attempting to articulate abuse at each other. They have renounced their humanity, because they believe it has renounced them. They are the most hopeless group of creatures have ever come across. I don’t believe any of them could ever have been returned to anything resembling a form of normal life.

They belonged to another world. In fact, they created another world within ours, surrounded themselves with an aura of remote horror, and allowed us to surrender that space to them. People will sit next to tramps and filthy, bloodied drunks on benches, if there’s nowhere else.They won't sit with the drinkers of meths. No one will join their world. They exist on another plain, that the rest of us do not want to be part of. We are happy to leave it to others to experience.

Does Literature Exist? Part 1

Is there such a thing as literature, a thing distinct from the writing and telling of stories? Is it a degree of interest, of quality, of complexity, or the role that a story has, which converts it into literature? Is it simply the fact that someone is moved to study it in a way that was not originally intended, that makes it literature? Is there a thing which we can call literature and whose analysis is worth turning into an object of intellectual study? And paying people to do it? And taking seriously what they say?

If we look at the origins of story-telling...

Story-telling is common to all human societies. All human beings, everywhere in the world, even the most primitive, un-contacted hunter-gatherers, live in a conceptual world entirely of their own making. Our social behaviour is not instinctive, like that of monkeys, but has been created by us, and by generations of our forebears. We make it collectively, through stories, and we understand it and transmit it through stories. Stories are used by all societies to explain their origins and their structure, to justify their beliefs and their hierarchies, their moral codes and manners, to entertain and to reinforce the authority of the teller, to control the thoughts and acts of the listener, to strengthen their sense of their place in the world, and to reduce their fear of their weakness and mortality. In all societies, there are authorised story-tellers, who must be listened to, and the unauthorised, who are seen as liars.

These things are done in different ways in different societies and within different sub-groups of larger or more complex societies, but the reasons, the motivations are the same. The right to tell stories is an important one. It is the right to create truths about the society itself.

In this sense literature is just another word for story, or perhaps for a culture of stories, and has no useful meaning of its own.

Sex and Repression...

I've written before about Bronislav Malinowski, an anthropologist of the first half of the 20th C who did important research in Papua New Guineau and Australia in particular. He often called himself a sociologist, since in those days it was a field that used observation and analysis and was motivated by a search for truth. Today it has degenerated into an attempt to justify its own prejudices, and serious scientists avoid the term. Anthropology is a field that is in danger of going the same way, but in his day both words referred to the authentic pursuit of knowledge.

I spoke last time about ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific’, a description of life among the Trobriand Islanders, and particularly of the remarkable Kula system of ceremonial trading.

In ‘Sex and Repression in Savage Society’ he criticises the then relatively new discipline of psycho-analysis, on a number of grounds, but he starts by pointing out that Freud based his work mainly on observations of upper-middle classes families from Vienna, and was almost completely ignorant of other kinds of family and social structure, even within Europe, let alone the great variation that exists around the world, from the most primitive tribes to the wealthiest western nations, and that, if he had learnt about them, he would have reached very different conclusions.

Malinowski also challenges the founding myth of Freudian psycho-analysis, the Oedipal desire to replace the patriarch, by showing clearly, first that it could not have been a real event which created this supposed aspect of human culture, and secondly that the relations between one generation and the next are played out in far too many different ways, and were historically quite unlike the situations Freud studied, for there to be any such common cultural element in the human psyche.

I say 'shows' because he does. He doesn’t express doubt, take issue, shout, torture the terms until they scream, or throw dogmatic nonsense about; he simply states what he has observes and explains why Freud’s theories, the very basis of his psycho-analysis, are so deficient as to be worthless.

I can’t link to it, or even copy and paste, for technical reasons related to my rural idyll, but the books are at Project Gutenberg and are worth reading. Sex and Repression is quite short and readable, and much of the demolition is in the first pages.

On Darwin

Having just re-read (I had sort of flicked through them both before, years ago) Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, I have a much clearer idea of what he was actually saying. There is a tendency, even among experts, to conflate ‘Darwinism’ with the theory of evolution in general, and even with the whole field of genetics. This is useful shorthand, but it can hide the differences in a way that becomes important in a subject which is often discussed more from the perspective of religion and politics than from that of science. So let’s look at what Darwin actually did.

A Disclaimer: I remind readers once more that I am not a geneticist or evolutionary biologist, any more than I am a linguistician, historian, palaeoanthropologist, indologist or any of the other things I like to chat about so breezily here. I was once a mathematician, but that was a long time ago. I state the facts as far as I know them, and quote from people who seem to know what they’re talking about the rest of the time.

Anyhow, Darwin didn’t invent the theory of evolution. Plenty of people had proposed such a theory before him. What he did that was revolutionary, and the reason his name is so closely associated with the concept, was to collate thousands of detailed and precise observations on form and behaviour of life of all kinds from all over the world, including skeletal structure, internal organs, body covering, colour, predatory, defensive and sexual behaviour, dimorphism, and history. Much of this information was his own, gathered in the course of long and difficult voyages by sea to just about everywhere- he was in Australia, Tierra del Fuego, the Pacific Islands, the Phillipines and the Galapagos, as well as many more places closer to home- and where the data are second hand he is careful to establish the competence of his informant and the extent to which the information can be trusted.

His inescapable conclusion from analysing all of these data was that all life forms change with time, that many have once been very different from how we see them now, that some have derived from an earlier common form, and that this occurs in nature because of pressure of two kinds- forms better adapted to the specific circumstances they live in tend to live longer and leave more offspring, and forms better suited to defeating rival males and attracting females tend also to leave more offspring.

That organisms can change over the generations was already well known, from experiments on short-lived insects which can be observed through hundreds of generations over a period of years, and from breeding of domesticated animals, detailed records of which exist going back hundreds or even thousands of years, but that the same thing happened in nature, without the intervention of man, was the subject of considerable doubt. Darwin effectively dispelled that doubt. And by applying the same observations to primates, he showed the very high probability that man shared a common ancestor with the extant apes, and these with the primates in general.

However, although he described clearly the behavioural and environmental pressures which bring about change in organisms, what he did not do was identify the biological mechanism by which this process occurs. He had no idea what a gene was, as they were not discovered until many decades later. Nor did he postulate anything remotely like them. He speaks of passing on individual characteristics from parent to offspring, but the nearest he comes to conceiving of genes is when he speaks of ‘gemmules’, which are poorly defined and are in any case a very long way from being genes. The theory of gemmules is not his, and when he mentions them he doesn’t sound very happy about the idea. It’s just that he had nothing else.

He also had very limited information about man. With the exception of the Neanderthals, no early hominid remains had been clearly identified at that time. All he had to go on was morphology. Nevertheless, in placing the origin of modern man in Africa he was almost certainly right.

He was wrong about certain things. I’m sure there were errors, minor ones, in some of the observations. It would be extraordinary if there were not. But his main error is perhaps the residual Lamarckism. He often refers to the inheritance of acquired characteristics, along with chance variations at birth. He had no reason at that time to imagine that only variations brought about in a particular way could be transmitted to offspring, again because he had no conception of the mechanisms involved.

The real genius of Darwin was not his foresight, nor his conceptual brilliance, but his ability to gather and analyse data on such an enormous scale, and with such attention to detail.