the mathematical theory of the struggle for life

"If sharks were people,” the small daughter of his landlady asked Mr. K., would they then be nicer to the small fish?” – Brecht, Wenn die Haifische Menschen wären

Continuing LI’s notes on the predator/prey relationship – we discovered, through one of Machery’s essays, that a famous essay by Volterra had caught Raymond Queneau’s eye, and was mentioned in his 1943 essay, The place of mathematics in the classification of the sciences, which begins like this: “In its relations with mathemtics, every science passes through the following four phases (four as of now, perhaps five tomorrow)” – which elegantly combines the academic and the Groucho Marxian. Queneau briefly surveys the sciences, claims that physics has gone through three of his stages, already, and then writes: “This is the ideal stage for the scientists of the late nineteenth century. The other sciences reamin far behind in this regard. Only very limited subjects are treated by this method: in biology, the theory of the fight for life; in sociology, econometrics. These two examples furthermore show that there is no incompatibility between the analytic method and the life sciences. The delay is in part explained by the fact that such an application apparently offers no problem to be resolved from the mathematical point of view, and so no potential for discovery; mathematicians thus soon lost interest in these theoretical fields, which offered no grist for their mill. if the theory of the fight for life was developed by Volterra, it’s because it ultimately led to integro-differential equations worthy of interest.”

The explanation from mathematical banality might not quite have been the whole story, or at least LI can’t see it. But it is a nice story, nonetheless. The essay arose out of a project Queneau was working on in July 1942 (terrible months to encounter the struggle for life): Brouillon projet d’une atteinte a une science absolue de l’histoire, (sketch for a project for an attempt at an absolute science of history) of which Voltarra’s Lecons sur la theorie methematique de la lutte pour la vie was going to be one of the main sources, and Vico, Bruck, William Flinders Petrie, Spengler, “authors who believed they could discern rhythms or cycles in history” would be the other.” In the Model History in which Queneau jotted down these reminiscences, he also wrote: “if there had never been any wars or revolutions, there would never have been any history; there wouldn’t be any matter for history; history would be without an object… happy people have no history. History is the science of the misery of mankind.”

Most people have heard of the Volterra-Lotka equations, which show how predator-prey relations should oscillate around an ideal equilibrium over time, all other conditions being equal, and how that oscillation takes on four states. Queneau’s idea that, perhaps, these predator-prey states are strung out over human history is startling.

The Plan 9 from outer space Party

Yesterday, I figured it out.

I’ve been wondering if the GOP was serious. They are actually going to nominate this guy?


For a number of years, LI has used the term zombie to denote those who support George Bush. It seemed like a pertinent insult – after all, these were people who have confused a war with a tailgate party. Their sense of unearned entitlement is only equaled by their contempt for liberty. Their lumbering walk through many a comments thread gave meaning to the term, 'self-administered lobotomy'.

But I had thought that the Republican party honchos had a certain amount of control. They would feed the doggies what they damned well pleased.

But – in a final coup de theâtre of massive incompetence – Bush’s toxicity has apparently affected the party itself. John McCain is such a lemon that no amount of media fluffing will get beyond the fact that he seems to be doing standup on the Ed Sullivan show of yore. He is very very of yore.

Which is why I have decided that this the GOP’s version of Plan 9 from outer space. Compare McCain’s fifties-ish patter (and his impulse to surround himself with the doddering and the demented) to this clip of Ed Wood. Surely, McCain is stealing his routine from the amazing Kreskin, seen at the end of this clip. While I believe the zombie’s will swallow nearly everything, I refuse to believe they are going to rally so that we can elect the amazing Kreskin to that tv spectacular, White House idol.

Perhaps, not being a tv watcher, I am presuming too much on my own eye. After all, via you tube clips of the Chelsea Handler show, I've learned that Dancing with the Stars is a hit. That's, well, quite a shock - Americans, I always thought, were way too sophisticated to watch stuff that the yahoo Euro tv networks put on - so maybe this is a bad sign. I just don't see McCain, however, going anywhere but down.

social animal 2

“Submitting to the influence of the considerable scientific progress of the second half of the nineteenth century – Bertillon’s anthropometric measurements, the discovery of fingerprints for the utilization of the police by Galton – the detective novel substituted proof by indexes for proof by witness.”

