10 Documentaries Every Curious Thinker Should Watch

There are instances in life when you know something, but cannot make sense of it in a neat, nice and tidy way. Below are the 10 hand-picked documentaries which will take you to places from the ruthless scientific investigations, to fringes of culture and politics, and to the heartfelt emotions, self and psychology.

Credits to http://worldofwonder.net/tag/secrets-of-the-living-dolls/

1) The Secret Life of Chaos

Can science explain the springing of life? Can it explain chaos, disorder and uncertainty? Till now, science has been expected to explain the order and precision of the natural world. Many other phenomenon such as creation of life, division of cells, movement of sand dunes, unpredictable weather, formation of shores, and economic and financial disasters are seen as areas where science does not have much to say. However, Jim Al-Khalil explores the beauty and neatness of the chaos theory. He uses it to answer questions such as how does order emerge out of chaos? And how come nature has such seamless, and charming patterns, which could only be seen as an act of a Greater Artist.

2) Is Seeing Believing?

This is a sister documentary to “Do you see what I see?”, and covers the mind-gasming topic of reality and perception. It takes us on the journey of various visual and auditory illusions which basically shows how vulnerable our perception is. If you want to understand the contemporary insights of brain and consciousness, this documentary is for you. The world surely will make more sense after watching these two documentaries.

3) Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimensions of the Universe

What explains the repetitive shapes of snow flakes, spider-webs, sea stones, sand dunes, and galaxies? There is a neat mathematics, underpinning all seemingly random yet recurring patterns of everyday life. Find out the mathematics of irregular, disorderly solids, and appreciate the power of science.

4) Born Good? Origins of Morality

Are we born good or bad? What explains altruistic behavior in humans possessed by no other species known? What explains psychopathic behavior, discrimination, tribalism and violence? This documentary looks at centuries-old argument, which has kept both philosophers and scientists awake at nights.

Evolution equips us with both social behaviors of cooperation and empathy, and tribalistic instincts of us-versus-them. Cooperation and empathy are common in-group behaviors, while tribalism is expressed as an out-group behavior. People who look like us, think like us, and lead lives like us, are more likely to attract empathy and altruism from our side. Hence, empathy has limitations. And many of our earlier notions about human kindness and love seems to be wrong all this time.

5) Middle sexes: Redefining He and She

What happens to children whose genital inspection fail to categorize them as either male or female? How do ambiguous genitals look like, and how doctors assign the sex of a child at birth? In India, the State has long recognized such people as Hijda, third-sex but the Western world still harbors taboo attitudes towards the “Middle sexes”. The documentary takes us through the personal lives of many people, which includes those whose genitals had been declared ambiguous by doctors at birth, those who had undergone surgeries because of that, and those whose hormonal dynamics after hitting puberty led them to live as a different gender than what they were born and socialized in.

The documentary also looks at an experiment to determine people’s acceptability and tolerance towards such members of society. The results found that men and women who are insecure about their own sexuality are more likely to be discriminatory and harbor phobic attitudes towards the middle-sexians.

6) An Inconvenient Truth

Climate change is real, it’s man-made and it’s going to impact our economic, technological, and social prospects. Al-Gore explores the mismatch between scientific consensus and popular media, and looks at reasons of skepticism among politicians, economists, business owners and the wider public.

7) Secrets of Living Dolls

This is probably the most psychologically exoteric documentary one could watch. It shows men, who choose to live their lives as female dolls. An epic case of cross-dressing and trans-genderism.

8) Nice Guys Finish First

This documentary is a reply by Richard Dawkins to his infamous book, “The Selfish Gene”. He explores cooperative and altruistic behavior, which seems to be at odd with natural selection and cut-throat competitive machine of evolution. He incorporates insights from game theory, prisoner’s dilemma, and some common social behavior examples. Dawkins explains how, even self-less and altruistic individuals, contribute to the survival and propagation of genes of the whole species.

9) The Cost of Free

Google is free, and so is Facebook..or maybe not. The cost of free investigates the hidden price we all pay for using social media and how the age of Internet is re-wiring our brain and feeding onto our evolutionary traits.

10) Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness

It is a series by philosopher Alain De Botton, who looks at various Greek and Roman philosophers and their perspectives of life. The series reminds us how philosophy is still relevant to different spheres of our lives whether it is Socrates on self-confidence, Epicurus on happiness, and Nietzsche on hardship, all can teach us something.

