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It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill

I originally imagined myself, upon finished Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, using the knowledge I would gain to dissect my own actions, gaining insight into what the underlining motives are for what I do, and then gain an upper-hand on my peers. In hindsight, that was dumb. The lessons that can be applied from the book are not as I have described, but instead, it offers an introductory glance into the field of evolutionary psychology. I didn't read up on the field prior to reading the book, which was a mistake, so I was surprised by the contents of the message. Inside I found out more about how Darwin uncovered his theory of evolution then I had ever known, and I witnessed first-hand how to apply it as it relates to all aspects of human nature.

The ideas of free will, determinism, and utilitarianism dominate the latter half of the book. These concepts are key to grasping and understanding evolutionary psychology. Sacrificing oneself for the good of the group, holding the door open for the person behind you, and many other actions are not as noble as they seem upon first glance; instead they amount to a "self-serving manipulation of image.” What we think we are doing for certain reasons (morals, ethics, et cetera) is actually being done unintentionally by our mind, and that it can be attributed to evolutionary tactics. For much the same reason that the TIT FOR TAT strategy succeeded so well in the computer simulation, those who generally are not a nuisance for society are often able to procreate, spreading their genes, and in doing so continuing the lineage of “do onto others.” While I would like to believe that my actions are greater than just a desire to procreate, it seems hard to justify myself as being more important than others in that I can choose to do something. Free will has been argued by many people smarter than myself, so I am not going to attempt to parrot their ideas or disagree until I can gain a stronger intellectual base in this area.

I have much more reading to do in this field if I am to gain a better understanding. It seems as if this book serves more as a basic introduction into the field and that if I wish to learn more I will have to do much greater research. However, as funds are a little short, I will for now be reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. This is another book recommended by Ryan Holiday's reading list, and according to him it may be the greatest book ever written. I can only hope to gain as much from this as he did.

]]> http://endofempire79.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/richard-manning-on-the-psychosis-of-civilization/ Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:37:03 +0000 endofempire79 http://endofempire79.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/richard-manning-on-the-psychosis-of-civilization/ http://www.whatawaytogomovie.com presents another clip as part of the "Why Are Things Falling Apart?" series. In this one, Richard Manning exposes civilization for what it is: a form of psychosis -- a human zoo.

Yes, we lead the world in preferred recreational drug use, although the numbers from UK are suspiciously absent, probably because of all the tobacco they put in their joints. Let me just say: If you don't want to get high on tobacco or weed, mixed joints are incredible.

Anyway, people have been saying that this survey is reflective of the increasingly desperate situation that is modern America. Basically, our addiction to drugs has led us to the economic crisis occurring at home, as well as our follies abroad. I say bullshit. American drug use isn't a recent trend, and if you believe otherwise, I've got a collapsed bridge to sell you.

What I'm here to tell you is that rampant American drug use has been going on for years, and that it is simply the natural consequence of our world dominance, and that particular dominance is best explained in the terms of Evolutionary High-cology.

You see, there is a relatively new field of science that is very controversial. It's called Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology basically argues that we have evolved very little since the hunter-gatherer days. Women desire tall, strong, high status men for protection and have selected for such traits throughout history (basically, your college Lacrosse frat). It further argues that men are naturally polygamous, women would prefer 1/10 of a high status husband than all of a low-status one, and that monogamy allows societies like those of the modern West to prosper because they allow every man a wife. Otherwise, there would be violent surplus men.

Let's summarize: A field of science argues that humans have evolved to naturally select for the most dominant and beautiful people, and that culture plays little part in determining human behavior, eventually concludes that the most successful societies are the ones that allow weak...people...to pass on...their genes.

Jesus, Evolutionary Psychology makes my fucking brain hurt!

To further illustrate how ridiculous Evolutionary Psychology can be, read this passage from
this article "10 un-pc truths about human nature" regarding how men evolved to prefer blondes:

"It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing."

Read that shit. It pretty much says that women decided to "evolve" blond hair.

"I need blond hair to attract men. Hey science, make it happen!"

If a science like this has its ideas regularly published in journals, I think that the concept of Evolution High-cology is just as legit.

Evolutionary High-cology is idea that society has evolved not to select for genes, but to select for the greatest and best available highs. In essence, people who can get access to the best highs are the winners in the evolutionary game.

Think about the early Western societies. Greece: Wine, drugs. Rome: Wine, drugs. Sparta: Nothing. What have we taken from the Spartans? Not a damn thing. Thank god for that, too. 300 was a terrible movie and the Spartans were wound up so tight from having no drugs and killing their babies that they ended up completely outnumbered. What a bunch of dumbasses.

Beyond Greece and Rome, every dominant empire had its abundance of drugs. Japan had Saki and Opiates. The favorite pastime of the British was the pub and caffeine, not scoring the hottest bitties.

Want to know why Communism fell? Try finding a dimebag in Moscow.

It goes much deeper than this. You want to throw me some counter examples? You want to say that alcohol and drugs are practically banned in India, a burgeoning empire? Well, they use about a thousand gods as a way to stimulate the senses. What about the Ottoman Empire? All they had was some strong tobacco. Yeah, sure; when's the last time you read anything about the Ottomans? They sucked.

Take a look at a lot of primitive societies. Do their respective manhood initiation ceremonies revolve around losing one's virginity or getting married to three wives? Hell no. It usually involves walking alone into the wilderness and taking some bad acid. "Kid, if you can't handle these drugs, I don't see what use we're gonna have for you".

Let's move beyond society, however, and look at things from an individual basis. When is the last time you went out looking for a significant other without swilling some beers first? How often do you think, "this sex would be better if I were high on X ("X" meaning hypothetical drug, not ecstacy. Although X could hypothetically be X)".

Do men try to get rich in order to score the best women? Do women try to make themselves more beautiful in order to score the best men? Maybe we improve ourselves simply because superiority=more people willing to share drugs with you.

Sex, drugs and Rock 'n' Roll. It should actually be Rock 'n' Roll, drugs and sex. Men and women become musicians because they otherwise lack the status to score the best drugs. The sex is simply the icing on the cake. What did Jimi Hendrix overdose on again? A whole shitload of drugs mixed together. A man can only have one orgasm at a time.

Who gets more infamous stories told about them? The dominant drug dealers or the dominant pimps? What is the U.S. waging a multi-billion dollar war on? Uh-huh.

It's the eternal chicken and egg argument, and I'm siding with the chicken (egg).

So, back to the U.S.: weed, X, coke, beer, liquor, Xanax, Adderall, Ambien, Ritilin, heroin, Acid, shrooms, tobacco, Oxycontin, coffee etc. Our decadence is simply the result of our dominance, and we are likely headed for a massive fall-off in drug use given the decline of our empire. Is it the massive intake of drugs that ultimately predates the fall of every empire? Don't ask me, it's 10:36 am and I'm on my 5th beer.

This is the Klon Review signing off, and I'm wondering how many people will take this literally.

Editor's note:  The concept of Evolutionary High-cology was arrived at mutually by myself and Charlie, creative mind behind Seattle Untimely, on the way to Sasquatch music festival in late May.  People there were very high.

The assumption is determinism, that "... every event, including human cognition and behaviour, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences." (1)

The next assumption is that all human behavior serves an evolutionary purpose.  Now, let us stop and consider for a moment the societal implications of such a view. 

1). Law and its consequences are largely based on the notion of free will. 

2). The notion of marriage is a religious institution..or at least that's how it started.

3). In the US at least, we believe that all people are created equally and have sought to right wrongs against folks who were not treated as if they were created equally.

So, quite simply, one could view the motivation of evolutionary psychology as having the intent (consciously or unconsciously) of undermining the most important elements for the stability of society.  Even though these elements would likely be viewed as 'adaptive' in allowing the species to survive.  As an aside, I wonder what an evolutionary explanation would be for the study of evolutionary psychology (in other words, how is DNA preserved through this pursuit).  But I digress....

So from an evolutionary psychology perspective, which has an underlying liberal political perspective in the US, people are not responsible for their behavior ("My genes made me do it!"), marriage is whatever you want it to be, and people with different characteristics could be considered less evolved or at least posing a threat to the survival of the most fit DNA.

Now all of this despite the fact that no simple aspect of human behavior has found to be genetically determined.  There's some evidence for general dispositions (emotional reactivity or sensation seeking), but as for specific behaviors, there is no evidence for any specific behavior that is tied to our genes.