- Dominique Viart, The imaginary of signs at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Viart’s essay on signs is an attempt, in a brief space, to come to terms with Eco’s claim that the sign existed, basically, as a secondary or minor vehicle for other major conceptual themes (of language, of reason, of logic) up until the beginning of the 20th century. Viart references the success of a new kind of detective novel that traced signs into the past – back to the primary scene of some crime.

There is, of course, no better testimony to the moment in which the eyewitness becomes subordinate to the trace than M, Franz Lang’s film. Of course, the trace and the eyewitness, in correspondence to the law that all opposites shall dance the Moonwalk to a joyous sound played on an ocarina in the black heart of a dead deconstructionist, mutually exclude each other by mutually presupposing each other, and teach the Mosaic law as it came down to Wittgenstein – can your right hand steal from your left hand? (when the Mosaic law was transmitted through Wittgenstein, it came out as a series of questions. Which poses the question, is it possible to create a code of law in which every rule is a question?) But to return to M – you will remember, LI readers, that the eyewitness to Peter Lorre’s child murderer is a blind man. What he witnesses is a conjunction of sounds – the sound of a voice he heard, the sound of a little girl’s voice. The viewer witnesses a ball and a balloon. The blind man tells a fake blind beggar about the man, and the fake blind beggar marks Hans Beckert (Lorre) with the fatal M. Surely more than one Lacanian, orgasming uncontrollably, has had to be ushered sternly out of the movie house whilst watching the famous scene when Lorre turns and sees the M chalked on the back of his coat in the mirror.



Which take us back to Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on Freud, Morelli and Holmes. After cross cutting quotes from Morelli to Sherlock Holmes to Freud, Ginzburg makes his first point like this:

“We have outlined an analogy between the methods of Morelli, of Holmes, and of Freud. We have mentioned the connection between Morelli and Holmes, and that between Morelli and Freud. The peculiar similarities between the activities of Holmes and Freud have been discussed by Steven Marcus (1976:x-xi). 15 Freud himself, by the way, told a patient (the "Wolf-Man") how interested he was in Sherlock Holmes’s stories. When, however, in the spring of 1913, a colleague of his (T. Reik) suggested a parallel between the psychoanalytic method and Holmes's method, Freud replied expressing his admiration of Morelli's technique as a connoisseur. In all three cases tiny details provide the key to a deeper reality, inaccessible by other methods. These details may be symptoms, for Freud, or clues, for Holmes, or features of paintings, for Morelli (Gardiner 1971:146; Reik 1949:24).

How do we explain the triple analogy? There is an obvious answer. Freud was a doctor; Morelli had a degree in medicine; Conan Doyle had been a doctor before settling down to write. In all three cases we can invoke the model of medical semiotics or symptomatology-the discipline which permits diagnosis, though the disease cannot be directly observed, on the basis of superficial symptoms or signs, often irrelevant to the eye of the layman, or even of Dr. Watson. (Incidentally, the Holmes-Watson pair, the sharp-eyed detective and the obtuse doctor, represents the splitting of a single character, one of the youthful Conan Doyle's professors, famous for his diagnostic ability.) But it is not simply a matter of biographical coincidences. Toward the end of the nineteenth century (more precisely, the decade 1870-1880), this “semiotic” approach, a paradigm or model based on the interpretation of clues, had become increasingly influential in the field of human sciences. Its roots, however, were far more ancient.

Remember we started with footprints. Our signs go back to myths, and our myths go back to footprints – as Ginzburg remarks, there is a Chinese legend that the first letters were copied from the track of a wading bird through the sand.

“Or abandoning the realms of myth and hypothesis for that of documented history, there are undoubtedly striking analogies between the hunters' model we have been developing and the model implicit in the texts of Mesopotamian divination, which date from at least 3,000 years B.C. (Boterro 1974). Both require minute examination of the real, however trivial, to uncover the traces of events which the observer cannot directly experience. Droppings, footprints, hairs, feathers, in the one case; innards, drops of oil in water, stars, involuntary movements in the other. It is true that the second group, unlike the first, could be extended indefinitely, since the Mesopotamian diviners read signs of future in more or less anything. But to our eyes another difference matters more: the fact that divination pointed toward the future, while the hunter’s deciphering pointed towards he actual past—albeit occurring a few instants before. Yet in terms of understanding, the approach in each case was much alike; the intellectual stages—analysis, comparison, classification—identical, at least in theory. But only, of course, in theory: the social contexts were quite different. In particular, It has been observed that the invention of writing must have had a great effect on Mesopotamian divination (Bottero 1974:154ff.). Mesopotamian gods had, besides other kingly prerogatives, the power of communication with their subjects through written messages-on stars, human bodies, everywhere -which the diviners had the task of deciphering. (This was an idea which in turn over thousands of years would flow into the image of "the book of nature") And the identification and divination with the deciphering of characters divinely inscribed was reinforced in real life by the pictographic character of this early writing, "cuneiform"; it too, like divination, conveyed one thing through another.”

