May 20, 2007

• Thinning the Herd

  UPDATED below

  This is such a complex subject, I don’t really know how to characterize my feelings about it.  I guess, “conflicted,” is good enough for now.  The conflict within my own mind right now reminds me of the lifelong disagreement between Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead over action versus inaction.

  Both were anthropologists, and early in their careers they were married to each other for a while.  Cathy Bateson, their daughter, is also an anthropologist.  She believes, with good reason, that she had the most observed and studied childhood in history.  Her mother kept her in a glass-walled nursery and filmed her every waking moment for purposes of anthropological research.  This probably isn’t something her father would have chosen to do, and that goes to the basis of that argument between Mead and Bateson.

  Mead’s first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was controversial in 1928 when it was published.  But it caught on with a new generation at the start of the sexual revolution of the 1950s, and her name was a household word in my youth.  Ironically, Margaret Mead’s anthropological methods were highly suspect (she converted some of her native informants to Christianity), and she was dangerously naive.  Some of her key informants lied to her, and that false data made up a substantial part of her most influential work.

  Her missionary activity among the people she was supposed to be studying stemmed from the same attitude that was at the core of her classic debate with Bateson.  She believed that if one found “wrongness” or “evil” in the world, one should work to fix it.  Gregory Bateson said that it is not always possible to accurately judge the rightness or wrongness of things, and that in addition to the intended consequences of our actions there are unintended consequences that can have even greater effects.  Our efforts to fix things often just intensify or multiply the problems.

  I think that the efforts of our bureaucratic government (spurred on by the insurance industry and medical profession) to protect us from ourselves is bound to have troublesome if not disastrous unintended consequences.  Recently, Greyfox found some fun magnetic toys in the dumpster at Felony Flats.  After a few hours of fun with them, I decided it would be even more fun to have more pieces to play with.  That’s when I learned that the toys had been recalled because some little kids had swallowed the magnets, and one child had aspirated one.

  In my opinion, people who have stupid (older) children, and/or those who allow young children to play with hazardous objects unsupervised, don’t deserve to have their kids survive and reproduce.  For millennia, Homo sapiens has evolved through natural processes that naturally eliminated weak and stupid individuals.   Now some segments of our society are doing everything in their power to halt that process.

  It has been a lengthy process to get where we are, but I don’t think it will take that long for us to devolve into something none of us now would want to see, if we continue this trend of overprotection and fail to institute some rational eugenics along the line of the Population, Ecology, and Genetics Board that Robert A. Heinlein invented in Podkayne of Mars.  And I do mean rational eugenics, not the racially, religiously, and economically skewed version that would inevitably result from our current corrupt bureaucracy.

  I did say that my feelings on this subject are conflicted.  That is because planet Earth continues to cull from the herd a category of individuals I don’t think we can easily do without:  the adventurers and explorers, the ones with the courage to push the envelope.  The Alaska Range ate four more climbers in the past week, two on Denali and two on Mount Barille.

  

  The National Park Service requires sixty days advance registration for climbing parties, and the rangers use that time to screen applicants, inform and educate climbers, and try to prepare them for the conditions they face on the mountains.  In one sense, their efforts are probably effective.  Most of the climbers who summit Denali and his companions come back alive.  They are easy to spot in the local shops and lodges, with their high-altitude burn, the pale goggle-strip across the eyes, and the special quality of their smiles, the look of mingled awe and pride in their eyes.

  Maybe they should be encouraged to leave behind some of their eggs or sperm before they take off for base camp, in case they don’t make it back.  It doesn’t mean they are defective if an avalanche sweeps them away (as it did Andre Callari, 33, of Salt Lake City, and Brian Postlethwait, 32, of Park City, Utah, this week) or they fall to their deaths, as did Lara-Karena Kellogg on Mount Wake last month and Mizuki Takahashi and Brian Massey on Denali last week.  They have to be excellent specimens of strength and courage to even be there.

  I’m not suggesting that they be required to donate their genetic material.  That would be sure to have some unfortunate unintended consequences.  Everything does.  But what could it hurt to just drop a little suggestion along with the rest of their orientation?  Don’t answer that.  I know.  Everything has unintended consequences.

  UPDATE:

  OMG, here’s more of it:

  

  As part of an interagency effort to pacify a danger zone where hundreds of anglers daily mingle with bears expecting to dine on human leftovers, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game plans to make over several grizzlies in bright shades of drugstore hair dye. The idea behind yellow, green, orange or blue bears is to make them instantly recognizable to anyone who reports an encounter, area wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger said.

  For public safety reasons, biologists have decided they need to kill bears that repeatedly intimidate people, he said, and making it easy for people to know exactly which bear they encounter may avoid any wrongful executions.

  He and other biologists plan to tranquilize several bears that frequent the area, give them a shampoo, bleach the hair around their heads, shoulders and hindquarters, and then apply dye.

  “This is their only chance at surviving,” Selinger said.

  It’s a tactic that he predicted would draw scorn from wildlife watchers, though he says the state agency is “not trying to embarrass these bears.”

  adn.com/news/alaska/wildlife/bears

  As usual, I have mixed emotions.  I wonder how the bears will feel about it. 

  I just might have to drive down to the Kenai Peninsula this summer to get some pics of punked-out bears.  I’m way overdue for a campout, anyway.

  

  • 5:20 pm
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