Numbers Don't Speak: Misleading Statistics Come To Science

Humans are bad with numbers—mainly because centuries of evolution molded them to think quickly and intuitively, not abstractly. Though this method of thinking, known as heuristics was enough to get them out of savannas and settle into small subsistent communities—it did not make them the ‘masters of the planet.' In fact, it was their ability to bend the laws of nature and manipulate the strings of earth—which involved observation, exact measurement, and scientific thinking. This recipe allowed them to weasel out truth from sham, hunch from ‘hit,' and luck from meaningful occurrences.

There are a variety of tools which help humans do this. One of them is statistics. Though not old, statistical tools have profound applications in almost every realm of our lives. Google uses it. Netflix and Amazon depend on it, but most importantly, our source of knowledge—published research and journals, won’t exist without it. However, among the goodly proportions of scientists and researchers who use it, only a few truly know how to. This realization came with the paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” written by John Ioannidis at Stanford.

Statistical illiteracy is not just an epidemic among ordinary people, who get misled by poor statistical reporting of mainstream media, are ignorant of sampling, errors, and fallacy of averages. But, as the paper reveals, the scientific community is neither immune from it.

A lot can go wrong while doing statistics. Choosing a faulty sample, ignoring extreme values, maneuvering graphs and visuals, proposing causation instead of correlation for example, implying pornography as a ‘cause’ of sexual violence, and finding nonsensical correlations, like correlating the number of Hollywood movies released per year with the number of bird deaths in that year, are some among the well-known. Other problems are inherent, which one can never eliminate such as randomness of real world or complexity of the system. Others result from scientific conventions—popular practices developed over time. Those are rampant in the fields of experimental psychology, neuroscience, medicine, health, and nutrition.

Probably the most articulate book on the topic Statistics Done Wrong highlights many of the statistical sins committed by academicians and researchers in different study areas. A handful of them is given below.

Everything wrong with ‘statistical significance.'

This phrase has become a de facto of statistics, whether in textbooks or prestigious journals like Nature and Science. A study is said to be statistically significant when its p-value is lower than a certain cutoff, usually set to p < 0.05. However, this p-value cutoff is somewhat arbitrary in nature—a mere convention tracing its lineage to RA Fisher, the god-father of significance tests.

But that is not the only problematic thing about p-values. In fact, it is their frequent and much-widespread misinterpretation which are troubling. Most people think a p-value of 5% means there is a 5% chance that a result is a fluke, or put in a better way, a 5% chance that a result is because of luck—which is downright false. The probability of getting a lucky result is much higher; a good 38%. Besides, there is not much difference between a p-value of 6% and 4%. But, as David Colquhoun in his paper puts it, “one of them gets your paper published, and the other does not”.

P-values are handy when used correctly. They are meant to be used as a gauging tool for researchers only to make informal guesses about whether the results make sense. They are not intended to be strict engraved rules for hypothesis testing.

Another head-scratching quality of p-values is that they are simply probabilities. They have no practical value. They don’t tell whether your medicine works, or there is a difference between two bacteria cultures, and therefore to try and lower your p-value as much as possible and present it as proof that you have found something is—futile. P-value is only supposed to tell you how good your data is. It’s not meant to tell whether you have made a discovery. And even if you want to judge your data, the confidence interval is a much better option because it calculates the variation bar, which gives you insights about uncertainty in your data. Sadly, however, only 10% of research papers in experimental psychology use confidence intervals, and in journals like Nature, 89% of papers involve p-values without any confidence interval.

It is precisely this reason that editors and scientists have screamed about the ‘replicability crises’ in many disciplines, especially the nascent ones which lack vigorous standards to test against such as neuroscience and behavioral studies. The p-values should not be deciding what has been ‘discovered,' the replication studies should.

Little Extremes

Little extremes were aptly explained by Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow through an example which goes like this. In the US, for instance, it was found that counties with the lowest rates of kidney cancer tended to be Midwestern, Southern, and Western rural counties. And also counties with the highest rates of kidney cancers tended to be in the Midwestern, Southern and Western rural counties. How is that so? Well, because the countryside have less population than urban areas, and therefore extreme values were supposed to be found in the countryside, instead of urban settings where they averaged out.