I seem to be going off track, here, from our original theme – the groove in this record – of the social animal, but this is because one thinks of the hunter and the prey as being, somehow, alone. And that is because we live far from the real hunts and chases. But the notion of the social animal begins not just with language, but with something to tell and some way to tell it. It begins with organization. This is why Pliny’s story of the elephants passing down the herd line an impress of a human footprint should give us a certain shock – much like the shock Peter Lorre gets from seeing himself in the mirror. It is the shock of being prey, not predator. The shock pulls us back.

I’ll try to get to this again, soon.

The Bob-fest

LI has been so pressed this week that our ambition – to advance a little along the line of the theme of the social animal – has been totally fucked. Fortunately, we’ve spent the last two days attending lectures at the Bob-fest – the conference commemorating Robert Solomon. The academic custom of reading papers at conferences, as anybody knows who has actually gone to a conference and had papers read to him or her, is not exactly the most exciting activity in the world. It ranks somewhere around TV coverage of the Tour de France – long stretches of time go by without anything seeming to happen, and then everybody gets briefly excited, and then ennui stretches out again. This conference was a bit more personal, a bit more eccentric, and instead of the standard way of asking questions, those with questions and comments would go down, at the end of the panel, to the panel table and sit around and speak. I did not hear all sessions, but of the four I heard, the highlight was surely the paper read by my friend, Janet McCracken, entitled " Grief and the Mnemonics of Places: A Thank You Note", which ranged over the funeral games in the Iliad to the place of the dog at Zoroastrian funeral rituals to connect a number of seemingly disparate topics – the dead as companions, the need to mark the earth for the dead, the relation of the human and the animal (and, especially, that subclass of domesticated animal, pets) from the perspective of death. I’m merely flying over the paper giving its grosser features, but McCracken’s paper was just the kind of Shandian essay I wrote about last week, re Ian Hacking’s paper on cyborgs.

Afterwards, I was in a group around McCracken, talking about animals, and of course animal intelligence, and we all sort of marveled that animal intelligence is always measured by seeing how close animals can come to human intelligence. That is surely wrong. An ant or dog or whale born with a human brain would quickly die. Intelligence, if it has any meaning at all, is connected to animal existence, and so one would want to produce a number of intelligence models fitting different animals. As a counterpart on tests of, say, the human intelligence achievable by parrots, it would be interesting to see how close humans can approach to parrot intelligence. Of course, it is pretty difficult to probe into parrot intelligence, but surely we can devise models for parrot seeing, hearing and flight such that they could be fed into a virtual environment, in which we could insert a human subject.

So, LI was not wholly negligent of the social animal theme we so abruptly aborted.

Later, thinking of animals, humans and intelligence, it struck me that one of the reasons I have problems with the machine model of humans and animals is that, in my experience, those who are best with machines – engineers, for instance – are really piss poor at human relationships. My old man, for instance, became pretty well known in the HVAC field. He had a certain diagnostic genius for what was wrong with, say, a 13,500 BTU roof unit that had been underperforming. He could track a ductwork problem down to its malign root. And yet, he couldn’t read the face of a man who was obviously trying to con him out of ten thousand dollars – a situation that my old man faced, alas, all too frequently, as he seemed to be on some list of gulls passed around in the confidence game. As for women, well, forget it. This is, of course, an absurdly limited sample – but I have met a lot of engineers in my life, and a lot of people who make their money repairing machines. It seems to me that generally an inverse relationship held between psychological insightfulness and mechanical ability. Although I wouldn’t say this is a hard and fast rule – my brothers, for instance, are both engineer/repair men, and both of them are fairly interested in what makes human beings tick (which already distinguishes them from most IBM engineers I’ve met). One has adopted an attitude of therapeutic nihilism – since it is impossible to rely on rule based behavior, here, it is foolish to judge – while the other is more inclined to a sympathy theory, and is very good at empathizing and advising – as I well know.