So, I will present some evidence that evolutionary psychology undermines the basis for civilization, if accepted.

Evidence for the undermining of point 1.

Why Men Rape  -- It helps propagate the gene pool!!  It's not about power, domination, and control.  What were you thinking?

Muslims Resort to Suicide Bombing with Hopes of Breeding  -- See point 4.  It asserts that since Muslims are polygymist, that there are less females available.  So the the offer of 72 virgins in the after life offers them a chance to finally propogate their genes!  So, I suppose the problem of Muslim suicide bombers would be solved by allowing them to rape someone or otherwise propagate their genes.  That motivation would completely disappear....right??  If you want to actually learn something about the Arab mind, I recommend ShrinkWrapped's currently 15 part series.

Crime is the result of men's competitive desires  -- See point 7.  Those who act violently towards other men, may have been more likely to reproduce!  So, next time you feel angry, go ahead and punch the sucker.  You're more likely to have some fun in bed if so, and if you're lucky, keep the DNA of humans going!  Or, play that midnight basketball, that will give you an outlet for you competitive strivings based on our evolutionary history....but I'm not sure how it will help you spread your genes.  Worth a try though...who knows, right??

Evidence for undermining point 2.

Humans are by nature polygamist-- See point 7.  That's right...and we should pass laws allowing polygamy then!  It asserts that men benefit from monogamy...hmmph....and women benefit from polygamy...what??  That doesn't seem right to me, but what the hey, I'm a man...  Now, I really don't think the government should have anything to do with marriage as it is a religious institution, but that is beside the point.  But we'd be fine as far as suicide bombers coming from the US go, because Christianity has no promise of virgins in the afterlife.

Homosexuality and the consolation prize -- That's right...for you homosexual males...your problem is that you can't find a woman.  And ditto (opposite obviously) for lesbians.  But, again, I think marriage should be between folk and God.  But the government's involvement has sociological ramifications when they allow gay marriage....  The government should have no part in marriage.

Evidence for point 3.

Asians rock, whites are so-so, and blacks...well...  Okay, so it's just fine to be a racist.  Let's go ahead and kill off those two inferior sub-types...so that we end up with a superior gene pool.  I think everyone knows where this type of thinking has led in the past.

So you think evolutionary psychology is cool???  I don't...  I think if it were accepted on large scale, it would undermine the basis of civilization.  Not only that, but I think it is blatantly false in almost all of its assertions.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

Friends have heard me defend The Patriot, which is not a good movie at all. But come on! Mel Gibson looks up from the cooling corpse of his next-oldest son, grabs a handful of rifles from his burning house, and recruits his next two oldest sons to sprint through the woods and ambush the British! He charges out of the woods screaming with a hatchet! And all for revenge!

I liked Man on Fire, even in spite of Tony Scott's camera antics. Sure, everyone in the film had two settings - histrionic or cold. Sure, the pacing left something to be desired. But come on! Denzel Washington loses his client's daughter in a firefight. So after getting enough blood back in his body to stumble out of bed, what does he vow?

"I'm gonna kill 'em. Anyone that was involved. Anybody who profited from it. Anybody who opens their eyes at me."

And I got similarly excited about Taken, a movie so apparently mediocre that it'll never get a domestic release (it opened in France in February of this year). The few critics who saw it described it as "paint by numbers." It looks pretty formulaic (note that none of the protagonists have a last name).

But come on! Tell me you wouldn't want to growl this into a live telephone:

Jack Bauer. Batman. Inigo Montoya. Jason Bourne. Dirty Harry. People who get beat down, lose the ones they love, and then come back in a blaze of indignation. Why does that speak to me? Why do I get such a primal, unavoidable kick out of that?

I think it speaks to that fundamental animal rage which all of us - who share more than 95% of our DNA with animals - carry. The "laugh in triumph over a defeated foe" that Orwell talks about: the brutal, pre-rational appeal of nationalism. We want to kill, and we want our killing to be sanctioned by a moral code. He hurt my family, therefore it's okay if I cut off his fingers. He killed my wife, so it's all right if I slaughter everyone he knows and burn his house to the ground. No impartial jury or outside observer would think that's a proportional or fair response - but come on! I'm the Good Guy, so my savagery makes me driven. They're the Bad Guys; their savagery makes them subhuman.

But ultimately, in stories like that, the tissue-thin distinction between Good Guys and Bad Guys suggests more than it divides. We don't cheer the Good Guy because he did the right thing by stabbing the Bad Guy in the top of the skull. We cheer the Good Guy because he totally fucking killed that dude! Did you see that? We identify with him because he has his reasons - they took my job, they hurt my family, whatever - but that's secondary^*. The chaotic, reptilian roar of victory after bashing someone's neck seals the deal.

So my love of revenge arises from evolved instincts. I think that's okay. I recognize and acknowledge it. Indulging in fantasy never hurt anyone, provided you keep it private. It's the difference between GTA 3 and Columbine. It's the difference between watching a Briana Banks movie and actually trying to fuck the babysitter. So long as I never take a drunken swing at a bouncer for wrongs real or imagined, I think I'll be fine.

We all have instincts that we did not choose making decisions for us. I try to stay informed about mine.

^* Think about it: if maiming in pursuit of revenge makes him noble, wouldn't taking the extra effort to keep his family safe in the first place be really noble?

Some of the problems that beset these articles are pretty general objections a person could have to evolutionary psychology, so I feel like I want to go over them a little bit (but I'll try to keep it short).

Why women like bad boys: ev psych explains

Jill Filopovic discusses a story, Do Jerks Get Laid More? Good news for psycho-narcissists, by Jessica Wakeman, which is commentary on a story in New Scientist, Bad guys really do get the most girls (a similar piece also appeared on ABC News). In other words, this story has been ricocheting around the Internets for a while, getting reposted and commented upon all over the place (such as here, here, here and, my favourite, here, where democracy confirms ev psych stereotypes). With all sorts of people having things to say, some share a bit too much about their own personal lives and some involve cueing up familiar cliches ('nice guys finish last,' for example, is a favourite).

Two researchers seem to be responsible for this upsurge in discussion of 'bad boy' magnetism; one is Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, who set up their project to explain why the 'dark triad' of personality traits 'persists in human nature' (from New Scientist): 'the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism.' Because these traits, Johason aledges, are maladaptive 'at their extreme,' they must be good for something, or else evolution would have kindly wiped them clean from 'human nature.' After all, we know that Mother Evolution makes all things perfectly adapted and that everything we do--especially SEX--must be a result of a deep 'nature.' Fortunately, we have a research team to explain what how these anti-social traits are really an evolutionary advantage.

Jonason's team surveyed 200 college students (I'm assuming male), comparing personality traits and correlating them with the number of sex partners each subject reported having, their attitudes toward relationships, and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

The study found that those who scored higher on the dark triad personality traits tended to have more partners and more desire for short-term relationships, Jonason reported at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Kyoto, Japan, earlier this month.... James Bond epitomises this set of traits, Jonason says. "He's clearly disagreeable, very extroverted and likes trying new things - killing people, new women." Just as Bond seduces woman after woman, people with dark triad traits may be more successful with a quantity-style or shotgun approach to reproduction, even if they don't stick around for parenting. "The strategy seems to have worked. We still have these traits," Jonason says.

Aside from the confusion provided by using James Bone, a fictional character (note to Mr. Jonason: Bond gets the girl because it's in the script), I don't even know where to start on this paragraph. First, I have to suspend judgment on Mr. Jonason as we know about problems with science writing at Neuroanthropology, but if he's touting James Bond as a way to understand human evolution, he's got to share a bit of the blame.

Lo and behold -- evolution explains why James Bond gets chicks! And it's because he's narcissistic, aggressive, and mean, not because he's brave, charming, funny, rich, well-dressed and handsome (again, let's recall that this is fiction). And men who are seeking short-term relationships, who are aggressive, who don't want long-term relationships, and are self-absorbed are cycling through lots of women because women like them that way (not because they can't and don't want to maintain a relationship).

(And why doesn't anyone point out that men find 'bad girls' alluring when we talk about this stuff? I bet if you did a study of 'bad girls,' you'd find that they had more sexual partners, too -- but would this make the news?)

