A merely life permitting universe is of incredibly unlikely probability but an organism, the first organism, just happening to have assembled by random chance events and being viable in just the conditions it came together in is certainly a very lucky shuffle of a very large deck of cards. After a while, with such luck, you have to start wondering if it's not due to luck.
I don't think I've more than started piling on possible factors in trying to figure out the actual improbability of it happening but have just dealt with a few of the more obvious ones. This, like the pseudo-science of abiogenesis is a matter of imagining things instead of observing the one and only thing, that first organism, which is not and certainly never will be available to study in any resolvability answering instead of generating questions about its unique genesis. Trying to do that through generations beginning hundreds of millions of years after that event, who knows how many millions if not hundreds of millions of generations of perhaps evolving life under changing environmental conditions is certainly prone to almost as much speculation.
Remember when that "oldest statue of a human being" was in the news, as the "world's oldest pornography"?
Interpreting it, was child's play compared to trying to figure out these questions I've been dealing with, there is the statue there to be seen, after all. But what was said about it could have been anything from accurate to totally wrong, in that case telling us more about the academic hacks making the asertions than the people who made the statue. I started by wondering why they all seemed to think a man made it as a thing to get him horny when it could have had many other interpretations, who knows if any of them were what the artist(s) had in mind. Here's my piece on it from Echidne of the Snakes.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Is Anyone Wondering If The 35000 Year Old Statue Is a Self-Portrait? by Anthony McCarthy
A nod to Echidne.
I was going to research this but didn’t need to get farther than the first Google search page that came up.
35000-year-old figure of 'sexually charged' woman unveiled
Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35000 Years | LiveScience
Sexy "Venus" may be oldest figurine yet discovered - Yahoo! News
Sexy Figure Sculpture May Be 35000 Yrs Old - ABC News
I haven’t been following this very closely, but has anyone speculated that the sculptor might have been a woman? Or that she might have been making a self portrait? Or that the sculptor might have been making a portrait of her mother? Everything I’ve read or heard seems to take it for granted that it was made by a man, most seem to assume, for erotic reasons.
Other than the location, approximate age and material its made of everything that has been said about this ancient art is mere speculation. We don’t know who made it, why it was made, even if it is part of a cultural tradition. We have no way to know if it was even what they, themselves, would consider their best work. We don’t know if the artist liked their work or if they were considered to be a good artist by their contemporaries. This could be the equivalent of prehistoric kitsch, for all we know. Any remarks about the pattern of cuts along it is likely to be a misinterpretation. Tattoos? Body painting? Cultural cutting? A striped body stocking? Disfigurement by a later hand, perhaps even the woman depicted who just hated it? The earliest known graffiti made fifty years after the artist died?
Like all attempts to recover a lost cultural past, everything being said about its meaning and what it tells us about the person who made it and their presumed culture, tells us only about ourselves. No amount of other “cultural material” from that area and time can tell us much other than if this was a common theme in their culture. Even with a large number of objects, most of what we might want to know is irretrievably lost to us and always will be. We can’t ask them to answer those questions. We shouldn’t pretend we can know what they were thinking. We can’t even recreate their aesthetic sensibility with reference to our own. We can't even know if the artist had a single "message" or "meaning". Maybe if asked they would say that was the viewer's job.
Almost everything I’ve read talks obsessively about the size of the breasts and thighs but no one seems to be very concerned that the head is way too small, or, perhaps, missing. The conclusion someone could draw about the gender of the people making the comments from that is of more certain reliability than any speculations about what the statue meant to whoever made it. The comments made since its discovery are the only record of its meaning we have.
The desire to fill in for information we can’t get seems to be irresistible, especially among scholars who are eager to get into print or interviewed. And if they don't make one up, the "journalist", steeped in the social science assumptions learned in college can be counted on to fill it in. But that’s just story telling, it's not fact. We should stop pretending it means anything.
Update: OK, Let me show you what I mean.
Sciency explanations for why the 35,000 year old woman’s head is so small.
#1. The sculptor wasn’t very skilled and didn’t leave enough room for a head that was proportional to the body. You see this all the time when you watch kids drawing. Alternatively, the sculptor had problems depicting proportions.
#2. The sculptor intended that a separate head would fit over what is there, the head was either never attached or got lost
#3. The part of the ivory that was going to be the head broke off when it was dropped and this was the best that could be done with what was left.
#4. The figure was carved by a male breast fetishist who didn’t have much respect for a woman’s intelligence or who just wasn’t a face guy.
#5. The figure is actually a malicious caricature made by a woman of a rival, she was calling her a “pea brain”. Only in her culture that would have been “you have the intelligence of a sloe fruit”.
#6. You can go on making up stories all day if you want to. Just don’t be surprised when someone points out you’re just talking about yourself and not the sculptor when you do.
I was going to research this but didn’t need to get farther than the first Google search page that came up.
35000-year-old figure of 'sexually charged' woman unveiled
Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35000 Years | LiveScience
Sexy "Venus" may be oldest figurine yet discovered - Yahoo! News
Sexy Figure Sculpture May Be 35000 Yrs Old - ABC News
I haven’t been following this very closely, but has anyone speculated that the sculptor might have been a woman? Or that she might have been making a self portrait? Or that the sculptor might have been making a portrait of her mother? Everything I’ve read or heard seems to take it for granted that it was made by a man, most seem to assume, for erotic reasons.