Obviously, this is touch and go evidence, a set of ordinary superstitions. But it does perhaps point to a nuance in the relationship between biology and positivism in the 19th century – given a certain notion of social engineering that went with utilitarianism and was carried into the scientific ideology of the late nineteenth century, biology was often the science from whence sprang the dissenters. Scientific psychology, in order to gain credibility, often veered closer to engineering than to biology. And this made a lot of difference.

The 3 trillion dollar recession and the price of tea

LI finds it clarifying to refer to baseline numbers when thinking about big events, like wars and recessions. For this recession, we hold to the number, 3 trillion dollars – which reflects the growth rate for consumption over the growth of GDP over the last ten years, according to Michael Mandel at Business Week. And that growth, in turn, reflected the magic economy of assets inflation in a world in which inflation was supposedly dead. The magic was in simply not registering the extent of the assets inflation – it was put in a black box, technically diminished so that the information it gave to the Fed could be ignored. When you fix the information that you are supposed to respond to, you destroy the integrity of the machine. It is that simple.

And now, of course, we have asset deflation and inflation on other fronts. This story captured LI’s attention. As, apparently, hardcore members of the bottom 20% on the American wealth scale – oscillating between being in the straight poverty class and just above it – inflation is our biggest worry. At the same time, there has been a sort of cone of silence over the real rate of inflation that has affected our class. It is as if the poor live in some sub-Argentina in this country, where the prices are always going up dramatically, while the rest of the country lived somewhere else.

“Over all, Americans are spending about 13 percent more on food and energy now than a year ago. The figures, as are all the figures shown in the charts accompanying this article, are based on three-month moving averages of seasonally adjusted figures, and compare this year with last year.
The biggest cause of that increase is gasoline, of course. Americans are spending 22 percent more now at gasoline stations than they did a year ago. Food costs are up nearly 6 percent, a smaller amount but still a drain on budgets.”

This is pretty huge. If, as we think, the 3 trillion dollar gap is going to be closed, or at least the start on that closure is what we are going to see, then the recession is going to be deeper than anybody is forecasting. And if inflation on ordinary goods continues at this rate, compounded by the inflation on lifestyle goods like education and healthcare, the American middle class is going to be joining our Argentina soon. It is no fun, alas.

News from our great Democratic Ally

Pleas for condemned Saudi 'witch'
“In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.”

Let the winds strip the calendar back to glorious January, when our beloved leader, President Backbone, made the democracy tour in the Middle East. Among the chroniclers of a moral moment that rivaled Jesus preaching on the mountain and Buddha’s revelation under a sweet gum tree, nobody’s tongue worked as eagerly on the presidential behind as Michael Abramowitz, the Washington Post chronicler of all the fun and goofy things our, well, greatest president ever did on his fabulous trip. The highlight of the tour was, of course, our consultation with our great democratic ally in the fight against the intolerable totalitarianism of Iran (pause for booing…):

“Bush is devoting two days of his Middle East trip to Saudi Arabia, much of it to private meetings with the king, who is hosting the president at his guest palace here and at the farm near Riyadh where Abdullah raises Arabian stallions. That amounts to an unusual commitment of diplomatic time, reflecting both the large role Saudi Arabia plays in U.S. economic and foreign policy and a desire to strengthen a relationship that has frayed badly over the past seven years.

Some diplomats and experts with close ties to the administration say meeting with Abdullah has been the main purpose of the president's trip to the region.

One senior administration official traveling with the president said this week that Bush regards the octogenarian Abdullah as "really a remarkable figure," citing the king's role in starting reforms such as municipal elections and in regional diplomacy, and that the president intends to reaffirm their "close personal relationship."
White House counselor Edward W. Gillespie described the one-on-one time with the king, who is known to dislike diplomacy conducted over the phone, as a "very important" part of the visit to Saudi Arabia.

Despite the outward display of affection on the tarmac, the relationship has also been tense and uneasy for much of Bush's tenure, according to former senior officials and experts on Saudi Arabia.