In addition, the resurgent discussion of those alluring 'bad boys' also references 'another study of 35,000 people across 57 countries found a similar correlation "between the dark triad and reproductive success in men."' This research, less well-discussed in New Scientist was reported by Prof. David Schmitt of Bradley University at the Kyoto meeting. Schmitt is also the founder of the International Sexuality Description Project. Schmitt's bibliography is extensive and reflects his long-term interest in the subject, so I'm hesitant to critique what are, at best, second-hand accounts of his presentation in Kyoto (Jonason, in contrast, provides plenty of material to work on at his website). I suspect that if I read a lot more of his work, I'd probably still be having some issues with it.

Okay, so why do I have problems with this research? Ooooo, let me count the problems:

1) Methodological problems with survey research on number of sexual partners: Jill at Feministe and some of her comments focus on this -- ask guys with mild narcissist, manipulative, and aggressive tendencies around the age of 20 how many women they've slept with and can you assume that they're telling you the truth? In addition, as Jill also points out, the survey asks the number of partners these men had, not the number of times they were having sex, unlike some of the reports on the research (which imply being 'bad' leads to more sex).

2) Correlation, causation and using men's reports to judge women's preferences: We find out that narcissist, manipulative, aggressive young men report more sexual partners than normal guys; should we assume that the reason is that women like these qualities? (By the way, why didn't we ask the women about this?) We could assume that being narcissist, manipulative, and aggressive makes you more motivated to seek more partners, or that it makes you more likely to pressure people into sex, or that you're more likely to cheat and have multiple partners at once, or even that it makes women more likely to toss you out quickly once they've slept with you a couple of times (thus boosting your number of partners, but not by your own choice). But these explanations wouldn't fit into our James Bond theory of male hotness. And all these 'reproductive strategies' might be much less successful than having fewer partners, but we don't know because we're theorizing about 'reproductive success' (which presumably involves BABIES from data on dating and sex among young people, at least in Jonason's research).

3) Assumption that subjects' behaviour demonstrates universal human trait: Jill Filopovic also points out the problem of extrapolating from university students to 'human nature'; I would agree with this wholeheartedly. But the problem runs deeper than this. We would be extrapolating from the behaviour of college students, in 2008, at an American University, likely without full-time jobs, probably in an environment with birth control, maybe in dorms, and in a setting with tons of alcohol. One could argue, for example, that the risk environment in 2008 is substantially different from that likely experienced by foraging ancestors. For contrast, a whole host of health problems that now are among our most serious--obesity, diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure--would have been extremely rare in an evolutionary environment; anyone who looked at our current disease profile and said it was a result of 'human nature' would obviously be mocked. One could argue that we have an even harder time talking about how sexuality might be different.

4) Assumption that contemporary attitudes are not affecting partners' choices: Since the researchers didn't focus much on female preference, it's hard to say (Jonason's research report is apparently under review), but contemporary attitudes about what 'bad boys' are good for might be affecting sexual behaviour. For example, I doubt very much that the same male behaviour would have produced the same numbers given a substantially different social, cultural, and sexual climate (think 1950s, or Taliban Afghanistan, or another radically different situation, and ask yourself if the numbers would be the same). Are 'bad boys' always attractive? Given a different situation, the 'dark triad' may be more of a turn off than it now is (but again, we don't even know this because the researcher's weren't really measuring attractiveness, only reported number of sexual partners; maybe all the nice guys get locked into long-term relationships with lots of sex and thus are taken 'out of the pool' so that their number of partners drops).

5) Assumption that sexual behaviour is analogous to mating behaviour or successful reproduction: This kind of follows on from the previous point. That is, with current reproductive control technologies, the gap between mating and having sex has likely grown. I suspect that some women might be having sex with men now that they might avoid if they had no way to diminish the likelihood of reproducing in the process.

The problem may be especially pronounced in Schmitt's statements. He is reported as saying: 'It is
universal across cultures for high dark triad scorers to be more active in short-term mating. They are more likely to try and poach other people's partners for a brief affair.' In the interpretation we're given in the articles, the almost tautological statement, 'men who are aggressive, impulsive, callous, and extroverted are more likely to try to have affairs' (as opposed to the passive, careful, sensitive, and introverted lotharios prowling the streets), turns into 'they have more reproductive success.' We don't know if they have 'success' in evolutionary terms because we don't KNOW if they reproduce. This problem points to two more:

6) Assumptions about reproductive goals already imply 'strategy': 'Evolutionary psychology' sex researchers suggest that the 'dark' traits are good for pursuing the men's agenda, which happens to be short-term relationships. So, let me get this straight: your survey asks men if they are pursuing short-term relationships, they say, 'yes,' and then you realized that they had a lot of short-term relationships (in comparison to the guys who wanted long-term relationships), so you've proven that the 'strategy' is evolutionarily successful because they had short-term relationships? I'm not sure where to even crack into that circle of reasoning. All this is finding is a correlation between character traits and the actions that we would see as indicative of these character traits. We haven't demonstrated that it's evolutionarily successful strategy, nor even that the 'trait' exists. In fact, the rarity of the 'dark triad' actually points to the possibility that it is not a 'successful' strategy, my next issue...

7) Logical problem arguing that a trait is superior but that it's not universal: This is a simple statistical problem that tends to crop up with evolutionary psychology. If a strategy for reproducing is supposedly superior to others, and if behavior is inherited as a trait, than one has to explain why everyone doesn't display the same trait after enough generations. If narcissism, callousness, and a Machiavellian character are such a good strategy for reproduction, then why don't all men use the same strategy?

Some evolutionary psychologists will bring up the concept of 'frequency dependence' (see Wikipedia), the idea that a mix of genetic traits will predominate because one of them is only adaptive given a limited frequency (such as the danger of 'Machiavellian' traits if everyone were to become Machiavellian); Linda Mealey made this argument about sociopathy in a 1995 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article. But then we run into the problem of achieving the equilibrium. If the 'bad boys' are successfully knocking up all the girlfriends of the 'good boys,' then it's going to be kind of hard to keep any sort of stable equilibrium.

8 ) Assumption that behaviour is subject to selection: This is a bigger problem than it sounds like because it requires that behaviour be inheritable, the result of inherent organic properties (usually attributed to genes, seldom with genetic evidence, and yet potentially with other conduits of transmission). Even the story that ABC News opens their article with undermines this idea: the 'bad boy,' Ricky, admits that he's 'more or less mastered the art' of being bad, reinforced by his desire for 'sexual conquest.' If we follow the ABC News story logic, we have a hard time arguing that Ricky's behavior is a 'trait' fixed in his genes; instead it starts to look like a learned social pattern of behaviour.

If the 'dark triad' can't be transmitted or is not inherent, you still have the issue about women liking 'bad boys,' but now you have a whole different dynamic to explain. To me, that question looks a hell of a lot more like a sociological one than an evolutionary one.

In place of conclusion

As Daniel pointed out in his piece on homosexuality recently, so much of the research on human sexuality decontextualizes sexual behaviour from relationships, from love, from the way that life changes us. By taking 20- to 22-year-old men and asking them how many partners they've had, and using this to measure 'reproductive success,' it's substituted a culturally charged vision of 'sexual success' (call it, scoring with the ladies) for actual reproductive success.

Let me give you a hypothetical example of what I mean. Let's assume that every time a man and woman have intercourse, there's a 10% chance the woman gets pregnant (it's actually about 20-25% during a cycle given normal fertility, which also varies). If Bad Boy sleeps with five women one time, he has a lower chance of successfully reproducing than if Good Boy sleeps with the same woman six times (and presumably, if Good Boy is spacing them out, he stands an even better chance of getting her at the right time of her cycle of ovulation). The Jonason method would assume, however, that Bad Boy is much more reproductively 'successful,' when in fact he's just 'getting it' with more women.

Like many discussions of evolutionary psychology, however, I feel like I'm getting genetic arguments without genetic evidence (and not much discussion of behavioural genetics) and evolutionary arguments without much evolutionary evidence (or sophisticated evolutionary theory). To even begin to argue that there was an inheritable 'dark triad' that was good for reproducing, at the very least, we'd have to demonstrate that the 'dark triad' was inherited, using such things as twin studies or adoption studies (oh, god, I can't believe I recommended either). In the Human Genome Project Information website's page on 'behavioural genetics,' none of the 'dark triad' show up as the subject of extensive genetic studies. If we're going to argue about female preference, I think we would need to test women, and not just the dumb 'show them a picture and ask if the guy's attractive' kind of study -- we'd have to actually study mating behaviour, who people are really sleeping with.