Other than the location, approximate age and material its made of everything that has been said about this ancient art is mere speculation. We don’t know who made it, why it was made, even if it is part of a cultural tradition. We have no way to know if it was even what they, themselves, would consider their best work. We don’t know if the artist liked their work or if they were considered to be a good artist by their contemporaries. This could be the equivalent of prehistoric kitsch, for all we know. Any remarks about the pattern of cuts along it is likely to be a misinterpretation. Tattoos? Body painting? Cultural cutting? A striped body stocking? Disfigurement by a later hand, perhaps even the woman depicted who just hated it? The earliest known graffiti made fifty years after the artist died?
Like all attempts to recover a lost cultural past, everything being said about its meaning and what it tells us about the person who made it and their presumed culture, tells us only about ourselves. No amount of other “cultural material” from that area and time can tell us much other than if this was a common theme in their culture. Even with a large number of objects, most of what we might want to know is irretrievably lost to us and always will be. We can’t ask them to answer those questions. We shouldn’t pretend we can know what they were thinking. We can’t even recreate their aesthetic sensibility with reference to our own. We can't even know if the artist had a single "message" or "meaning". Maybe if asked they would say that was the viewer's job.
Almost everything I’ve read talks obsessively about the size of the breasts and thighs but no one seems to be very concerned that the head is way too small, or, perhaps, missing. The conclusion someone could draw about the gender of the people making the comments from that is of more certain reliability than any speculations about what the statue meant to whoever made it. The comments made since its discovery are the only record of its meaning we have.
The desire to fill in for information we can’t get seems to be irresistible, especially among scholars who are eager to get into print or interviewed. And if they don't make one up, the "journalist", steeped in the social science assumptions learned in college can be counted on to fill it in. But that’s just story telling, it's not fact. We should stop pretending it means anything.
Update: OK, Let me show you what I mean.
Sciency explanations for why the 35,000 year old woman’s head is so small.
#1. The sculptor wasn’t very skilled and didn’t leave enough room for a head that was proportional to the body. You see this all the time when you watch kids drawing. Alternatively, the sculptor had problems depicting proportions.
#2. The sculptor intended that a separate head would fit over what is there, the head was either never attached or got lost
#3. The part of the ivory that was going to be the head broke off when it was dropped and this was the best that could be done with what was left.
#4. The figure was carved by a male breast fetishist who didn’t have much respect for a woman’s intelligence or who just wasn’t a face guy.
#5. The figure is actually a malicious caricature made by a woman of a rival, she was calling her a “pea brain”. Only in her culture that would have been “you have the intelligence of a sloe fruit”.
#6. You can go on making up stories all day if you want to. Just don’t be surprised when someone points out you’re just talking about yourself and not the sculptor when you do.
Most anthropologists would tell you naked female figure does not equal sex.
ReplyDeleteThe Greeks, for example, were great admirers of the naked human form, male and female. They didn't think of it all as public pornography. Many cultures (one featured in the film "Mutiny on the Bounty", where hair was very strategically arranged), especially in National Geographic of old, featured women dressed no differently from men (ie., only the genitals covered). No one in those societies thought of it as public displays of naughty bits.
Not a comment your point, just on the headlines about this figure. Stupid is the native level of our public discourse, apparently.
I was genuinely shocked at how, in 2009, they could still figure that they knew who made it and why and the gender of the artist.As so often happens, I think they were imagining an artist with a lot in common with themselves, gender, foremost.
DeleteSo am I.I thought even uninformed speculation was more informed than that.
Delete"I can keep piling on problems for the probability of life successfully arising by random, chance events."
ReplyDeleteNo doubt. And like Yoko Ono, you can probably catch a fart and paint it green. So fucking what?
I did an image search and haven't found it. Where is said fart? Does it come out of a thought balloon attached to a cartoon of you?
DeleteStupy, why don't you stay at Duncans with other people who prefer to reinforce each others prejudices and congratulate each other on how brilliant you are, until you get pouty becaue you figure people aren't paying enough attention to you or saying something you don't like and you start upsetting the other inmates?
I don't write for people who choose to be stupid, I write for adults.
First of all, you can't write. Second of all, you're not an adult -- you're an old fogey. Which, it's pretty obvious, you've been your entire life.
ReplyDeleteWho do you figure you are? Bennett Cerf jr?
DeleteYou didn't answer my question. Nor can you because you made it up. Lied, in short.
I'm not a writer but for someone who can't write, I seem to generally get between 800 and 1200 readers most days. And it's clear they come here to read. They don't come here to tell other people who don't care what they're cooking out of the NYT cooking section tonight and cat pictures.
Duncan should have done what Digby did and drop comments. I think it was that go round when I exposed your sockpuppet trolling on her blog that might have done it. It wasn't long after that that she dropped comments.
I moderate comments, except yours, I expose yours as examples of the kind of decadence atheism produces.