The way of correcting this is to account for the population by using weighted averages instead of simple averages.

Pseudo-replicability

This erratum too is a common disaster. It involves collecting thousands of data points to give the illusion that you have replicated the results when in fact you have pseudo-replicated. It is when you take a smaller sample but measure your parameter again and again, with that same sample, For example, I want to know the average IQ of my class. I chose two people from the class and measured their IQs five times a day for twenty days. I collected 100 data points now. But they are useless. I should have taken 100 different individuals, may be measured their IQ five times and then averaged those five data points to make a single one. Now, I still collected 100 data points, but they are much robust.

Statistics can be quite baffling. Thier counter-intuitive nature sways even the best of people. I remember, once my father was cursing the weather prediction on his phone and said: “Look it says here that there is only a 20% chance of rain today, but see it’s raining so much”. Well, the problem did not lie with the prediction, it laid with his naïve understanding of probability. The chance of rain was 20% if you repeat your observation on several different days a good amount of time. Think of it this way, if you flip a coin, you get head. You flip a coin again, and you get head. And so you reach the conclusion that probability of getting a head is more than a tail—even though it is 50/50. Probability does not tell you the exact outcome on your next toss, and it only shows you the outcome if you repeat the experiment an enormous number of times. You won’t get a 50/50 head and tail ratio with just one toss, or ten tosses or even hundred tosses. That is why we simulate tosses millions of times using random numbers. Another quirky use of statistics is in the modern American rhetoric that “most people are above average”, which is laughable (most people cannot be above average. They are just average. ‘Average’ is called average for a reason).

But statistics is not only counter-intuitive, it also remains beyond the reach of those who don’t study them. A researcher cannot possibly run hundreds of simulations (even though they should), or apply sophisticated techniques. However, statistics is not the only reason science faces the perils of non-replicability. There are many other reasons as well, and it would be unfair not to bring them. Since the replicability crises mostly occur in behavioral sciences, can it be that the nature of those fields renders them unavoidable complexity and randomness — something you cannot ever eliminate? And, therefore it may not be that alarming that studies of those disciplines fail to withstand re-tests. Well, there is a difference between science failing to replicate, which is good, and science not attempting to replicate, which is horrendous. Replication is at the heart of scientific query. It cannot be detached from the scientific organism.

Therefore, when replication studies are treated as “lowly” than new and original endeavors by journals, or when replication stalls career growth of a researcher or hampers her from being funded, it all should be a violent blow to the integrity of science. In fact, nascent fields should be more careful about replicability, because they have yet to establish strong credibility. They should be the ones getting wrong most of the time, by putting their studies to test often. Being wrong is okay in science, not trying to prove wrong is disastrous. Hence, it should concern every one of us when universities or academia puts unnecessary pressure on researchers to ‘get published.' Instead, they should be propagating academic attitudes, most importantly, scientific attitudes —which hold replication dearest.

References and Further Reading

Reinhart, Alex, Statistics Done Wrong, 2015.
LA Times, "Why Failure To Replicate Findings Can Actually Be A Good Thing", 2016
The Economist, "Trouble At The Lab", 2013

Robotonomics: Why Economics Needs To Take Robotics Seriously?

In 1932, Bertrand Russel penned a bombastic essay called In Praise of Idleness, which made a harrowing observation of “the leisure gap.” His much heathen genius recognized the way work was organized in modern societies with some people sitting idle all day and others working ceaselessly like labored donkeys. Russel, was, of course, referring to our long-sought value of work-ethic which says that donkiness is virtuous.

Parallel to this radical thought extended the arm of technology and machines geared to replace much of the “big dirty work” on factory floors and assembly lines in the late half of the 20th century. Despite the whines of economists and policy-makers, the coming of technology did not only alter the work landscape but led to greater productivity, consistency and safety standards in the economy, with previous skills of workers though slowly, transferred to other areas such as retail and service. But as we tread further up, affording a bird’s eye view, the picture looks different this time. In The Rise of Robots: Technology and the Threat of Jobless Future, Martin Ford argues that the rocketing pace of informatics will absorb jobs more than it will create or transfer thus building a giant crater pooled by mass unemployment in the economy. Some of these jobs are what can be called “bad jobs”, not because they are inherently bad but because of the nature of their work which is often too repetitive, meaningless sometimes even dangerous and which churns out the least satisfaction among workers. One such example is fruit-picking, which Agrabot, a Spanish company is trying to robotify. The machine only picks the ripe fruit and can reach to heights and angles which a tall Sapien cannot. Another is driving, which Google’s self-driving cars with its camera sensors, GPS, and horse-like computing power, are taking over preventing a sobering 5 million road accidents per year, reducing congestion, fuel consumption and carbon print in the atmosphere. Box-picking, which is being mastered by Industrial Perception’s robot has the visual perception, spatial location, and dexterity to move boxes in warehouses without back injuries or fatigue. There are bot waiters at Japan’s Kura Sushi restaurant who are helping to make sushi and serving customers through conveyor belts.

