Social success went to our heads

This was my way of summarising a story I wrote about some evolutionary scientists and mathematicians interested in the Machiavellian hypothesis - that the explosion in brain size that occurred in Homo sapiens from about 350,000 years ago to about 50,000 years ago was driven by social competition. It works a little like this:

Have little brain --> can't do jack
Brain gets a bit bigger --> can deceive, form alliances, flatter etc
Those with slightly bigger brains can do more of the social scheming and get more intercourse and pass on more genes for bigger brains.

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The acquisition of knowledge in the sciences these days is astounding. Yet Craig Venter couldn't have put it better when he said that we don't know shit. I think this statement means different things to different people. To me, it shows an appreciation for the complexity of the life that saturates the world we live in. In my opinion - which I'd like to think is factually correct - we can't ever explain everything, if only for the simple reason that there are more species than person-hours to understand them. The sooner we realise our limitations, the sooner our priorities reflect reality.

The thing is, a layperson might interpret Venter's comment as an attack on science or its validity, which I think if you look at Craig Venter's history, it wasn't.

The continual hyping of research (which is an industry and which I am now a small part of) is rarely accompanied by serious and thoughtful commentary on what we know and what we don't; on how sure we are of the things we think we know; on why we fund what we fund; and what this knowledge means for us all. Does it mean that we understand life? That a cure for cancer is just around the corner? That we understand ecosystems?

Even if we could get better media analysis of science, I'm with David Suzuki and that communications theorist he quotes in a recent book, that science blurbs are part of an overall pattern of information flood which renders the receiver unable to do anything. It's all too damn passive. Just like this blog! At least you can post a comment if you please.

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By the way, the hypothesis that lies behind all medical research (which is the vast majority of all research) is that we should live forever, free from pain, suffering and abnormality. I couldn't begrudge a sick person treatment but wait a couple of decades for the science to advance and lots of people - and politicians - will be asking themselves questions about this. This is too meaty a topic for further exposition here.