Searching for Superorganisms: An Urban Expedition in Madagascar

Every year, tens of thousands of international tourists and researchers descend into the wilds of Madagascar in search of the rarest of the rare organisms on earth. Lemurs, lizards, and even lacewings are just some of the hundreds of endemic species making the island a critical global biodiversity hot spot. While I love spending time in the natural lands of the countryside, these are not the important organisms that I am seeking. I am searching for superorganisms.

A superorganism is, simply, a larger organism - itself made of smaller organisms working towards a common good. Bees in a bee hive are a classic example of such phenomena. When groups become so well coordinated and integrated so as to function as a singular unit, so the metaphor goes - they become a superorganism. Alas - I am not looking for bees either... the endemic species of superorganism I am searching for is located only in very specific environments: the University Cities of Madagascar!

My lab at the University of Toliara has completed it's first year of experimental programming, and we now prepare for 2014 and beyond, focusing on our primary objective: the mapping and cultivating of the University-Assisted Community School (UACS) model in each of the six Malagasy cities housing one of the National University System campuses.

The UACS model, developed extensively by the Netter Center at University of Pennsylvania, supports strong partnerships between university students and regional schools. What's more, such partnerships work towards the aims of highly effective Community School models (in which schools and communities work collaboratively towards widespread benefit).

Now, if my international team of undergrads through PhD candidates is able to both find and cultivate strong partnerships between Malagasy universities, regional school systems, and local communities; how will we know if we are looking at a real superorganism?

Is a UACS model iteself a superorganism, or is it an ecosystem of superorganisms?
OR - is it just an ecosystem of human organisms??

I earlier described superorganisms as both a metaphor and a reality - and that is the exact point of exploration for the programming that lies ahead.

As our lab works toward the critical aim of cultivating UACS models in Madagascar, we will be guided by a top pick of global curriculum to aid us in developing scientific perspectives on the nature and narrative of the school as superorganism.

Pictured above is our (very fledgling) collection of resources. A sort of UACS incubator in a suitcase if you will. Through generous private donations, this year I bring a panoply of resources ranging from Tablets (3) and a Laptop (1), to a portable EEG headset* (1), and most critically - the absolute best in both science and civics curriculum from around the world!

Our three specific curriculum resources:

• The Big History Project
• 13.7 billion years of history and more  - on one little DVD-ROM! 
• This incredible resource brings an internationally benchmarked curricular foundation to Malagasy schools, and one that integrates the physical, biological, and social sciences in a comprehensible and awe-inspiring way! 
• It is within this context of Big History that students are given lenses through which to view their community as a nested complex of organs, organisms, and super-organisms in both metaphoric and scientific terms. 

• Project Citizen (Malagasy Edition)
• A service-learning project in which university students work with high school students to analyze public policy and advocate for positive community development.
• This is the work-horse of our applied learning opportunities and provides tangible benefits for students, schools, and the broader community!
• As students begin to search their own community for signs of the UACS superorganism, we will use the lauded Project Citizen framework to examine potential policy development opportunities. 

• TED-ED
• DVD's loaded with topical TED Talks on issues of Education, Community Development, Urban Studies, Digital Democracy, and much, much more!
• All videos are offered with both french and english sub-titles. This promises to transform our previously struggling English Language Learning Center!

Our information technology resources are slim to say the least - the only way to proceed in such a harsh environment is to capitalize on social capital - bonding and bridging our way to a system of superorganismic significance. That is to say.... using the UACS model, we can now deploy our more than capable University of Toliara Teachers-in-Training into our regional K-12 school partners with the absolute leading-edge of curriculum in hand and mind. 

As the high school and university students of Toliara work together to map and cultivate a healthy UACS superorganism locally, they are really cultivating a healthy future for their city and university cities, globally. There is something about studying the big history of brains, schools, and society all together and all at once - which catalyzes the growth of this exciting prospect. I hope you'll join us over the year on our expedition in search of the superorganisms of urban Madagascar!