The demise of bad jobs

It is not an under-rugged truth that these jobs and many others such as cleaning, lawn-mowing, burger-flipping, packaging, quality-checking, and mining are driven to extinction. Fearing that these jobs would be lost, or trying hard to keep them for the mere sake of employment simply shows a lack of a visionary direction and good policy making. It is like searching for a quick fix while keeping the real problem under the rug. In other words, it is like saying “Oh let’s keep low-paying, low-satisfaction jobs so that we distract ourselves from bigger, louder and more pressing issues in the framework of our economy. Let’s keep these jobs so that low-skilled workers have something to hold onto, and let’s ignore the gushing cracks in the education and social system which churns them out in the first place”. It is no wonder that Trump’s campaign which played on the rhetoric of “savior of jobs” did so well.

The Good Jobs

The discussion should ideally begin when we consider what happens to “the good jobs” as they are slathered on by technology. Jerry Kaplan in Humans Need Not Apply makes exactly this point. The 20th century notion that “computers can only do what they are programmed to do” should be match burned and buried deep in the bowels of earth (or thrown in a bot bin) because this hour’s feats in machine learning and AIs are enabling soul-less robots to teach themselves anything from cooking, teaching, caring to accounting, medicine, law and even coding. If what you do, can be learned by reading textbooks, attending lectures and passing tests, chances are that a learning algorithm can easily do that.

Machine-learning, which tells you what stuff to buy and read on Amazon, what to listen and watch on Netflix and YouTube, who to make friends with on Facebook, and what to declare spam in your emails, is also being used in medical diagnoses, legal research, stock markets, and writing programs. The bonded ‘soul of machine’ exists and it is here by the name of Big Data. There cannot be any artificial intelligence without data as there cannot be good statistical inferences, pattern recognition and correlation without it. AI is only fated to succeed because we are all creating data at furious speeds such that almost all of the humanity’s knowledge was materialized just in the last two years. And so, every time you write a post, snap a photo, search a query or just browse the web, you are helping machines get smarter.

When IBM’s Watson sits in front of petabytes of published medical journals to learn diagnosis or reviews past legal cases to predict court’s decisions, it should seem intuitive that it can do a much better job than any of our human folks. Some might find this preposterous. It seems far-fetched to allow robots to, in a way, ‘play God’, by letting them make medical and legal decisions. The truth however is, they can play God, and they do a pretty good job at this. They can diagnose diseases with much fewer errors and more accurate ‘hits,' lack of which kills thousands of people every year or predict legal decisions which are brimming with vulnerabilities of cognitive and social biases. One of the popular AI memes of this half of the century is that robots will make decisions ‘on their own,' which directly emerges from our anthropomorphic view of the objects. Ethicist and technologist, Nick Bostrom has talked about the AI fallacy, which basically makes us think that robots are human-like, or that their thinking mechanism mimics the human brain, the way nature evolved it. “Airplanes don’t flap their wings” is an eloquent summary of it put famously by Frederick Jelinek.

The Creative Snowflakes

Looking past the big dirty jobs and the predictable white-collars, a lot many harbor the idea that creative and empathetic jobs will always remain the unclaimed territory of humans, even though bots are doing their best to push those boundaries as well. Music, much of which is already deluged by mechanized ghosts, some of them have started creeping up onto art, writing, and entertainment. As far as empathy goes, there are bot receptionists, nurses, babysitters and teachers, jobs traditionally thought to remain at the discretion of humans. It is true that the ‘care’ these robots exhibit is fake, or it is one-way, such that only humans get the pleasing effect during their interaction with the robots, not the robots. However as the future may unfold, it may not be far enough that a bot writes and produces a piece of blog article like this one (and does a better job at it!) 

