environment

In part one, I explored my mother’s life and work, relative to the social conditions she experienced as a low-income, self-directed woman navigating the public health and housing systems, and asked whether, viewing her life through the arc of 76 years of continuous productivity in the fiber arts, different decisions could have been made resulting in better accommodations and better integration into her community. I asked whether it was worthwhile to reassess our standards of fitness, disability, and disorder.

What are the conditions of disorder in an individual, and at what moment does disorder become a permanent designation, rather than a temporary condition?

Let’s use a slightly less emotionally fraught frame than a human life. Let’s observe some monkey behavior, not because of the monkey’s proximity to humans, as a primate, or because they have been fascinating to science for that reason, but because the monkey is my mother’s Chinese astrological sign, and she would like that association.

We are studying capuchin monkey behavior, for the purpose of developing a standard of fitness. We enter the habitat where they have evolved and adapted over countless millennia—let’s say a forested area in Honduras. We observe a troop and look for a specimen that appears healthy and generally representative of the species. We settle on an individual that does not appear to be a dominant male or a highly fertile female, but a female of no special rank relative to the troop, who is socially mobile, non-aggressive, non-avoidant. Our selection appears to represent a fairly neutral specimen from which we can extrapolate our findings onto the rest of the species. She appears fit, at the median presentation for the species—not the most successful, not the most disadvantaged. Just an average capuchin monkey. This is our focal individual, our point of departure for understanding monkeys.

We have chosen as our focal individual, our case study, an individual who exists within a social order that has many categories, and who exhibits a variety of behaviors and characteristics, monkeys being a highly social species. She is healthy—fit, we might say—within her environment and her social order. Looked at with more context, we can see that we are selecting an individual who has some characteristics that can be said to be representative of the species—bilateral symmetry, similar arrangements of limbs, tail, organs, fur. But this individual will differ from other individuals according to their social role—sex characteristics, size and weight relative to a dominant male or fertile female, specific social behaviors relative to their place in the troop, and so on. Because we haven’t studied the whole troop over generations, we don’t really know how this individual ranks, in percentile terms, for any given characteristic. But for our purposes, we call her good enough to represent the species for our study.

We capture the individual and bring her into our laboratory.

Stop. Reflect. Project. Pause.

This is the most important moment of the whole examination. Everything that follows is exposition.

In bringing an example of a fit individual into the laboratory, we are now examining a disordered individual. Disorder is a function of environment, not identity.

The condition of her disorder is the environment of the laboratory—an environment to which she is not adapted. The fit individual is fit within a set of conditions—in this case, forest canopy; a containing species with a social order that sorts its members into roles; a milieu of related species; and environmental resources and conditions. In changing the monkey’s environmental and social conditions, we introduce her into a natural and social environment that diverges from the one for which she is adapted.

In changing this individual’s relational status from emplaced to portable—meaning that her original environment was unique, and that uniqueness is due to a relationship with land—the environmental conditions are emplaced—while our laboratory conditions have been carefully designed to be invisible and replicable—and therefore portable—we change the way any data we collect can be interpreted.

We can no longer make predictions about her behavior relative to her embedded environment. We are now examining monkey disability. Monkey environmental disorder. Monkey social disorder. Monkey with special needs.

Disability is defined by an environment, not an individual. Saying otherwise makes the conditions that shaped that environment invisible, and therefore assumed as immutable. Shout it loud. Steal the idea and run with it.

From now forward, every. single. metric. is measuring a disordered individual, relative to the social and environmental conditions she has evolved over millennia to be fit within. From now forward, the only standard of fitness is her ability to thrive in a hostile environment.

In defining her characteristics as representative of her species, using the snapshot of any data we collect the moment we arrive in the laboratory, there are a lot of things that we don’t know:

• we don’t know if she was ascendant or descendant relative to the median for an individual of her social class;
• we don’t know what she would have become, given another five years in the troop she was taken from;
• we don’t know what knowledge she carried that only existed in her—which relationships, which routes through the canopy, which individuals trusted her and why;
• we don’t know what role she was growing into, and little about the role she occupied on the day we captured her;
• we don’t know who she would have mentored, or been mentored by, had we not removed her from her environment;
• we don’t know what her position cost her to hold, or what it would have paid her, over a longer arc;
• we don’t know what conditions produced her “neutrality” – whether it was constitutional, or whether it was what her troop’s social order permitted her to be;
• we don’t know what she would look like measured against a troop with more resources, less predation pressure, a different history;
• we don’t know what our presence, before capture, had already changed;
• we don’t know what her stress response tells us about her species, and what it only tells us about this laboratory or this individual;
• we don’t know what parts of her behavior we are about to record can be considered a baseline, and which are trauma responses to a hostile environment.

We don’t know that our definition of fitness is sound, relative to her environment, since fitness was never a property she carried alone—it was always a relationship between her, her community, and a forest we have just removed her from.