*For those wondering how we can use an EEG headset (a measurement tool for brainwaves), our educational psychology students have a special interest in neuropsychology, and this entry level tool, combined with our curricular resources will give them access to new horizons of understanding the effects of, for example, fear, stress and play in student learning and life success. 

Zen and the art of GMO Policy Making

Madagascar is an island known the world over for it's unique evolutionary pathway. A pathway fated early on from it's isolated location in the Indian ocean conspiring with it's natural geological diversity to yield an unimaginably endemic radiation of plant and animalian diversity. Yet this diversity was 'fated', as it were, by situational happenstance - not conscious intent. Then, some two-thousand years ago - waves of a species with a most curious cranium began to land on these bleeding red shores. Humanity has left it's mark on Madagascar is fascinating ways; some intentional, perhaps, some unintentional. The on-going march of domestication of plants and animals in Malagasy agricultural systems is perhaps the most beautiful and complex blending of such intentional and unintentional change. For example, the voanjobory bean is a unique culinary treasure. Selected each season by skilled Malagasy farmers; this richly nutty legume offers a world of flavor beyond the bean isle of any western supermarket. The voanjobory is just one crop of many selected in this manner by taste and performance each growing season. An intentional selection process, the rise of which has cultivated human civilization for over 10,000 years! But the world is changing quickly; the variety of crops today's farmer may select from is expanding. From farm to region, nation to the world; globalizing forces, for better or worse, have expanded the choices each farmer must select from for any given field. In addition to global trade in agricultural seeds; a faster rate of flow is occurring in the symbolic domain of information. Basic Internet infrastructure combined with robust international scientific (and media) networking, now serve as strong environmental forces of selection for the thoughts and feelings a given farmer, student, researcher, or public policy maker experiences. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are the new kids on the block in the agri-seed ecosystem; and their arrival on the world stage has been met with exactly the kind of tribalistic brow-beating one would predict from the science of our moralistic brains. 

When it comes to GMOs in Africa; Madagascar is an exquisite case study. While details on current public policy are still vague (our students are hard at work separating fact from fiction!); we do know that Madagascar has among the most strict prohibitions on this facet of biotechnology across the continent of Africa. There are currently neither production nor experimental field trials of GMOs on the island.

So what...

Is Madagascar a forward thinking paradise for organic and "sustainable" agriculture, keeping the health of it's citizens and environment on the forefront of agricultural policy? 

OR

Has Madagascar taken a knee-jerk anti-science policy position; a form a neo-colonialism brought on by anti-GMO activists from the western world (sensu Paarlberg 2009)?

Now - I could go on to offer you (and my students at the University of Toliara) an "evidence-based" review of the literature; and in doing so I could compose a (seemingly) coherent argument strongly supporting either of these conflicting positions. Indeed; from my experiences in higher education - the rule rather than the exception is for students to be educated in one tradition or the other; both under an explicit guise of "critical thinking". Obviously a "fair and balanced" approach where all perspectives are considered is the seemingly more 'honest' approach to teaching this complex content - yet it remains to be seen that a science-based pedagogy exists that can really engage students in such critical thinking.

The Agricultural IST Students at University of Toliara
The first organized University-level program to engage
the question of GMOs in Malagasy Agriculture!

One common solution is to force students into a "debate" on the issues; we tell them to use their reasoning skills to formulate a moral stance based on evidence. We then reward them for parroting the talking points of a given tribal position. This approach would be fine if  "GMOs in Madagascar" really were a black-and-white, yes-or-no question; instead this issue represents a world of gray, a world begging for nuanced civility in the discourse (Paarlberg 2009). As University of Minnesota Professor, Jonathan Foley says "We have to get it right on our first (and only) try".

What if we change the questions we are asking? What if instead of telling students to use their reasoning skills to join one tribe or another; we tell them a new story about the functioning of our moral brains, and we give them a new vantage point from which to explore the science. This is exactly the experiment we launched last month at the agricultural Institut Superior Technologique (IST) at the University of Toliara here in SW Madagascar.