All of it surely is overwhelming, no matter how much one reads up on it, give talks about it, or write papers on it. In all pinching reality, there bubbles a few good ton of questions, which we as a futuristic human society need to consider and attempt to answer. The biggest of them is “What next?” After most of the work has been unintentionally put at the discretion of robots, and a large chunk of the population is unemployed, which is an educated hunch corroborated strongly by most technologists and academicians, what will we all do in that era?

Thomas Paine had an answer in the 1930s. Universal Basic Income, an idea hugged by both liberals and conservatives, business people and employees, blue-collars and white-collars, individuals in the East and the West, mostly because it is to a good degree, huggable. It is workable, it has already been experimented in countries such as Netherlands, Finland, and India and it is producing results. For example, the MINCOME project by Canadian government from 1974 to 1979, gave a basic income to residents of a small town consisting of about 10,000 people. The experiment did not only help most recipients get above the poverty line, but it also improved graduation rates, health and birth control.

However many skeptics of this too-good-sounding deal, bring up the already present welfare state and unemployment benefits in developed countries, which they argue, has discouraged many job-able recipients from seeking out work. And if UBI was to be implemented, which frankly is another form of welfare state, one should better expect masses of individuals who feel meh about work. Apart from that, critics also blame the idea for its naïve approach, which is seeing work just as a means of earning a livelihood, when the fact is that there are many psychological and social surpluses to ‘work’ itself which cannot be measured by Econ101 apparatuses. And just because it cannot be measured, does not mean that it stays out of our policy decisions, and therefore, some might call an out-of-work society even worse than a collectively wealthy, post-scarce, and equal society. In "Why UBI is a terrible idea", the author aptly points out some of the slippery areas in our discussions, including the assault on America’s most heartily cultural values of work and life.

But here is the problem. The author was answering the question, what would happen if we implemented UBI right now, at this very moment, which in all honesty would surely be a terrible idea, considering the loopholes in our educational, economic, governance, and social capacities. It would not be an over-statement when we say that we might not be ready for it yet. Not just yet. Good policy does not only need a good idea, but it also needs supportive and compatible institutions for it to work and therefore, we are a long way from doing the necessary duct-taping and gluing.

The author also seamlessly laments the current loss values of work and hard-work, which is fair considering that the robotic future is a radical shift. It might as well turn out that work itself gets fundamentally re-defined in ways it never did before. Work in principle would become optional. A choice pursued solely for fulfillment, joy or to afford better holidays. But what will work really become like? Many theorists think volunteering, championing causes, art and most important, entertainment is what most of us will be doing. Nevertheless, our risen education levels might give us more illumination on more productive uses of our time. Is it, however, possible that we all become couch rats, maybe stacked away indoors playing video games till our last breaths? Well, Japan is facing that problem with its newer generation, who mostly remain unbothered from bills and familial restraints, thus almost corkscrewing its population growth.

Is Idleness that bad?

Studies show that the people who remain in the unemployed demography suffer from sheer psychological and social loss comparable to that of losing a loved one, mostly because work is tied so closely to their social status and integrity. However, idleness is different from unemployment. Idleness, which in Russel’s definition is mostly engaged in by feudal lords and elitists, who frankly, have both social status and integrity. And if we microscope history, it turns out many of our groundbreaking achievements and discoveries did come from people with plenty of time on their hands or those who were not hampered by financial and social constraints. And so, will a UBI spur a never-seen era of creativity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship? Well, we don’t know yet even though it seems quite logical. 

Between Luddites and Singularitians 

On a scale of Luddite to Singularitian, where should we all lie? Luddite is another name for "computer-phobic", a person who fears technology and its implications, the kinds which make movies like Terminator. Singularitians, on the other hand, are optimists who see a human-robot cooperation as an invariable outlook. We don't know yet which side is winning, or rather which is more robustly entrenched in evidence. However, it is crucial to make sure that we are not drawing castles in the air, but taking educated and also practical policy decisions. And thus there are some of the things which every nation ought to do, like reforming education system so that it produces liquid and agile workforce as opposed to ‘specialized skills’ chambers of Econ101. Or re-designing tax-policy to bridge gaps in income equality. Some economists are proposing taxing the robot workers, which discourages businesses from investing in technology to start with. It might sound like a good idea, but when looked closely, it too is a quick fix. All in all, the focus today must lie with the root-grass institutions which inevitably shape the fate of human civilization.

