Sunday morning, before chores, 20°

Weasel Wraps Up Possum, Sarge Takes a Tumble

Displaying great courage and devotion to duty, Weasel, the ten year old 'new' dog, trapped a possum on the north porch and kept it there, barking until I went out and shot it for her. As the shot was fired Weasel leapt back into the fray, yanked the possum out of the corner where it had been crouching, snarling in rage at the dog, and carried it out to the yard, where she made certain that the shot had been fatal. The plump possum, a member of a species known for producing large numbers of sneak thieves, had crept onto the porch in the mistaken hope of snatching some dog food.

The primo operatic hero of the farm, Sarge, the gander, now the age equivalent to a 35 year old human, is, as Spring approaches, feeling a very strong need to assert his qualifications for his position as Secretary of Goose Defense, i.e. he is an aggressive nuisance. He is six or seven years old; geese live can 20-40 years, so he is now in his prime. He can, if he is feeling real mean, deliver a peck sufficiently violent to draw blood on the victim when delivered through two layers of clothing.

Thursday morning I was wearing two layers of clothing on my legs: heavy pants and thick long underwear. It wasn't all that cold, 20° or so, but the wind was shrieking out of the north at 30 mph or better. It was downright nasty cold out there in the open area west of the barn, one of those situations where you feel like the only thing between you and the North Pole is a few strands of barbed wire.

While doing normal morning chores I stepped into the pasture with the goats and geese to refill their water pans. Sarge, who usually likes me, mistook the hose for the tail of a monster which was wearing my clothes and sneaking into his pasture. Wagner wrote no music equivalent to the enraged honk of a prime gander protecting his harem (maybe Pink Floyd).

Sarge came charging out of the shed, into the open, neck and wings outstretched, sounding like something from another planet,and, just before he reached me, into the full force of the wind from the north. Before I could move to defend myself the wind caught him, lifted him up, and dropped him solidly down on his back, spinning him around several times in the process.

Three days later he is beginning to regain his normal bluster. He suffered no physical injury, but the damage to his ego was tremendous.

Hopping Goats and Laying Ducks

The baby goats are learning to hop. Hopping is an important skill for young goats; they have to learn to hop before they can cavort. They have names, now. Lucy's doe is Zula and the two bucks are Hop and Flop. Sally's doe is Silly. Zula and Hop are friends and Flop and Silly are friends. In a week this might change, but, for now, Zula and Hop curl up together to nap, and Flop and Silly snuggle up together to nap.

The 17 ducks, at least 12 of whom are females, are starting to lay eggs. I think duck eggs are delicious, so I'm happy. In some urban stores eggs from free ranging ducks will sell for $20 per dozen. I haven't told the ducks that because I don't want them all to move to the city; I need to have them here to eat grasshoppers. So far I have thirteen eggs, not bad for a week. In two or three weeks I will probably be gathering a half dozen or more daily, if I bother to collect them all.

When ducks first start laying they just drop their eggs wherever they happen to be standing when the urge to lay an egg strikes them. I'm picking up eggs in the barn and all over the yard. In a few weeks they will start building nests and using them, and that is when gathering the eggs becomes a bit more of a problem. They tend to hide their nests, and, when they aren't on their nests, they cover them with camouflage.

If I take all the eggs in a nest the female duck will notice that her eggs are missing. If I take all but two eggs she won't notice, probably. That means that when I find a nest I can remove all but two eggs, and those two eggs I must mark, but with marks such that the mother won't notice them. If, for instance, I put a large 'X' on each egg with a magic marker, the mother will notice, decide that the security of her nest has been compromised, and move to another location. A large dot, though, won't be noticed by the mother.

This would seem to indicate that ducks can count to two. Perhaps they can discern the difference between zero, one, and more when applied to eggs. I doubt very much if the ability generalizes beyond counting eggs. Generalization seems to be a characteristic of what we call intelligence, and nobody who raises ducks could find any reason to associate the concepts of intelligence and duck.

A Reader Writes

Perhaps all our attempts to make the autistic children and asperger kids "well" is not what we are doing. We are trying to make them be like us. However, we may just all be looking in the wrong direction! The increasing prevalence of the syndrome and the genetic component may mean that mother nature is trying on a new human species. Perhaps what we think of as an "abberant condition" is the new human. Lord knows the one we've got now sure needs some fine tuning.

Lot's of truthiness in that paragraph. The only problem is that it assumes intelligent design. Evolution isn't planned, and it doesn't try out new things when it 'thinks' things are going bad. Successful genetic combinations are those that replicate the most. That's all. No planning, no trying, no intelligence.

The spirits must be guiding me, because just before I read the above e-mail I was reading, again, William Calvin's six essentials for a Darwin Machine. Calvin has abstracted the process of evolution from biology. His six essentials do not include any requirements for life, intelligence, or any material object to be involved in the process. There must be a pattern, it must be replicated, and there must be a limited environment. The replication cannot be perfect every time, the pattern and its variants must compete for space, and new variants must preferentially occur around the most successful of the current patterns. That is how evolution works. The result is complexity, or, as Calvin puts it, a “shaping up of quality.”