If want to see a reasoned, rational debate on GMOs in Madagascar; the first place to start is with human irrationality! When the competing tribes of science evoke the rational "evidence-based" approach of their own side; they are demonstrating a profound anti-science stance regarding the human condition. Advances in evolutionary science and moral psychology over and over again tell us a different story of our moral and moralistic brains.

We are tribalistic intuitionists; most ALL of us. We believe first and reason second. Our brains are naturally social and emotional - not scientific. "Well of course most people are like that, but not me and not my friends; We use reason and critical thinking!" - you are saying to yourself. Well - with all due respect, this is improbable at best (Haidt 2012, Kurzban 2012)

So what is to be done in the classroom? Well; a new science of intentional change is emerging that opens a mountainous set of tools for the curious educator to explore. In short; if we view the full range of diversity in opinion (on say, GMOs in Madagascar) as the end result (phenotype) of proximate evolutionary processes governing behavior, emotion, and cognition - we can begin to formulate environmental changes to the classroom that select for our most core values, rather than the knee-jerk (unIntentional - with a capital I) intuitional responses that our brains are so so good at 'naturally selecting' for (Wilson 2011, Wilson et.al in press). HUH? WHA?

In simpler terms.... rather than telling students to try to pick a side; we can engage them in viewing the moral discourse (on GMOs in Madagascar) as an ecosystem, or an organism; with ebbs and flows of energy that can result in states of system health or disease. Or as Jonathan Haidt conceives for political discourse, as yin and yang, balancing forces, the wisdom of which only emerges from healthy interaction.

In an ancient wisdom context, I am talking about the Buddhist notion of Mindfulness, cultivated traditionally through meditation. Increasingly, however, this state of consciousness is being evoked through a diverse range of metaphors and exercises of the mind empirically proven by researchers in the field of Contextual Behavioral Sciences (Kashdan & Ciarrochi 2013).

Educators may be able to tap these heavily validated approaches to cultivating Mindfulness for the service of improving moral discourse at the classroom, and perhaps public policy making domain.

After studying the evidential and moralistic diversity on the impact of GMOs; my students are currently engaged in the Service-Learning component of the course. Contacting a wide range of professionals with some knowledge of, or stake in this issue, to better understand this most human ecosystem first hand. In the months to come, our top students will be selected to craft a report. NOT a report about "should Madagascar grow GMOs or not"; but rather, it is an analysis of the "health" of the moral discourse in their country. This report will be made available to our growing list of Governmental and Non-Governmental agencies critically shaping the future of Malagasy Agricultural Policy.

There literally is a zen to the art of making public policy on biotechnology, I hope you'll follow our experiences as we cultivate this art at the University of Toliara!

What are your thoughts on this approach? Please comment or e-mail me [Dustin@MythicMinds.us].... Despite my background in Organic Agriculture, the response has been clearly more strongly supportive from the "Pro-GMO" side, and decidedly more skeptical from my "Anti-GMO" friends. If you believe science is on your side of this issue, than this process can only help cultivate an evidentially informed perspective. Yet if you focus mightily on the notion that "my science is right, how dare this guy muddy the waters for these students".... then perhaps you disagree with this methodology. One thing is clear - in the science on GMOs the only rational approach for the majority of us non-experts is a rather weak stance, welcoming new evidence with a skeptical eye, and wary of overtly moralisitic simplification of the complex reality.


References:

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon

Books. New York, NY

Kurzban, R. (2012) Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind. 
Princeton University Press

Paarlberg, R. (2009). Starved for Science: How biotechnology is being kept out of Africa. Harvard

University Press. Cambridge, MA

Wilson, D.S. (2011). The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a

Time. Little, Brown and Company; Hachette Book Group. New York, NY

Wilson, D.S.; Hayes, S.C.; Biglan, A.; Embry, D.D. (in press). Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of

Intentional Change. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Cambridge University Press.