Further Reading

Thompson, Derek "A world without work", 2015 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-without-work/395294/

Eric and Brynjolfsson, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in the Time of Brilliant Technologies 

Barrat, James, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of Human Era

Minsky, Marvin, The Emotion Machine

Imagining Other Worlds

Will our encounter with alien life change everything?

Star-nosed mole. Image by Google

In 2009, Jonathan Foer in his mind provoking book Eating Animals wrote: “If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

Thought-experiments involving aliens, have been great mental tools to debate and answer several of the philosophical queries and moral dilemmas like these. Other similar speculations had heartened us to ask questions such as “How will religions stand the discovery of aliens?” “What sort of power hierarchies will emerge once we encountered extraterrestrials as we imagine them?” “What sort of moral obligations will we have towards our galactic neighbors?” The possibilities are boundless, but our imagination, as it turns out, not very much.

We seem to know a lot about alien life, thanks to sci-fi sensations of 20^th century. Sometime gluey eyed monsters, blue, green, usually with two hands, two feet and a head. How bloody anthropomorphic! For centuries, we have looked up at sky wondering about the presence of other worlds and possibly other lives. Put another way, we have done a good job in casting our own image unto the universe. Our inklings have never left the bounds of our earthly existence. And why not? Is not everything we have ever dreamed, penned and painted bears witness? From homo-fictitious to gods and supernatural.

This explains our quirky methods till date to hunt for our galactic brothers (or rivals). The short-wave radio waves which we hope to catch as a “sign” from outside world, which SETI has been doing for long. The biggest assumption being that the alien life must have technology advanced enough to send radio signals for communication. Too far-fetched? According to astronomer, Avi Loeb, we might as well search for spectroscopic signatures of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmospheres of alien planets, in the hopes of finding fridge-using aliens. Or perhaps hairspray-using ones. And yet others propose to look for polluting cities, Dyson circles for electricity, nuclear-war torn planets. Sounds…familiar.

Any attempt at musing on alien life, is in actuality a musing about us, our own very selves. Our tribalism instinct has drawn our fear of an invading human-hating monsters. Same could be said about techno-phobias and artificial intelligences. And so, the philosophical queries and moral dilemmas reflect our own mental epidemics. We can shot our best guess, that earth-centric religions will have a very hard time grappling with the alien find. Most rabbis, imams and popes will be extremely disappointed at the non-mention of alien life in their holy books. Maybe, Golden Rule works, which basically states that you should treat others like you want to be treated, something used a lot in vegan ethics and animal rights arguments. Maybe, there are other better ways to organize society, than ours’ crude hierarchical ones. For science, however even finding a bacteria will be revolutionary. Any rudimentary form of life, will change everything. Maybe, that life form is so unfamiliar that we won’t be able to recognize it as life at all.  And maybe, we do happen to find legged and armed species, because in the course of earthling’s evolution, locomotion devices such as arms and legs have appeared and evolved separately and independently quite a times. Or maybe, we have been wrong all along and we should focus on finding other species on earth, which to our awe and even astonishment can be deemed as 'aliens' themselves. Nevertheless, whatever the case, it will be the ultimate test for our scientific understanding.

And so maybe, we should keep our fingers crossed and till then, let our imagination venture far.

Looking back at the Orgasm

A brief glimpse at the female pleasure's set

Image from Google pictures

From the Plato’s Timaeus, to the Chinese Jade Chambers and to the Freudian’s sexology, the O game has journeyed a long path of speculations, cultural fringes and fancy mythologizing. There have been fragments in the pasts, with democratized sexual pleasure for women, and also junctures of repressive mores, mutilation, and taboo. Humans’ attempts to understand female sexuality had been sleazy, and even if, occasionally, it happens to be studied, the drawings rarely reach public thought.

Today, after our neuron clusters are capable of contemplating the workings of universe and making sophisticated technology, we still understand little about our bodies. Many had sought to explain, female orgasm in terms of evolutionary functionality and later, adaptation, but this arose from inaccurate conceptions about the female orgasm, which we know today, is difficult to reach vaginally, and thus divorces itself from serving any particular evolutionary catch.