Memeticists think that the noosphere probably fits the six requirements. I suspect that the universe of all existing single lines of computer code form a Darwin Machine. The fact that lines of computer code rely upon programmers and the software publishing industry for their replication is irrelevant. One could look objectively at our information economy and decide that computer programs train programmers to use the lines of code in the program by attracting money for the programmers. Calvin, in The Cerebral Code, examines neo-cortical processes as being a Darwin Machine which creates conscious thought.

The context in which evolution occurs is one thing, and the process of evolution is another. Our immune systems, for instance, change through an evolutionary process. With some caveats the same can be said of interstellar carbon compounds. Biological evolution my be said to be only a theory, but the evolutionary process itself has mathematical certainty.

All this dances around the central question as to whether autism is a disability or an enhanced ability. The answer to that question is to be found in hunter-gatherer societies. Modern, urban humans haven't been at it long enough to make much difference in our genome. Based upon no data, I would guess that some autistic people might make exceptional trackers. Finally, I don't think that very many therapies for the autistic are aimed at 'repairing' them, instead they are aimed at helping them learn coping methods.

As I said above, the spirits are guiding me, because a nice young man I know, who is also autistic according to the experts, came to visit this week. We walked out to see the baby goats and on the way he said, “What is that?” It was a duck egg, one I probably wouldn't have seen for years, even though it was in the open. The egg was a dark gray, an unusual color for eggs of any sort, and it lying on a gray background, but, still, the young man spotted it instantly. At least some people who are called autistic have some awesome abilities to detect things that are out of place. That is why they are sometimes good spotters for forbidden objects at airport luggage x-ray machines.

I am not yet convinced that autism is a single thing. It often seems to be sort of a bucket, a catch-all for what may be several different things. The DSM-III, the book of categories of mental disorders, under the heading 'autism', states, as the first requirement, that “At least eight of the following sixteen items are present, these to include at least two items from A, one from B, and one from C.”

To me, that single sentence says that we have not yet really defined autism. When the DSM has changed to say, “At least four of the following six items are present,” we will have a much better definition. To reach that point, though, we will have to find definitions for some mental 'disorders' that will subtract twelve of the disorders now attributed to autism. Whether or not they are actually disorders is a different matter entirely. DSM-IV, which is in print but I don't have, says, “(I) A total of six (or more) items from (A), (B), and (C), with at least two from (A), and one each from (B) and (C).” We are moving closer to an accurate map, maybe.

[After writing the two above paragraphs, I feel that I should publicly invite the parents of autistic children to contact me and make some input into the discussion. There are two children with whom I interact and who are identified as autistic. Their parents know me. I didn't intend to get into a discussion of autism, but, as things often happen, it seems that I may be headed in that direction. Sharon and Sue, what are the benefits of autism? Write or call.]

Yet More Monkey Business

Dr. M. has been very busy lately being a new wife, housekeeper, Army officer, and veterinarian. Women sure do like to stay busy. There is no way I would take on all that stuff at once, especially not if I was doing it all for the first time. I'm feeling horribly overworked since Paula broke her wrist; she actually expects me to sweep the floor more often than once a month, whether it looks like it needs it or not.

Anyway, Dr. M. wishes to join in on the affair of the baby monkeys and their toys.

I was listening to an NPR interview about the baby monkeys, and the scientist talked about how she got involved in gender based play. Her friend, in a bid to subvert the dominant paradigm, gave her daughter a truck and her son a doll. Her son, predictably, used the doll as a weapon or projectile. But the daughter wrapped the truck up in a blanket and called it "little truckie". The kids sounded pretty young, which just says to me that we learn those behaviors really, really, early.

Dr. M., who thinks we learn those behaviors early, still thinks we learn them from watching the sexist adult males around us. Dr. M. graduated from the same fancy eastern women's college as did my daughter, so she also automatically blames most societal problems on what is learned from sexist adult males. Dear ladies, we 'learn' that stuff at conception; it's God's fault. Somehow, our genes set us up so that (1) girls learn very quickly to cuddle dolls and (2) boys learn very quickly to throw things. It makes sense if you consider that women are the only ones properly equipped to care for infants, and men, being blind to the housework needing to be done, instead spend lots of time throwing rocks at rabbits in hope of trading food for sex.

It seems unlikely that genes directly encode behaviors, and much more likely that genes encode kinesises, roughly, the animal equivalent of tropisms in plants. One kinesis might make throwing feel like a fun thing to do and another might make cuddling toy trucks feel right. How do we uncover an instinct which makes throwing feel good for boys? A kinesis is even more fundamental than an instinct, in this context.

Our question has become not 'when do they learn it' but, instead, 'what are the kinesises which guide them into these behaviors?'

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