Kashdan, T.B.; Ciarrochi J.V. (2013). Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology: The Seven

Foundations of Well-Being. The Context Press, an Imprint of New Harbinger Publications Inc. Oakland

Evolving Groups of Groups & Sparking an Education Innovation Revolution in the Process!

This picture may appear to be 'just a group of Students' - but it's much more!
These groups are exploring what it will take to integrate the best in evidence
towards the goal of offering all Malagasy Students - the best in education!
What evolutionary science is showing us - is how to design the most
cooperative, learning-enabled classroom groups possible!

Evolution shows us that Life is Groups of Groups.... That is - the biological cell is 'merely' -or perhaps rather - magically - a group of molecules; an organ is a group of biological cells; an organism is a group of organs- and a society is a group of organisms

Clearly to say that Life is 'merely' groups of groups - is disingenuine. The group-stuff of Life must be the most carefully cooperative group-stuff - in the Universe! A cooperation utterly contingent on the design elements found at every scale!

As our 10-day - EvoS seminar for our Secondary Education Teacher Training Program was coming to an end - we decided to turn our group's newly found deep-time eyes towards the potentially murky abyss that is Educational Design.

• How do our Classroom Groups function?
• How can we redesign Classroom Environments to support Students in the organization of effective learning groups (from the micro-level of the neuron; to the macro-level of culture)?

A group of learners - that is -  learning in ways that connect their neurons to their culture; their ancestral past to their anticipated futures!

These are the big questions and tall aims my Students have chosen to tackle. To take on a Service-Learning Project - in which they become the Educational Design engineers for the future of Madagascar!

Armed with our Unified Human Sciences (UHS) framework; and an expanding literature review of educational best practices - the next offering from EvoS@UoT is going to kick things up a notch! In this coming round - our Level II Educational Psychology Students will explore Positive Psychology - and the Human traits of optimum well-being. They will examine these traits from across the UHS spectrum (asking evolutionary questions at multiple scales of time and space) - and from this study - they will re-engineer the Mythic Minds - introductory course they just completed; and that their incoming Freshman colleagues are about to begin!

As our Students are exploring what the Regents Academy
Experiment was all about - they are experiencing a
radically new style of education;
& they are being empowered to bring these lessons to the
larger University of Toliara community!

From our studying of educational Best Practices - we are seeing that Humans have, what scientists call; an Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness - or what we can think of in lay terms as an environment to which our genetics are best able to thrive in. This may have BIG implications for education - and luckily these implications are simply re-confirming what many educators already know!

From our studying of David Sloan Wilson's work in creating the Regents Academy Experiment; we began to glimpse how converging evidence is leading educators to a growing list of best practices in the classroom.

For millions of years our ancestors learned in very different environments than those imposed by the "Factory Model" of education - as so eloquently described in the video belo, by Sir Ken Robinson. In these varying Environments of Evolutionary Adaptedness learning environments had some basic common traits:

• We learned in small groups of mixed ages and skill ranges
• Our learning was focused on practical, experiential learning, based on the needs of our communities
• Finding a personal niche - based on one's individual strengths - a niche that is beneficial to one's community; would have been a prized virtue

Our modern day Service-Learning model, indeed, offers a clear package of best practices for our Teachers-in-Training to bring back these ancestral traits into our future classrooms. We will practice what we preach - using the Service-Learning model to understand, and ultimately re-engineer our own educational system in ways that honor our ancestry and prepare us for the future!

In our EvoS-Inspired classroom we are evolving some most interesting varieties of Student Groups. These varieties are empowered with a rigorous evidential literacy, a sense of exploratory awe befitting of anyone wishing to study the miraculous web that is Unified Human Sciences - and - a call to action; a call to improve the very educational communities in which they study and work!