Then the sensationalized G-spot and nitty-gritty of ejaculation, arousal, and attitudes. The internet is squashing with information, often, wrong and unsupported. There are meter long “How To’s” self-help quack, all kinds of it, which thrive; “How to make her orgasm quickly”. “How to revive your sexual energy”, “10 Things you need to know about Os”. They do, because of the lack of decisiveness of science on these matters, which provide the food for a wide variety of woo to feed on.

It is true that any serious scholarship in this domain, faces barricades of culture and politics. 

But, we have a long way to go. Because, the oodles of media, literature and pornography still relies on outdated ideas about female sexuality and orgasms, which have long been discredited (in the scientific spheres). The fogginess which surrounds the topic manifests itself in a million households with unhappy paramours, poor sex education in schools and appalling practices of some cultures. Sometimes, science needs to step in, when issues with deeper political and social consequences are concerned. 

Why is sex such a taboo?

The shhh moments probe our lives every day, when we are bombarded with cues of inappropriateness and discrepancy. Some will just shrug their shoulders, melding into the “ought to be this way” narrative which is constantly hammered by cultural mores and social institutions into us since we were dumb blobs of flesh in our cradles. But some restless creatures of our kind, would like to scratch their heads and ask “Why did that happen?”

How come, sex, which our species is undeniably obsessed with, became such a “behind the covers” and often times, a “dirty” business. In other words, why is sex such a taboo? Let’s take a foot back, and ask “what do we exactly mean by that?”. Does this means sex outside marriage or practices like incest, on which large volumes of thought and literature has been expend. No, that is not what I mean. By, sex, I mean the very act of sex, which is supposed to be done behind closed doors, or possibly bushes in ancient times, without announcing it out loud or talking about it. 

But before answering that, it is important to muse another question. “Has sex always been a taboo?” If yes, then why. Did it serve any particular purpose? Humans have the tendency to look at their surroundings and think that things have always been the way they are now.

This is one of the spheres, where you find the most diverse and even contradictory schemes of theorizing. Because it’s like asking, why the word ‘fuck’ became so popular in language? Is there any particular reason for it besides that so many people started using it at once?

Culture and obviously, religion has a big hand in fencing taboo around the act, just like it does arbitrarily in matters of food and clothing. But, let’s dissect the ‘standard narrative’ which is often given in answer to this question, which goes something like this

“Sexual taboos are natural, it is a mechanism by which nature controlled whose offspring is who, so that men and women could work in functional units”

It does look quite good, and seems to make sense, but it is not quite true. Because, we know, that humans at least around pre-historic times were highly promiscuous and lived in shared societal structures, sharing food, resources and well..women. This kind of dynamics and practice, did not only exist in pre-historic times, but practiced in primitive forms of societies even later.  Surprisingly, some of these practices were sanctioned by religion, which vary a great deal on their position about sex and sexuality. This does not necessarily mean that taboo on sex was nearly absent, but that it did not exist in forms like it does today, with masturbation, nudity, sex talk, female sexuality being surrounded by contempt.

However with the advent of agriculture and changing cultural constrains, the standard narrative does hold some water, but taboo on sex was not ‘nature’s planning’ but rather a social adaption in response to religion and possibly, changing societal dynamics. When it comes to planning, nature is the worst entity. It is blind. Many people think it’s something useful that comes out of their sweet Motherly nature, which almost always has to serve some purpose.

We, coming from Abrahamic paradigms which spread and soon merged in and affected other cultures, have the tendency to fill our voids of knowledge, with pre-existing assumptions of today. It’s not that our ancestors sat around and carefully discussed what benefits would doing it behind the bushes would serve. It’s just that the ideal of ‘being civilized’ and therefore ‘unlike animals’, which has been at the very heart of our cultural conditioning. You can say, that humans did not want to look back at their animalistic past, and that sex out in open, reminds them of their primitive instincts, which culture has dictated to be embarrassing and something to get disgusted about.

 
Further Explore

Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jethá “Sex at Dawn: The Pre-historic Origins of Modern Sexuality”

Dening, Sarah. The Mythology of Sex. Macmillian 1996, ISBN 978-0-02-861207-2

Patton, Michael S. (June 1985). "Masturbation from Judaism to Victorianism"

Art is not subjective

Throughout history, art has enjoyed a special place in almost all human cultures and often seen as an ‘out of the world’, imaginative and an increasingly subjective endeavor. Whether its lore, mythology, visual art, music or literature, it has been seen as employing some deeper or ‘higher’ forms of conscious reach. But as we put the scientific goggles to stare at the world and the humans living in that world, we might want to shrug our shoulders and say Hmm! What if something else going on?