But I'll come back to that in Part 2 of my discussion of sexuality from evolutionary psychology...

Where all these articles fall down is in presupposing that women enjoy this patriarchal bullshit because it's part of their DNA, instead of being forced to accept it because most of us are trained from Day 1 to do so. "Women are hardwired to like pink!" Are they? Or is it more likely that if you wrap a baby in a pink blanket the day she's born, then subtly pressure her to like the color in a thousand different ways for the next several decades, she'll eventually start to think she likes it? I know anecdotes are not proof; but my parents never gave a damn what color I wore, and I'm a 33-year-old woman who really doesn't care for the color.

Nice guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the "dark triad" persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

This recent article in New Scientist, that purports to prove--basically--that women dig assholes, makes a lot of the classic douchebag-based science mistakes. Foremost, and most ridiculous, is the usage of fictional characters to confirm their hypothesis:

James Bond epitomises this set of traits, Jonason says. "He's clearly disagreeable, very extroverted and likes trying new things - killing people, new women." Just as Bond seduces woman after woman, people with dark triad traits may be more successful with a quantity-style or shotgun approach to reproduction, even if they don't stick around for parenting.

Jesus H. Christ, you guys are supposed to be scientists. James Bond isn't real. The reason his popularity has endured for 50 years is precisely because he's a total male fantasy.

Jonason and his colleagues subjected 200 college students to personality tests designed to rank them for each of the dark triad traits. They also asked about their attitudes to sexual relationships and about their sex lives, including how many partners they'd had and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

And we all know that people who score high on the "dark triad" of narcissim, deceit, and exploitation are totally trustworthy and not at all likely to conflate or lie about their number of sexual partners!

The study also makes the time-honored male-centric error of thinking women only fuck guys they love and want to marry and have a hundred babies with. This may come as a big shock to you white-coated dorks, but sometimes women fuck guys just because they want to fuck. You know, kind of like you seem to take for granted most men do.

It's easy to brush these articles off as so much poorly-researched, causation/correlation confused crap, which they certainly are, but the trend is troubling to me nonetheless. They're strengthening the feeling that women not only deserve to be abused, but somehow enjoy it. I'm sick of this "science" that seems intent on proving that our proper place in society is being mistreated by jerks. It's bullshit, and it's dangerous, and I'm going to continue to call it out for the lazy intellectual garbage it so obviously is.

Hat tips to Feministe and Pandagon.

Wired Science has summarized some of the panel speaker's ideas, here they are, and they are almost all wrong:

Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer: We do something other species can't: we remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information.

Daniel Dannett, cognitive scientist: We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. "The planet has grown a nervous system," he said.

Renee Reijo Pera, embryologist: We're uniquely human from the moment that egg and sperm fuse. A "human program" begins before the brain even begins to form.

Patricia Churchland, neuroethicist: The structure of how the human brain is arranged intrigues me. Are there unique brain structures? As far as we can understand, it's our size that is unique. What we don't find are other unique structures. There may be certain types of human-specific cells -- but as for what that means, we don't know. It's important not only to focus on us, to compare our biology and behavior to other animals.

Jim Gates, physicist: We are blessed with the ability to know our mother. We are conscious of more than our selves. And just as a child sees a mother, the species' vision clears and sees mother universe. We are getting glimmers of how we are related to space and time. We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?

Nikolas Rose, sociologist: Language and representation. We are the kind of creatures that ask those questions of ourselves. And we believe science can help answer. We've become creatures that think of ourselves as essentially biological -- and I think we're more than biological creatures. I'm not sure biology has answers.

Ian Tattersall, anthropologist: It's not "what is human," but what is unique: our extraordinary form of symbolic cognition.

Francis Collins, geneticist: What does the genome tell us? There's surprisingly little genetic difference between human and chimpanzee. Yet clearly we're different. There's brain size and language. A language-related gene, FoxP2, evolved most rapidly in the last few million years. How did we develop empathy? Appreciate our mortality? And we should admit that there are areas that might not submit to material analysis: beauty, inspiration. We shouldn't dismiss these as epiphenomenal froth.

Harold Varmus, physiologist: Intrigued by our ability to generate hypotheses and make measurements.

Paul Nurse, cell biologist: Is excited about the ability of science to answer this question.

Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist: The critical unique factor is language. Creativity. The religious and scientific impulse. And our social organization, which has developed to a prodigious degree. We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions. We're probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds. I like to think of a generator of diversity in the frontal lobe -- and those initials are G-O-D.

Marvin Minsky is wrong to say that humans are unique with being able to remember. Ravens/crows, elephants, great apes, etc. have shown remarkable abilities in remembering information. Minsky is also wrong in implying our culture, ways of transmitting information, are unique to humans. Lots of non-human primates, such as chimpanzees have been documented in transmitting information and having distinct rituals.

Daniel Dannett is wrong to say that, 'we are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other.' Reasoning is commonly defined as the cognitive process of looking for reasons for beliefs, conclusions, actions or feelings. A 2005 column written by Carl Zimmer in New York Times, summarized how chimpanzees exhibit a better understanding of cause and effect than human children.

Renee Reijo Pera, isn't necessarily wrong in saying a unique "human program" begins before the brain even begins to form, because aspects of human development has to be fundamentally different for humans to become a different genus from other apes. But there is a lot of conservation in the development of vertebrates.

Patricia Churchland is right to say the size of human brains are unique. Recently some unique structural differences have been really studied in depth, such as the wiring of the human arcuate fasciculus. I will be really interested to find if there might be certain types of human-specific cells, but I imagine it will be a pretty monumental effort to morphologically and genetically compare every type of brain cell. It will be done though, I am sure of it.

Jim Gates is wrong to say humans are unique in the ability to know our mothers. Many species know their mothers and are conscious of more than themselves. I won't review them all, it is pretty well studied. Gates is right and wrong at saying we're unique in asking metaphysical questions, like, "what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?" It is hard to really discern if humans are the only ones asking these existential questions, but apes that use sing-language or lexigrams have been able to answer this question at a very basic level.

Nikolas Rose's thoughts are out-there. Language and representation are not uniquely human. Many non-human animals have been shown to communicate in unique ways. For example, orca pods have been found to have unique vocalizations that are not understood by other orcas outside of the pod. Captive chimpanzees have also been found to voice unique vocalizations to certain foods. Rose also brings up some metaphysical aspects, which I have just outlined are both right and wrong.

I find that there's only one anthropologist on the panel, Ian Tattersall, extremely ironic considering they are asking a very anthropological question. Tattersall says our extraordinary form of symbolic cognition is unique. I can't say definitively that he's wrong in stating that, but chimpanzees from Gombe have been documented to show some reverence for nature, which is a very symbolic behavior. Read more from Barbara King.

Francis Collins, my favorite creationist geneticist, mentions human brain size and language as unique traits. He's not wrong in brain size, human brain size is uniquely different from other animals, but so is a horse's brain from that of other animals. As outlined before, language is not a uniquely human trait. Other animals have been documented to communicate and transmitted knowledge in unique forms. Given Collins' recent vocal defection to the dark side, I'm not surprised he's reducing epiphenomenal associations and raising the spiritual question.

Harold Varmus is intrigued by our ability to generate hypotheses and make measurements. I don't really know what Varmus is suggesting, my best guess is that he thinks that humans are unique in problem solving and trial and error, which is wrong. Non-human animals are excellent problem solvers. While other animals don't write up reports and publish them in Science or Nature, they do have ideas whose merit requires evaluation. Take the example of the raven who wants to open a nut. The raven most certainly has an idea, to drop the nut from high up in flight, and have the force of gravity coupled with the impact of the nut to the ground to open it up. To act upon this idea, the raven must inherently evaluate each failure and success, ultimately testing the hypothesis and measuring how effective the idea is.

Paul Nurse really didn't give much to work with. I too am interested in how science can answer this question. I wish he was more forthcoming with his thoughts, even if they are wrong.

Antonio Damasio mentions that language is unique. I already outlined how this is wrong. He instills the human religious and scientific impulse are unique. I also already shown how chimpanzees have been documented to be somewhat spiritual, and that other animals have 'scientific' ways of solving problems. Damasio also brings up aspects of Tomasello theory -- our ability to imagine our social organization and institutions. I won't comment on his idea that the diversity of the human brain's frontal lobe was designed by 'G-O-D.'