For More Information:

The Regents Academy Experiment at the Evolution Institute 

The KIDS Consortium for Service-Learning; far and away the best in the business for making these kinds of projects work!

The good folks over at George Lucas' Foundation EduTopia also get it! Their evidence-based Core Concepts perfectly reflect our approach - and provide yet another platform for our Students to re-conceive what education can be!

The EvoS Experiment - Malagasy Style!

The First EvoS - Core Course Students at University of Toliara!
These Students are nationally selected leaders;
the future of Educational Psychology in Madagascar!

As I walked from my hotel to the CEDRATOM complex at University of Toliara; the pungent burning of freshly butchered coconut palms was an all to real reminder that recovery from Hurricane Haruna is far from over.

Indeed, day one for this pilot educational experiment - offering an EvoS Consortium based Core Course, for our Educational Studies students  - got off to a rough start...

Yet - it seems like it is heading towards a remarkable finale!

It is a course that examines the vast interconnection amongst the all of the Human  Sciences. Fostering literacy in the basic processes of science - and breaking down old-fashioned perceptions of strict barriers between any and all disciplines. It is a course I titled Mythic Minds: Connecting the Story of Our Moral Brains Across the Unified Human Sciences.

We're connecting the very newest of neuro-science to the most ancient of anthropology!
We're integrating a mythic understanding of the Universe - with an evidential understanding of the same!

These are seriously lofty ideas - and the still flooded streets, hourly electrical brown-outs, and collapsed sheet-metal shacks I witness daily enroute to campus are a constant reminder of the realities many of my students are facing.

Where several Students in my class had most all of their possessions destroyed by Haruna just days ago, my colleague; Dovick Alexis and I, figured we should plan for a slow beginning for the class.  As Students trickled in, we provided them with the Moral Foundations Questionaire; explaining that this "introduction to psychology" would be different than their other courses in that we will be actually engaging in the scientific research process as we proceed through the course. Exploring our own moral psychology - through this survey mechanism - was the entry point to understanding something we are calling a "Unified Human Sciences" approach. As all the students arrived and completed their questionnaires, I turned on our brand our new LCD Monitor (Thanks to IEET!) - combined with the second screen of my Laptop; and our trusty dry-erase whiteboard for the brown-outs - I  introduced the students to the psychological quandaries of optical illusions; a fun if standard entry to understanding the human brain.

UoT is a low resource school;
in a low resource region;
in a low resource nation
It Doesn't Matter!
EvoS Content is working here!

3 days in to the 10-day intensive seminar now, and we've covered a mind boggling amount of ground - especially considering that we're working in three different languages (English, French, and Malagasy!)

Students are beginning to get grounded in our Unified Human Sciences framework; able to see how any human trait must ultimately be described and explained from a multitude of disciplines, timescales, and levels of organization. We've also explored some of the history of Human Sciences - and noted it's a bit WEIRD. That is - most of these Human Sciences were developed by Scientists who could be classified as coming from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Developed backgrounds. What does Moral Psychology - Malagasy Style actually look like?

Today we decided we will map the moral vocabularies of the Malagasy language! We will have our Educational Psychology students take cultural ownership of the concepts we just learned by seeing how the vocabularies surrounding morality in their own communities may or may not "map" onto the transdisciplinary moral psychology of the west.

We dissected a French translation of the field's emerging standard research tool - The MFQ-30; or Moral Foundations Questionnaire originally created by Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham, and Brian Nosek; we talked about how a translation is much more than a "1-to-1" word conversion; we have to make these metrics culturally relevant! Quite a task for our first year Undergrads, but I am confident they're up for it. Student teams of 3 have each selected 3 items from the MFQ-30; and over the next week - they will each interview (n=15) Toliara residents (per group; total surveyed to be n>100) - from widely variable backgrounds regarding the accessibility, relevance, and associated moral Malagasy vocabularies - in the context of Haidt and colleagues theory of Moral Foundations.