So, what does the seemingly conclusive heading above actually mean? When I say, art is not subjective, do I mean that everyone has to like the same art and art forms. It would be cool if each person on the planet would listen to the same songs, or read the same books, but that is not what I mean. Then, does it mean that art in human societies serves specific evolutionary functions which in popular thought, is deemed as a way “to attract mates and pass on genes”. That is not quite true, nevertheless, that is not what I mean either.

When I talk about art, I am basically talking about aesthetics and beauty, principles of which are not so subjective or beyond this world, as previously thought to be. There are predictable patterns which manifests themselves across human cultures and even across species, and they can be studied in a scientific way. There are some cognitive and emotional modules, shaped by evolution which explains why some arts find their way in museums, buildings and even worshiped as gods in temples while others don’t quite make it. In a particular cultural tradition, some aesthetic forms continue to get replicated over and over across generations and across geography which can be traced historically such as deliberately enhanced features of iconography in Hindu art.

The all-time creative world of art is subject to cognitive and cerebral laws formulated by billions of years of evolution. What those laws are which invoke awe and ahas in us have remained the domain of artists and craftsmen, who had learned to capitalize on them through trial and experimentation. In other words, they take advantage of our perception and emotional processing systems to charm ‘magic’ on us.

So, how do we know this?  Well, the findings arose from completely unrelated areas of science. Mainly perception and neuroscience. We don’t see how we think we see. There are some ‘perception shortcuts’ which evolution had wired in us during millennia of our struggle with environment. The evidence comes from visual and cognitive illusions which easily trick our brains, even if we know that we are being deceived. But, more important insights come from ethology, the study of animals. Jewel beetles, which are found in Australia were noted to go extinct because they were seen having sex with beer bottles. Well, Jewel beetles are brown and glossy and so are the beer bottles, which humans have the habit of throwing around in the environment. The beetles saw “anything that is brown and glossy, that is our hotie”.

Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Nobel prize winner ethologist, did an experiment with seagulls, whose beaks have a red dot, which they use to feed their infants. Tinbergen took an isolated beak, with no seagull attached and swayed it in front of the infants who showed the exact same response when they were about to get food even though there was no seagull. Then, Tinbergen, took a wooden stick and painted it with red dot, much brighter and bigger than that of a seagull’s beak. And, the infants pecked even vigorously and grew crazy for food. Vilayanur Ramachandran had remarked on this “If those seagulls were to build a museum and pay millions of dollars for an artifact, then that would most probably be the painted wooden stick”.

This new way of looking at art through the lens of neuroscience was coined by Semir Zeki  according to whom art is governed by the laws of the brain which just means that you cannot ignore biology while doing culture. For many years, humanities and the social sciences have shown contempt on 'biologizing' of social and cultural phenomenon which according to them are complex, and cannot be underpinned. 'Reductionist' is the favorite and probably the most common word in the humanities and social sciences which is equivalent to being a baby-eater. 

Nevertheless, findings from different areas continue to shake us and make us re-evaluate our standings. Margaret Livingstone, had pointed to several perceptual tricks which artists and impressionists use to make us clap by manipulating our visual systems. Art reveals how we see, at the back end in processing of our brains. That makes scientists the theorists, and artists the experimentalists. In her documentary video, The Neuroscience of Art, she explains the use of contrast and detail in several paintings. She also shows drawings made by people with brain damages and perception impairments who have difficulty locating distance and spatial network as shown below. 

All of this tells us an important story about our own selves and how we see. Cultures, throughout history, have tried to figure out ways in which we perceive and absorb reality, whether it is auditory systems in sounds and music or visual organization in pictorial or illustrative art forms which enchant us and make us coming for more.  

Further Explore

Huang, Mengfei. "The Neuroscience of Art"
http://web.stanford.edu/group/co-sign/Huang.pdf

Vilayanur, Ramachandran. "Aesthetic Universals and Neurology of Hindu Art". 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZTvHqM-_jE

The Scientist. "Neuroaesthetics"

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/39802/title/Neuroaesthetics/