"The president has a personal bond with the king," said Dan Bartlett, Bush's former counselor. "This visit will go a long way to keeping relations on the right track. The personal diplomacy that the president likes to use will resonate with the way the kingdom does foreign policy, because it is so dominated by the king himself."

The Post is a tout paper for the bizarre Weltanschauung of D.C. elite, a world view and language which makes gangsta rap, by contrast, seem reality based. Unfortunately, these revelers in spilling blood they will never see cause blood en masse to be spilt and bodies to pile up on the invisible margins, where we can dicker about them later (300,000 Iraqis murdered or 600,000? yours to guess). In this imperial farce, there are two pillars – Israel is not to be criticized, and Saudi Arabia is not to be mentioned. Thus, if Iran hangs a man for homosexuality, there will be four WAPO op ed pieces about it and one editorial, notching it up as just one more casus belli. If Saudi Arabia burns a witch, the story won’t happen in the Post. The Saudis are our allies, after all, in the long, long, long, long war to democratize everything and destroy terra-ism.

'Undefined' crime
The US-based group is asking the Saudi ruler to void Ms Falih's conviction and to bring charges against the religious police who detained her and are alleged to have mistreated her.
Its letter to King Abdullah says the woman was tried for the undefined crime of witchcraft and that her conviction was on the basis of the written statements of witnesses who said that she had bewitched them.
Human Rights Watch says the trial failed to meet the safeguards in the Saudi justice system.
The confession which the defendant was forced to fingerprint was not even read out to her, the group says.
Also Ms Falih and her representatives were not allowed to attend most of the hearings.
When an appeal court decided she should not be executed, the law courts imposed the death sentence again, arguing that it would be in the public interest.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 15--One of the more surreal scenes of the eight-day presidential trip to the Middle East may have taken place this evening at the lavish Al Janadriyah Ranch, the so-called "horse farm" where Saudi King Abdullah entertains his most favored guests and raises Arabian stallions.
When the president arrived for dinner, a little before 7 p.m. local time, he was wearing a black full-length robe with bluish-silver trim and seeming eminently pleased, as Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times described it in his pool report last night. Later, when he sat down with the king and took off the robe, it became clear that it was lined with fur.
When his aides showed up, they too were wearing similar robes. The contingent included White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Counselor Ed Gillespie, Press Secretary Dana Perino and--most curiously perhaps--National Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams, better known in Washington as possibly Israel's staunchest supporter inside the White House.

When asked by Newsweek reporter Michael Hirsh, Elliott of Arabia said he was allowed to keep the robe, suggesting these were gifts for all.

Perhaps Bush is right that the time is ripe for Middle East peace."

Happy Valentines Day, LI readers

LI is shackled by a tight schedule today. And it is Valentine’s day! During our busy day yesterday (a meeting with a potential editing client, and in the evening, an invite to see a film about an election campaign in Japan, followed by music at… what was the name of that 6th street club?) we heard many disparaging things being said about Valentine’s day. Of course, LI, blistering in our sore and sour solitude, could cast an evil eye on Valentine’s day. But fuck that – those who bitch at the mighty power of Venus notoriously suffer dire fates.

Unfortunately, the American media, or the NYT, has decided on this day to treat us to a love story among the powerful – thus, the report on that über-rebarbative couple, Nicholas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni. At least it is slowly penetrating the Americanosphere that this romance “made in France” is pissing off the French royally. For some reason, the air of the can-can still lingers over “France” in the American media, as though it were a country dedicated to producing naughty postcards of women caught bending over and showing their knickers, a country where the sounds of Maurice Chevalier singing thank heaven for leeeeetle girls can always be heard winding through the streets of Gay Paree. Often though, the very cluelessness of myth rides us to an apposite conjunction of images – and so it is here. The can-can/Chevalier theme point us to the slight, persistent stench of corruption that always surrounds Sarkozy’s behavior – it is very reminiscent of the utterly corrupt behavior of French pols in the 1890s, a bribed lot of wankers who spent their graft on chorus girls (in whose beds they were notoriously prone to be found dead) when not passing laws against anarchist bomb attacks or making anti-semitic speeches. Colette was the poet of this scene, all right.

Ah, Venus, that these products of the new gilded age would be swept away in a paroxysm of your divine disgust!

Happy Valentine’s day, folks.

PS - Maybe I need to perk this post up with some positive Valentine's day vibes. So here they are.