His argument stems from two of his recent papers, the first, "Comparing Social Skills of Children and Apes,' was authored along with Frans B. M. De Waal, Christophe Boesch, Victoria Horner, Andrew Whiten, Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, María Victoria Hernández-Lloreda, Brian Hare. Many of the same authors also joined Tomasello on the other paper, "Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis," which I covered on Primatology.net in September 2007.

The latter paper compared the congitive and problem solving skills of two & half-year-old human children to those of chimps and orangutans ranging from 3 to 21 years old. The results showed that both are comparable in numerical and spatial skills. When comparing social skills, the human kids excelled over the chimps. An example, the toddlers learned how to open a container by imitating what they saw, where as the chimps did not mimic... Thus, the kids made connections like, "stick helps open box." The chimps relied on trick of trial and error. The authors summarized that imitation is a fast way acquire a lot of knowledge and may have paved the way for our departure from these primate cousins – and ultimately allowed us to develop the complex social culture we have today.

The more recent paper, also involved comparing the social and cognitive abilities of children and chimps. Tomasello and his team concluded that humans recognize and commit to group tasks. Chimps, on the other hand, do not have such expectation of others. If and when the chimps did communicate, they did it to get others to do what they want. I'll confirm that from my own experience with working with apes, gorillas, that they communicated to me almost exclusively to get what they want. In their experiment, communication amongst children was to share information.

Tomasello argues that only humans pretend. According to him humans imagine, and this ability has allowed us to build institutions. These adaptations, Tomasello writes, set us apart from apes, thereby allowing us to build modern civilization.

I believe I have seen and experienced non-human imagination in gorillas and also chimps. I, by no means have the accolades that Tomasello has, nor the experiences he has in analyzing psychological research but I think it is really hard to definitively say that only humans can imagine and pretend. To do that we'd really have to get ino their minds. I just don't understand how we can know if non-human primates do or do not imagine.

If you're interested in this topic, we have in the past, had some short discussions on what traits have made humans unique, such as this one summarizing Marc Hauser's postulates. I also think you'll enjoy this 60 second audio summarizing the discussion, made by Christie Nicholson, of Scientific American -- which she draws a tangent to social networking sites, something I commented about last September.

[audio=http://kamrani.net/kambiz/files/scientific-american-60-sec-psych-2008-05-29.mp3]

[S]ome men may be genetically predisposed to believe in evolutionary psychology, a finding that may well suggest future methods of treatment of the psychological malady. Believers in evolutionary psychology maintain that feminism sets itself in opposition to millions of years of anthropoid evolution, and is thus futile and inhumane to men. Allegations made by believers include references to putative differences in math skills between men and women, a supposedly irresistible but entirely non-visually stimulated female attraction toward powerful and/or arrogant males, and the existence of a genetically preordained male right to multiple female sexual partners.

(via Economic Woman)

Related (but much longer and not funny), a history of how race (as a concept) was invented:

If one is an evolutionist, and accepts that there have been hundreds of thousands of years for different ethnic groups to emerge and to spread about the globe, the monogenetic hypothesis is not hard to maintain. The same is true if, conversely, one believes that the world is only a few thousand years old, but is operating with a geographical scope that does not extend much beyond one's own region. But for creationists in the 17th century, monogenesis effectively required that the new anthropological data from around the globe be somehow rendered compatible with the view that all human beings be descended from two ancestors, presumed to have lived somewhere in the Near East roughly six thousand years before the era of the scientific revolution.

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More on the immigration raids:

Most of all, it's clear that the plant's owners were in the business of seriously exploiting the illegal status of their workers -- abusing them, underpaying them, exposing them to hazardous working conditions -- and the raids actually had the effect of covering that up....

On the same blog is this discussion about the universality of inalienable rights:

My human rights law professor was Lung-chu Chen, a co-author along with Mac and Professor Laswell, of "Human Rights and World Public Order" which propounded the notion that Jeffersonian natural law and innate and inalienable rights belonged not just to US citizens, but to all people. They argued that providing human rights should be the policy of all nations and all organizations of nations (such as NATO, UN, etc.). . . . You see, there are some rights so fundamental that they come to us simply from being human; they are NOT "given" to us by the State.

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We should all be this resourceful:

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets. . . . Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.

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On gawking at the Amish:

I usually enjoy playing the trespassing voyeur, but even at the heritage museum I could tell that in Amish Country, trespassing and vouyering were not going to bring me as much joy as they usually did.

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Photos of "punk houses" (otherwise known as "apartments of people with whom I will never make eye contact, because they are too intimidatingly cool for me").

Speaking of, here's an article on how much the Millennial generation sucks:

One need look no further than the local newsstand to see the favoritism the Millennials have received. Whereas Generation X was routinely denigrated by the press, the Millennials have been compared to World War II's Greatest Generation. In Robert Strauss and Neil Howe's Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, the authors state authoritatively that "over the next decade, the Millennial Generation will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engaged."

(via Unfogged)

I'm on the cusp - while I'm just one year shy of being an actual Millennial, I am a solipsist and I do blog. However, I take comfort in the fact that no one could ever, ever accuse me of being upbeat or engaged. The '81 crop of babies must have been the last to be born "downbeat and alienated."

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Happy Memorial Day, y'all!  Hope everyone enjoys the holiday:  here, it's a lovely day out, and we're having friends over to christen our newly cleaned back yard.

Question Number 7 poses this : "Why do children love their parents?"

I'll quote at length:

7. Why do children love their parents?

At first glance, this question may appear absurd. Of course children love their parents; it is only natural. But why?

If you really think about it, there is absolutely no evolutionary psychological reason why children should love and care for their parents. Some people (usually parents themselves) have suggested to us that parents will be more motivated to invest in children who love them back. But this is not true; from an evolutionary psychological perspective, parents have to love their children, whether the children love them back or not, in order to motivate their parental investment. And, as Daly and Wilson's work on discriminative parental solicitude shows, parents are motivated to invest not necessarily in the children who love them most, but in those w have the greatest potential to attain higher reproductive success themselves (more attractive, more intelligent, healthier children, or boys if the parents are wealthy, girls if they are poor, etc.) If parents with limited resources have two children, one an intelligent, physically attractive, and healthy child who hates them, and the other a handicapped, unattractive and sickly child who loves them, the cold evolutionary logic dictates that he parents invest in the former, not the latter. So the children do not really have to love their parents.

This is especially true for adult children. While the parents are still young, they can potentially produce further offspring with whom the children share half their genes. So it might make sense for the children to invest in and take care of their parents, so that they can produce more siblings. But once the parents are past the reproductive age, this is no longer possible. So it makes no evolutionary psychological sense for adult children to take care of their elderly parents.

Yet the overwhelming evidence from most human societies shows that children do love their parents, and this is a theoretical puzzle for evolutionary psychology - although probably only for evolutionary psychology. [187-188]

A Rough Account of the Logic of Evolutionary Psychology. I'm going to try answering this using the logic of evolutionary psychology that the book uses. The book operates on the premise that a careful analysis of human traits or characteristics that persist should reveal that those traits somehow contribute to reproductive success. In other words, that organisms that possess the traits in question tend to survive, while organisms that lack them tend to die off.

This is a blog, so I'm not going to really ... polish my argument at this point. As it flows hot off my fingers, I suspect it's extremely repetitive. I'm actually rehearsing my idea. Still, I think I've answered Miller and Kanazawa's stumper ... (Note: at the end of this entry ... and on this page ... I re-print the email I wrote to Dr. Kanazawa, which I think is a clearer and more readable version of my answer.

But please proceed on to what must be (consequently) the more obscure and less readable answer.

My Explanation: Loving Your Parents Is Adaptive Because It Keeps You from Hooking Up With Adults Who Have No Evolutionary Reason to Sacrifice for You.

At any given moment, people's fortunes shift. Imagine a Paleolithic tribe made up of a variety of family units. At any moment, because of any number or combination of factors, Paleolithic citizen Ogg might be doing well. Maybe a recent success in the hunt has given him a lot of social credit in the tribe, which translates into shared out calories. Maybe a series of deaths has placed Ogg in a more socially advantageous position. Maybe Ogg's hunting and gathering grounds were spared a recent forest fire (whereas other members of the tribe haven't been so lucky).

It would be a temptation for some child of the tribe to throw in with Ogg at this point. And if Ogg's doing so well, he can probably support a few more children. If a kid really turns on the charm, Ogg might decide to do just that, to form a kind of "child entourage." If you're doing well, why not pick up a few kids who will eventually become loyal members of your caveman posse?