Sit with that.

rigor: mortis

Science demands rigor. Yet ‘rigor,’ as a term of art, defines stiffness, rigidity, resistance to change. And it’s this scientific rigor that my thesis is presented to indict. We have, as scientists, observers of phenomena, been entraining to limited premises, to confined metrics that don’t scale, to questions defined by a culture that has changed faster than our environment has changed us. The method is sound: question, test, record, reflect, question, repeat. But in our pursuit of specificity of quantifiable data, we’ve lost the frame. We rarely ask the systems level questions, because they often involve cooperation to answer, and cooperation is hard.

Einstein’s theory of relativity established this formally: there is no privileged, view-from-nowhere position from which to measure anything. Every observation is frame-dependent—inseparable from the position, motion, and condition of the observer making it. There is no neutral laboratory. There is no absolute vantage from which the monkey can be measured without the measurement itself already being shaped by the frame we’ve placed her in.

We need to start observing ourselves, and the conditions we assume before observing our subject.

a study of a study

Let’s move forward. Considering that our study is now the study of a disordered individual, let’s make the best of it, and reflect on our data.

We recognize that we want this to be a longitudinal study. We are rigorous—we want to play the long game. So we bring in another individual—a male—to make a breeding pair. We can now study our subject over generations.

We observe as many aspects of biology and behavior as we can think of, in our laboratory:

• growth rate, weight gain, caloric intake relative to species norms established elsewhere;
• reproductive cycle, gestation length, litter size, interval between pregnancies;
• maternal behavior—grooming frequency, nursing duration, proximity-seeking in offspring;
• social hierarchy between our two adults, now that a hierarchy of two is all that’s available to form;
• vocalization patterns, and how they change in an enclosure with no canopy to carry them;
• activity level across a 24-hour cycle, measured against a light schedule we control;
• stress hormone levels, sampled at intervals convenient to our staffing;
• response to novel objects, introduced on our schedule, to test cognition and adaptability;
• aggression and appeasement behaviors, now performed for an audience of one instead of a troop;
• longevity, and cause of death, when it comes, recorded as data rather than as loss;

And, across generations, we record whether any of these measurements drift.

And recognize that all of these findings represent behaviors and adaptations within a hostile environment that our subjects were not adapted to inhabit. We are recording disorder as baseline data for the species being observed.

Sit with that. Metabolize the conflicts presented here. Chew on the difficult truths.

Pause. Reflect. If you understand, grieve.

Then let’s move on.

We publish our findings. We present our data as representative of the normal range for the species. We get funding and extend our study to 20 generations of monkeys. This appears to be a longitudinal study.

But it’s a longitudinal study of disordered individuals, now sorted according to their fitness within a hostile environment they were not adapted to. Our study has shifted from “observing monkey fitness” to “monkey fitness relative to a specific, hostile environment.” Or better yet, “how do monkeys sort when we force them through this tube?”

Our 20-generation study is now sorting for survivability of hostile conditions, rather than fitness within the environment for which they are adapted.

Make note of that, and flag this for further study.

Hey, but we’ve got a lot of data. Our boss is impressed.

20 generations on, we’ve got a lot to work with in understanding monkey fitness and behavior. We’re able to establish norms, and medians, and divergences, and anomalies. We have a serious body of work, that’s the result of deep investments of time, attention, and capital.

This is the moment of truth, regarding the economy of scale, and its effect on the future success of our control group: the lab-raised monkeys relative to the land-embedded monkeys.

We come to this moment, recognizing that we have two populations to consider. We can name the conditions of their isolation. We can also consider the conditions of their reintegration. Let’s explore this.

Given that the monkeys evolved within a unique environment that they were then separated from;

and given that a subset of those monkeys were allowed to thrive within a different environment;

what is the degree of shift, relative to the original environment?

What did the laboratory monkeys miss out on, in their adaptation to the laboratory environment, and how might those variables provide challenges for reintegrating into their ancestral environment?

Our new control group of lab-embedded monkeys missed out on a lot of sensory and cognitive experiences that inform their new fitness criteria:

• the full sensory and spatial complexity of forest canopy—three-dimensional movement, depth judgment across branches, distance calibrated to a body moving through open space rather than a cage;
• exposure to the full range of native food sources, and the searching, testing, and problem-solving that foraging for them requires;
• a troop large enough to generate the full range of social roles—elders, rivals, allies, mentors, mentees—rather than the truncated hierarchy of a mated pair;
• exposure to predation risk, and the vigilance, alarm-calling, and group-coordination behaviors that risk selects for;
• seasonal variation—rainfall, food scarcity and abundance, temperature shifts—and the adaptive behaviors those cycles require;
• inter-species contact—the milieu of other animals sharing the forest, and the behaviors calibrated to that wider ecology;
• the chance to leave a troop, or be displaced from one, and everything that migration and renegotiation of status would have taught;
• unstructured time with no observer present—behavior that isn’t shaped, even unconsciously, by being watched;
• the possibility of failure with real consequence—a wrong choice that costs a life, rather than one recorded as data and intervened upon;
• continuity of relationship with individuals who remembered them across years, not just across a study’s observation window.