Our Students work in this area will directly result in a reliable and enduring new Social Sciences research tool for the entire nation of Madagascar! A tool that Students themselves are already self-reporting - they could also use to engage their future High School students in the transdisciplinary science of moral psychology!

As part of the final class assessment - students must craft science-based arguments for or against a very specific Educational Policy position:

• That further developing the EvoS program at University of Toliara should be a significant priority across all of our Biological and Human Sciences related departments.

Preliminary evidence suggests this policy may be very supportable!

A Seed Under the Tamarind Tree

Under the leguminous shade of the campus
Tamarind tree - we sat and talked....

Under the leguminous shade of the campus Tamarind tree - we sat and talked - about the heat - yes; but also about a very bright future for technology and science education at the University of Toliara (UoT).

I was with my colleague; Dovick Alexis - and the head of our social sciences institute, the ENS, Dr. Juliette Silasi.

We had just toured the Institutes developing Information Technology Center - which is incredibly promising but severely hampered by security concerns due to a straightforward - lack of resources to invest in basic infrastructure.

Now was time to get down to business; I had two goals here - to get permission to begin developing a website for the UoT; and to advance our UoT membership level in a leading international science education network - The EvoS Consortium for Evolutionary Studies.

The website would require permission from our President; Prof. Dina Alphonse; however - the offerings from EvoS were met with an enthusiasm and logical connections I was not prepared for!

I presented Dr. Silasi with a basic transdisciplinary model of Human Sciences - and she intuitively understood what EvoS is about. Indeed - the very structure of the ENS institute Silasi has shaped over the years is ideally suited to become a campus hub for EvoS - strengthening both this social sciences institute - and developing a resource for literally ALL other natural and social sciences departments at UoT.

We agreed that, in addition to my development of Neuropsychology programming for the ENS (why I originally came aboard) - I would offer an introductory course; in the vein of David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution for Everyone" at the University of Binghamton - and now across the SUNY system. An introduction into the world of integrated bio-social sciences - it's great for the students of course; but I am also seeing how it may be transformative for the University as well!

That evening we all sat down with President Alphonse. The concept of a UoT website was welcomed as a way to advance multiple University goals (e.g. technology integration, multi-lingual integration, and global presence). As well - President Alphonse was equally warm to the premise of EvoS - and it's ability to strengthen Universities by building bridges across departments. The President welcomes our pilot EvoS course in the Faculty of Psychology - and pending success here; we may be able to offer resources across the broad range of biological and social sciences offered at this most unique University; using a basic evolutionary framework as the glue that connects all knowledge!

In the very same way that biological and social sciences are inter-linked; so were my requests for a website and an EvoS experiment.

Laza Andrainy - Member of the UoT
IT Leadership Team

Today we purchased the domain: www.UniToliara.info; and today we begin a truly massive service-learning project to bring UoT to the world stage - by creating an Internet presence worthy of our promise! Amongst coffee cups and palm trees; I sat with a motivated young student; Laza Andrainy. We had worked till 8 last night crafting text at the English Language Learning Center - and today we began Laza's training in basic web-publishing using Google sites.

We have a LOT of work ahead of us; the University is of substantial size - mapping it onto a website from scratch is daunting - never mind doing it in three languages (English, French, Malagache)!! Yet - in this hard work - I believe some magic will happen. I believe the website - and it's creation through our cross-departmental IT Leadership Team; can serve as an engine, incubator, and metric for connecting disciplines and departments throughout the University in all of the ways the EvoS model for Higher Educator fosters. More fundamentally; I believe it is a way for UoT Students to take increased ownership of both their education - and the Internet itself. As I watched Laza learn and begin to create digital, global content for the first time on our humble Acer Netbook; it was clear a seed has been planted.

Follow our project as we cultivate the growth of information technology and transdisciplinary science education in Southwestern Madagascar!

_______________________________

Thanks to the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies - African Futures Project for the donation of the laptops used to create the first University of Toliara Website!