So the kid tells Mom and Dad to kiss off and takes up with Ogg.

Here's the problem, though: If Ogg's fortune suddenly has a downturn, Ogg's not going to feel any particularly allegiance to the charming hangers-on. All those extra kids fall into the category of "expendables," one of the first things to go during the "belt-tightening."

Clearly, in cases like this, it would be better to stick with caregivers who have a much stronger drive to care for you -- in both lean times and fat.

IN OTHER WORDS, loving one's parents leads to behavior that's optimizing IN THE LONG RUN. You might miss out on some rewards during the FAT TIMES, but by sticking with your parents - who are evolutionarily wired to protect you - you're going to do much better during the LEAN TIMES (since your survival will be a priority for your parents, but only a pleasant luxury for Ogg.)

TO RESORT TO THE EVOLUTIONARY LANGUAGE OF SURVIVAL, kids who take off to become a hanger-on or entourage member to some temporarily flush caveman will probably be fat for a month or two ... but could quite easily die if Ogg's fortunes should take a turn for the worse.

On the other hand, caveman kids who are evolutionarily predisposed to a super-strong emotional bond with two people who have an evolutionary drive to protect and care for them ... will probably survive and pass those genes on.

So that's my argument. Love for one's parents serves the evolutionary purpose of ensuring that children remain with caregivers who are evolutionarily pre-disposed to care for them - to ensure their survival even if it means hardship and sacrifice for the caregivers.

This strong bond (love for the parents) prevents children from being lured into situations that temporarily appear more attractive, but that are inherently riskier (since the kids' survival won't be as great a priority in the newer situation).

Let me say that another way: Love for one's parents is an evolutionary adaptation that allows a child to instinctively resist the temptation of a temporarily more advantageous situation. While the Land of Toys may seem like a better situation, while the Little Man who drives the Cart of Lost Boys might seem more generous and more fun, Pinocchio is probably better off staying with Gepetto.

The best bet in an uncertain world is to stick with someone who will go sacrifice right up to their last breath for you. Once you've placed yourself in situation where you're a luxury, you've also just made yourself extremely expendable. And evolution does not treat the expendable kindly.

The "Spandrel" Explanation. One explanation - a weak one - would be to invoke the notion of a "spandrel," to suggest that "loving one's parents" is a byproduct of other more adaptive evolutionary traits. (Loving your parents is basically a non-adaptive by-product of our genetic programming to "love people who share our genes.") (Miller and Kanazawa suggest, for example, that religion -- despite being a universal phenomenon in human societies -- isn't an EVOLVED feature of those societies. Rather religion is a spandrel that arises given the evolution of an "animist bias" or "agency-detector mechanism." The argument is that a tendency to believe that observed phenomena in the physical world are caused by ACTORS -- even if the actors are unseen -- is adaptive. If you hear a rustling noise, you're better believing that SOME AGENT is making the rustling sound. If your brain is somehow evolved to be comfortable with the proposition that sometimes grass just rustles for no reasons, that brain will probably be eaten before it has a chance to pass on its DNA.)

My sense, though, is that you don't need to make a spandrel argument if you can determine what evolutionary purpose a trait serves. I would submit that my account does this.

In a way, I'm surprised that M&K didn't already toss this one out there ... it seems pretty obvious. So maybe they did and I just didn't realize it ... maybe I'm missing something.

_____________________________________________________________

Here's the email I sent to Dr. Kanazawa, whose email address is very findable ... It's probably a clearer statement of my theory:
Dr. Kanazawa:

Forgive me for writing to you.

I'm an eighth-grade Language Arts teacher in Iowa and a hobbyist in Evolutionary Psychology.

I recently finished your 2007 Why Beautiful People and very much enjoyed it. At one point, I was tempted to share with my eighth-graders the book's theory on why men find big breasts attractive, but then I realized that while they would find the theory fascinating, I would have to find a new job.

Anyway, I want to submit to you my answer to your Stumper #7: Why Do Children Love Their Parents?

My answer is that loving one's parents is an evolutionary characteristic that helps children to instinctively avoid temporarily attractive but ultimately foolish alliances. Absent a near irrational bond of love for one's parents, who wouldn't run away with the circus or the Lost Boys or Michael Jackson?

The problem is that none of those institutions have the same devotion to the child's survival as the parents do. If the circus wagon breaks an axle and the local sheriff shakes the ringmaster down for the week's receipts, the ringmaster will be sore tempted to boot runaways and hangers-on out into the cold night. Maybe the same Ringmaster tolerated the kid last week when things were flush ... maybe the Ringmaster even entertained visions of bringing the kid up through the ranks once he got a little older. Have him pitch tents, geek a chicken, gaff a midway game .... it's good to have a kid who knows the show from the ground up. But when push comes to shove, the kid's an expendable luxury.

That's not the case for the parents. They don't see the kid as an expendable luxury -- they experience him as their best hope for eternity.

Despite the undeniable attractions of circus life, most kids will ultimately be better off under the care of parents who are evolutionarily dedicated to their survival.

Love is an adaptation that increases the odds that the kid will remain in that optimal situation.

----------

My question isn't "Am I right?" My question is: "Have I answered the question?" Have I come up a theory -- or did I simply re-state the question while foolishly believing I answered it.

Thanks for your attention to this -- and thanks for the book.

Social contract theory is a theory drawn from evolutionary psychology - a 'cheater detection' system if you like. Following on from yesterdays post about detecting faking in pain, this study examines the judgements observers (in this case, friends and relatives of people with pain) in a study where four vignettes were presented. Each vignette varied in terms of four cues: the person continuing or stopping liked tasks, continuing or stopping disliked tasks, the availability of medical evidence, and the pain intensity as rated by the person.

Many variables have been studied with respect to how accurately observers judge another person's pain - attractiveness, gender, ethnicity, social class, as well as the context (return to work or post-surgical), and the characteristics of the observer (parent, caregiver, spouse, clinician).

Results from past studies have included: unattractive patients were judged to suffer from more pain than physically attractive patients (Hadjistavropoulos et al.1990, 1996, 2000). Generally, higher reported pain intensity appeared to invite higher estimated pain intensity. When comparing sufferers’ self-reports and observers’ estimates, however, low reported pain intensities were overestimated and high reported pain intensities were underestimated (Chibnall and Tait 1995; Chibnall et al. 1997; Krokosky and Reardon 1989; Tait and Chibnall 1997; Zalon 1993).

For health professionals, some studies found no associations (Dudley and Holm 1984; Everett et al. 1994; Hamers et al. 1997; Oberst 1978; van der Does 1989), others found that less experienced observers gave higher pain estimates than did more experienced observers (Mason 1981; Perry and Heidrich 1982; Lenburg et al. 1970).

In terms of contextual cues, the absence of medical evidence to support the person's report of pain has been associated with lower estimates of pain.

Yesterday I briefly discussed the idea of malingering being the purposeful faking of health problems in order to gain financial benefit: in this study, the evolutionary value of the 'social contract' is used as the theoretical model for evaluating our sensitivity to these responses. Social contracting is a situation where the ‘‘individual is required to pay a cost, or meet a requirement, to an individual (or group) in order to be eligible to receive a benefit from that individual’’ (Cosmides 1989, p.197).

It makes sense that as humans we have some systems developed to determine whether we are being exploited and that the normal 'contract' between people is being disturbed. There is empirical support for humans being sensitive to cues for cheating from both human and animal studies (Cosmides 1989; Gigerenzer and Hug 1992;Wilkinson 1990) - but as we saw yesterday, we can be deceived reasonably readily, so it makes sense for us to be particularly sceptical about situations where we may be manipulated.

In a situation where one person is likely to receive benefits (caring or free food, for example) because of their reported pain, it makes sense for the observer to be more aware of cues suggesting that the individual receiving the 'benefits' is not actually in pain (Williams 2002). This has been studied before, and it has been found that suspicion of cheating or faking leads to conservatism and underestimation of pain. This can explain why such weight is given to medical evidence by health care professionals even when the relationship between 'evidence' from radiology and pain, for example, is fairly weak. This is especially true in cases where time off work, or other 'special' treatment is given as a result of confirmation of a 'real' problem.