Along with this, our new control group is sorting along new criteria for fitness, that didn’t apply to our original population:

• tolerance for confinement—stillness, restricted range of movement, proximity to walls and boundaries with no option to leave;
• tolerance for chronic proximity to a small, fixed set of individuals with no ability to disperse, avoid, or seek distance;
• tolerance for human observation—habituation to being watched, handled, and measured as a condition of daily life;
• tolerance for a fixed, human-controlled feeding schedule, rather than self-directed foraging;
• tolerance for a fixed light/dark cycle imposed by researchers, rather than natural seasonal variation;
• reduced vigilance behavior, in the absence of any predation pressure to maintain it;
• reduced range of alarm and coordination calls, in an environment with nothing left to coordinate against;
• compliance with novel-object and cognitive-testing protocols introduced on a schedule convenient to staff, not to the control group;
• recovery speed from repeated, unavoidable stress exposure—since the same procedures recur across a generation’s whole life, and across every generation after it;
• whatever traits made an individual “easy to study”—docility, low reactivity, predictability—now quietly functioning as fitness criteria in their own right, selected for without ever being named as such.

Let’s pause again. That’s a lot to take in.

Two populations of monkeys. They’re all the same species, but observed in contrast, they are functionally different in important ways.

Having observed a group of monkeys in the laboratory with deep granularity, we have learned a lot about monkey behavior, variation, and fitness.

Having said that, let’s consider a different project. Let’s say we want to abandon our study, and allow our laboratory subjects to reintegrate into their ancestral environment. Will this be a clean and easy transition? Considering the metrics for fitness our data supports, and considering that we are choosing candidates for reintroduction based on our laboratory model of fitness, let’s see what the net gain/loss looks like.

Compared to our lab-based control group, here’s who would be sorted out of the original community:

Individuals that exhibit:

• heightened vigilance and frequent alarm-calling would read as hypervigilance or excessive anxiety, since the new baseline has no predation pressure to calibrate against;
• complex three-dimensional spatial navigation and constant movement across variable terrain would read as hyperactivity or an inability to remain still;
• a wide vocal repertoire, calibrated to coordinate a large troop across dense canopy, would read as excessive or disordered vocalization relative to a population that only ever had to communicate across a cage;
• strong reactivity to novel stimuli, appropriate to an environment where the unfamiliar is often dangerous, would read as poor stress regulation or low stimulus tolerance;
• selective, discriminating avoidance of certain individuals or situations would read as social dysfunction, since the lab baseline was shaped by populations with no ability to avoid anyone;
• assertive competition for troop rank and resources would read as aggression, absent the larger social structure that gives competition its context and its limits;
• deep, long-term bonds formed and re-formed across a large, shifting troop would read as inconsistent or unstable attachment, next to a baseline of fixed, forced proximity to the same few individuals for life;
• foraging behavior—wide-ranging, exploratory, tolerant of extended uncertainty about where the next meal is—would read as restlessness or food-seeking dysregulation, next to a population fed on a fixed schedule;
• resistance to human handling and observation would read as poor compliance or temperament problems, rather than as an intact, appropriate wariness of an unfamiliar species;
• variability itself—the sheer range of individual difference the original troop could sustain—would read as noise, or as a lack of the consistency the new baseline has come to expect, simply because the new population was never permitted to generate that range in the first place.

Every trait that would now be called divergent is a trait that was, in the original environment, either neutral or actively adaptive. Nothing in this list describes a defect. It describes a population still calibrated to an environment they have been separated from, and that moment of separation has ceased to be factored in to any assessment metric. This is the legacy of our original group of scientists failing to pass on their knowledge to a new generation. This is not an indictment, just an acknowledgment that there is cultural information that was simply forgotten.

None of this should be controversial, from my perspective. Nothing I’m presenting is new. It’s just considering a broader and more reasonable set of variables for organizing data. Why this doesn’t reflect current diagnostic paradigms is difficult to not interpret as nefarious intent, but I know better than to assume that.

monkey see, monkey do

From here, i’d like to actually step into the frame, or rather ask that together, we merge with it. We are the monkeys, the monkeys we were observing are now us. and we are observing the traits we have described as divergent, with the understanding that we are a colony of highly social primates, observing behavior, scanning for range, and sorting for adaptation to a highly restricted environment. How did we get here? What assumptions do we bring with us to our observations? Are our calculations neutral, or are they calibrated to ensure that the environment, the conditions of the laboratory, are maintained?

And by environment, i don’t just mean the physical environment, i mean the web of social relationships that exist inside of cultural expectations. We are a population that has been living in a constrained environment for generations, and our scientists have forgotten to relate their current data back to this population’s original emplaced environment.

We’ll explore this in part 3.

Pause. Reflect. Grieve. Celebrate. Repair. Rinse. Repeat.