The hypotheses in this paper were:
- the combination of two behaviours (continuing liked and
stopping disliked activities) would be judged as unfair
and lead to lower pain estimates, whatever the level of
pain,
– there would be no effect on pain estimates of the
presence or absence of medical evidence, and
– pain as reported by the patient would affect pain
estimates by relatives

Although the results were from a very small group of respondents in the end (only 23% of the initial group recruited actually responded with complete questionnaires), some interesting findings were obtained.
- people who stopped doing things they liked were interpreted as 'having to stop', and this was perceived as fair
- people who stopped things they didn't like but continued with things they did like, were perceived as being unfair
- behaviour of characters reporting high pain was estimated to be fairer

The authors suggest that perhaps greater pain meant greater recognition of the cost in pain incurred by doing any tasks, or that more leeway was exercised in judgements of behaviour as fair or unfair.

- more pain was attributed to patients who stopped liked tasks
- highest pain levels were assigned to patients having stopped both liked and disliked activities
- lowest pain estimates were assigned to patients who had stopped disliked but continued liked chores, the combination which also received the lowest fairness ratings

The authors comment that these findings 'support our hypothesis concerning lowering of pain estimates by individuals close to someone with persistent pain if they judge patients to be behaving ‘‘unfairly’’, that is, ‘‘accepting the benefits’’ of having pain—of being permitted not to do some tasks—‘‘while not meeting the requirement’’—of being unable to do other preferred activities.'

- participants’ estimates were not significantly affected by presence or absence of medical findings in this sample

- higher given pain intensities led to higher estimated pain intensities
- there were systematic discrepancies in estimates since low given pain intensities were estimated as higher and high given pain intensities as lower.

Some food for thought - this is a first cut study using social contract theory as a framework for determining a priori predictions as to which cues are salient, and in which direction. I look forward to finding out more on this - it may help us help our patients reflect on their behaviour, as well as the ways in which family members interpret and respond to patient's behaviour.

There are some limitations to this study - in particular the small sample size, and the use of written vignettes rather than video-recorded scenarios. But for making us think? I think it's great.

If you've enjoyed this post, there will be more tomorrow - and don't forget you can use the RSS feed above to subscribe, or you can simply bookmark this page and come on back! I love comments and always respond, so don't forget to let me know what you think of the topics I cover (***pssst! I don't bite!***)

Kappesser, J., C. Williams, A.C. (2008). Pain judgements of patients’ relatives: examining the use of social contract theory as theoretical framework. Journal of Behavioral Medicine DOI: 10.1007/s10865-008-9157-4

Women might prefer less male like behaviors in selecting a mate. Since the gene pool is largely shared between males and females (except for the Y-chromosome), it may be that some less fratboy-like straight guys are better parents or are easier to get to do work around the house, or whatever. Perhaps selecting for this increases the possibility of gay offspring.

Another possibility highlighted is that a 'male-love' gene makes a woman really like men and like having children besides. This means more offspring. It might be that such a gene influences the male offspring to also sometimes really like men also. But since the percentage is low, this is not sufficient to counteract the evolutionarily beneficial effect of having more offspring.

Previous posts:

08apr Evolution and Homosexuality (3), 08feb Evolution and Homosexuality (2), and 08jan Evolution and Homosexuality (1)

It seems to me that he is absolutely right, however, to point out data that undermine hypotheses based on covert benefits of schizophrenia genes. He generalizes about evolutionary psychiatrists as if they are not only all in one category, but as if they all think the same things. This is especially surprizing given his emphasis on the mistake of assuming that schizophrenia is a natural category. It is so important to criticize hypotheses, not people or groups.

There is much additional useful in his paper, especially his outline of evolutionary reasons why the genetic factors in schizophrenia will be much more complex than we have imagined. This all fits very nicely with other reports this week about the genetics of schizophrenia I do think, however, that we do need to ask why such a highly heritable devastating disorder persists. Balancing selection is not likely. It could be just that new mutations happen. But I think that the high heritability has kept attention focused on the level of the gene, when the problem may well be in constraints and trade-offs at a higher level. See a previous post for more on this.

Haidt compares morality through the study of developmental psychology--i.e. Lawerence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan--and what he sees as the new scientific approach to the question.

Haidt (my emphasis):

So in the 1990s I was thinking about the role of emotion in moral judgment, I was reading Damasio, De Waal, and Bargh, and I was getting very excited by the synergy and consilience across disciplines. I wrote a review article called "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail," which was published in 2001, a month after Josh Greene's enormously influential Science article. Greene used fMRI to show that emotional responses in the brain, not abstract principles of philosophy, explain why people think various forms of the "trolley problem" (in which you have to choose between killing one person or letting five die) are morally different.

The Rational Tail is Kohlberg and Gilligan.  The Dog who does the real wagging here is emotion honed through evolution is the real driver of our choices/views about morality and then we create abstract philosophical and psychological theories to retroactively justify these emotion-based decisions.

But returning to the part I italicized and highlighted, particularly this line "emotional responses in the brain."  Since when is emotion located in the brain?  What we know is that emotions have brain pattern correlations so that when you experience an emotion there is a signature brain pattern that corresponds to that emotion.

Correlations being the key word.  Who said a correlation is a cause?  Perhaps it is just as easily an effect.  Or something (as I believe) which co-arises.

So the point about Kohlberg and Gilligan (& Crew) might still have validity--i.e. its retroactive--but it hasn't moved from emotion-in-the-brain versus abstract philosophy-in-the-mind.  It's abstract philosophy in the mind with its own brain correlations compared to emotional response having both a consciousness and material (brain pattern) signature.  The consciousness of the emotion may in fact be prior to linguistic formulation or mental construction.

But even in that later case, the developmental psychological tradition is part of another experiential moment of the same basic moral continuum--it might not be telling us about the "cause" of the initial response but it is telling us about the way in which the human constructs meaning. Both of which would then be part of a seamless unfolding of the whole moral response.

Something that like, a more integral moral study, would I think find consilience (in Haidt's terminology) with something like Blink from Malcolm Gladwell. The moral evolutionary emotion-based response mechanism being something of his blink unconsciousness (which is not the Freudian repressed unconscious).  But as Gladwell points out--something Haidt and Marc Hauser underemphasize imo--is that both this unconscious intelligence and conscious rational ("abstract philosophical" reasoning) are necessities in our world.  If for no other reason that evolution has selected for both in our species.

]]> http://anthropologynet.wordpress.com/?p=839 Wed, 07 May 2008 20:45:12 +0000 Kambiz Kamrani http://anthropologynet.wordpress.com/?p=839 There's a new PLoS ONE paper making the rounds in the press today. The research behind it fits the kinda stuff you may see on Dienekes' Anthropology Blog and sometimes on GNXP... it is basically an investigation on the attractiveness of a symmetrical face. The paper is published open access, under the title, "Symmetry Is Related to Sexual Dimorphism in Faces: Data Across Culture and Species." It comes from psychologists and anthropologists in the U.K. and the U.S.

This subject is extremely interesting. The face has many functions in social behavior -- moods are assessed from emotions expressed on the face. The face also functions as a billboard, advertising the quality of the mate. More attractive faces are often thought to be higher quality mates. Both symmetry and degree of sexual dimorphism have been linked to affect the attractiveness of human face shape.

In this study, subjects were given arrays of photos of 500 faces from people of European and African ethnicity as well as photos of non-human primates (macaques). About a third of the faces were male and the rest were females. The subjects were asked to judge for the most attractive face. The most attractive faces were then measured for symmetry. Symmetry was determined by measuring deviations from the midline, as well as measurements for the distance between the eyes. In total 6 measurements were made to assess bilateral symmetry.

The degree of sexual dimorphism was also measured. The distance between specific points, like the prominence of the cheekbone and ratios of the height of the jaw to the lower face height, lower face height to the face height and ratio of the width of the face to the height of the lower face were made. In all samples, symmetric males were ones who also had more masculine facial proportions and symmetric females had more feminine facial proportions. I've put up a figure that shows the highs and lows of attractive faces form their study.

These conclusions further validate the notion that sexual dimorphism and symmetry in faces advertise mate quality. I kinda have an issue with how the authors are phrasing their results -- they had two ethnic groups in their study but conclude that symmetry & dimorphism is attractive in all cultures. It is very probably that other cultures also share this sentiment, but it is over-stretching the results to say that this reaction is evident ALL cultures and species based off of two ethnic groups.

I'm also not too sure how the authors justify that sexual dimorphism and symmetry in the face provides evidence that there must be a biological mechanism linking the two traits during development. This could be because I really don't know much about evolutionary psychology. There is without a doubt something going on psychologically that makes people associate symmetry and dimorphic faces as attractive, how that translates to mate quality is highly debatable. On a related sidenote, I find the data about our ability to find attractive primate faces also very interesting, the authors suggest that,

"the signaling properties of faces are universal across human populations and are potentially phylogenetically old in primates."

Which indicates that there's been some sort of selection in the primate lineage that has predisposed us to associate symmetrical, dimorphic faces as attractive.

Little, A.C., Jones, B.C., Waitt, C., Tiddeman, B.P., Feinberg, D.R., Perrett, D.I., Apicella, C.L., Marlowe, F.W., Reimchen, T. (2008). Symmetry Is Related to Sexual Dimorphism in Faces: Data Across Culture and Species. PLoS ONE, 3(5), e2106. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002106

I will here explain why it is mistaken to believe that the lessons of evolutionary psychology imply that we are doomed to endure a genetic faith which is beyond our control.

Enjoy.

Self-Improvement in the Era of the Chromosome

I was recently in a club when a guy I know from the community came up and greeted me. He had been working for a few years on becoming better with women and nurturing the connected personality traits in himself; confidence, sense of humour, social intelligence and so on.

As we talked, it became clear that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the results he had been getting, and had become a bit disillusioned with regards to whether at all it is at all possible to change yourself.

“Look man,” he said. “Sometimes I think we largely fool ourselves in this community. We study all this stuff about evolution and genetics. Well, guess what? If everything is genetics and the behavioural and emotional circuitry of women is hardwired and beyond their control, as Mystery says, then the same must be true about us, men, too. Most of the guys I have met that do well seem to have been fairly confident most of their life. So maybe some of us have just been hardwired to be awkward beta males and there isn’t jack shit we can do about it, because it is all genetics.”

I am quoting from memory, but this was basically how he felt. He was obviously frustrated, but I could see where he was coming from. For a subculture that focus so much on inalterable behaviour patterns (“if you do this right, she can’t help being attracted”), genetics, emotional circuitry and hardwiring, this might seem to contradict the other central tenet of belief: that no matter how much of a chump you are, this can be changed and you can be transformed into a swashbuckling ladies man.

Indeed, it has been established that there is a significant genetic component in all of the five major dimensions in which psychologists define personality: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

So, that’s it right? Some guys are just naturally extraverted and confident whereas others are shy and introverted and there is not much to do about it? Damned genes! Maybe we should just drop our hard science focus because it is too depressing and embrace pseudo-science, new age and start yapping on about chakras and energies?

Hell no. The idea that genes = determinism stems from a misunderstanding of what the life sciences truly teaches us. My friend’s frustration was an unfortunate yet understandable effect of a community that often embraces a simplistic, folk-version of evolutionary thinking with very few of its members having a real understanding of the theories. This article will briefly explain not only why genes doesn’t prevent you from changing and improving yourself, but why your genes are the only mechanisms through which change is at all possible.

First, what are genes? A gene is a recipe in your DNA for making a protein. What kind of a protein depends on the information in the DNA. The ASPM gene, for example, contains the code for the amino acids isoleucine and glutamine that are vitally important for brain size.

Now don’t worry, I won’t get too technical here. All you need to understand is, firstly, that DNA codes for proteins that have vital functions in your body and mind. Some genes produce proteins that contribute to personality traits such as aggression, sexual assertiveness, pair-bonding and so on. A gene on chromosome 20 in humans, for example, regulates the production of the hormone oxytocin, which is central in pair bonding.

Secondly, you need to understand that the fact that your personality is affected by proteins which in turn stems from your genes, do not mean it is set in stone. A lot of people seem to believe that if there is a gene “for”, say, confidence or libido, it is decided at the moment of conception whether you’ll be confident or have a high sex drive and that environmental influences will not matter. The genes you have will provide a set personality by producing a given level of “confidence” or “horniness” hormones, and that’s that.

Not so. The genes are not blind Soviet Union factories, mindlessly producing the pre-set proteins according to some rigid central plan. To the contrary, they depend on your experiences and outside stimuli to know when to “switch on” production. It would be better to compare them with, say, skill full and savvy capitalists who keep a close eye on what the market demands and what “season” it is to turn on and off the production of various proteins accordingly (puberty is the most important “season” any human being will go through, where all kinds of genes dormant since conception suddenly are switched on).

I guess an example is in order here. In the 1950’s, an eager birdwatcher named Daniel Lehrman discovered that the male ring doves courtship dance triggered a change in the hormones of the female doves. What this means is that the mere act of observing a male dance caused dormant genes in the female to be switched on and producing proteins that made her want to mate.

I have now used the term “switched on” three times, you didn’t read it wrong. Genes are not always operating on some set capacity, they get switched on and off according to outside stimuli. How this happens is a complicated process and not important to outline here, all you need to know is that it happens (strictly speaking, genes are more like thermostats than switches, but for our purposes the switch metaphor works fine).

The flipside of the coin: if you are not exposed to the right stimuli, many genes will not switch on. They will stay dormant, some times forever.

Another example: an experiment was done with a pack of chimpanzees in a zoo. Chimps naturally form social hierarchies that are dominated by an alpha male. Beta males and females show their subordination by making submissive gestures towards the alpha male. Experimenters took the alpha male out of the pack, tested his testosterone level, and placed him in a room of his own, separated from his pack by a two-way mirror. He could see them, but they couldn’t see him. Every time another chimp came by he tried to intimidate them into displaying submission to his status, but was duly ignored. After a while the absence of submissive displays made him drop his dominant behaviour patterns and he became shyer and more reserved. When his testosterone levels were then tested again, they had plummeted.

It was as if his body had concluded he had been dethroned as the leader of the pack, and then duly switched off the genes that produce hormones conducive to dominant behaviour. In fact, that was exactly what had happened.
This makes perfect evolutionary sense: dominant behaviour is good as long as you are strongest guy on the block – and whether you are is determined largely by analysing the feedback others give you – but if you are not it will only get you killed, and being submissive and agreeable is a healthier tactic.

If you feel bad for our alpha-chimp, don’t. When he was let back into the room with his pack, true, he thought he was now a mere beta and tried not to bring much attention to himself. But the rest of the pack did not know of these recent developments and thus immediately started showing him the same reverence as before. He quickly picked up on this – or rather, his genes did – and he was soon back to throwing his weight around like a school bully.

Talk about etched in stone, eh?

The point of all of this is that your body will search for your relative status in society based on the feedback it gets. Then it will literally switch on and off genes accordingly. So, if you have been a virgin or been picked on all your life (and access to females is the primary indicator of your relative status in species’ similar to ours), there have been no reason to suggest that anything could be gained by switching on the genes that produce proteins contributing to sexually and socially confident behaviour. Again, as far as the evolutionary logic is concerned, that is more likely to get you killed than anything else.

Of course, we live in a completely different environment today, where your chances of getting your head kicked in for getting uppity and trying to climb in the social hierarchy is virtually nil. First of all, the rule of law has replaced nature red in tooth and claw (thank you Romans). Second of all, there are so many people running around that most people are strangers, and thus have no preconceived notions of who you are or how you should behave.

So it has never been so easy to change yourself, and the way you go about it - in a way so real it can be not only experienced emotionally but measured chemically - goes through changing the feedback the world gives you. Unfortunately, that can only be done by changing the way you behave. That sounds like a catch-22, and in a way it is, but it is far from out of reach.

How this is done in detail will be touched upon at some length on this site, but for now you can start by focusing on changing your appearance, consciously changing the way you act and talk. Fake it until you make it. Gradually, the feedback you get from the outside world will change in a more positive direction, cementing your newly adopted behaviours as “naturally” yours. From here it will only spiral upward, with every success and positive experience making the next easier to obtain.

Yes, there is no getting around it for those of us who cares about cold, hard truths as opposed to fairy-tale illusions propagated by snake-oil salesmen; some people are naturally more extroverted and confident than others. Bo-fucking-hoo, woe is me. That might not feel fair, but it is the way the world works. That is no excuse not to go the extra mile, because you have dormant strengths you weren’t even aware of. They are sleeping because the impulses and environmental feedback you have exposed yourself to wasn’t conducive to waking them up. Start changing that. Now.