First, a disclaimer: I have no moral qualms with with sex. My current interpretation is that, in humans, sex is a factor we use in deciding with whom to reproduce. If that’s true, the cult of monogamy serves, in some degree, to benefit individuals whose reproductive success is improved under that system. I also have no qualms about the theoretical underpinning of pick-up artists (PUAs) so far as it’s about jettisoning cultural baggage and presenting one’s self in the best light. Translation: I don’t hate the game.

Here’s where I do object: The hackneyed use of evolutionary psychology and pop-paleoanthropology to craft narratives of our evolutionary past, then use them to justify behaviors or strategies. Among PUAs, this is commonly manifested in a narrative that goes something like: “Humans evolved emotional responses that influence attraction in the paleolithic. During this period of human evolution, we lived in tribes. Because of the protective advantages, resource advantages, and social advantages of tribal leaders, women evolved an attraction to tribal leaders, a.k.a. alpha-males. Therefore, men should act like alpha males to attract women.”

Side Note: Lately, John Durant of hunter-gatherer.com has been writing about sorta similar things in the context of masculinity. While John’s recent posts have reminded me of my intent to write about this subject, I haven’t seen him construct this narrative. So… unless I missed something, the timing of this post is mostly a coincidence.

As to not be accused of constructing a straw-man, here are some quotes from “Mystery”, of the TV show The Pick-Up Artist. I can already hear the PUAs interjecting… “Yeah, but brah… he doesn’t represent all PUAs.” I fully agree with that point, but I don’t particularly give a fuck.

Evolutionary psychology and hunter-gatherer anthropology are ridiculously important and useful to a zillion things, and they continue to be held back by the pop-PUA bullshit that gets circulated endlessly. In other words, it makes my life difficult because I have to waste my time dealing with flak from people who object to the bullshit narrative — while I agree with their objections to the narrative. Darwin’s baby gets thrown out with the bathwater because a few people want to sell an image and a bunch of poorly researched ebooks.

The other objection I can hear rattling around in the most vapid of PUAs’ heads is, “Um, dude… So what, it fucking works.” That’s true in many cases, but it’s still a logically flawed argument. I’ll let those using it try to figure out why on their own.

But I digress… the quotes:

“Our emotional circuitry is designed to best suit our [survival and reproduction] based on an ancient environment and tribal social order that once existed tens of thousands of years ago.” – The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed (2005)

“Our emotions, and the behaviors they cause, are best adapted to a primitive tribal environment that no longer exists.” Revelation (2008)

“A friend that says, ‘He’s dated playboy models.’ Peacocking that screams tribal leader. Demonstrations of leading men in the group…. These are plotlines, and my game is full of them… learning that you are the tribal leader, having a jealousy plot line infuriate her…” The Pickup Artist: The New and Improved Art of Seduction (2010)

Anthropology argument against tribal alpha-male narrative

The main references cited in the PUA books mentioned in these posts are Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Evolution of Desire by David Buss (2003). I recommend both books, but the citations tend to misrepresent them. In the case of Dawkins’ book, it was written more than three decades ago, and anthropology has progressed radically in that time. Further, Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, not an anthropologist. Using his work as an anthropological reference is bound to be somewhat problematic.

There is no good reason to believe that humans evolved in hierarchical tribes between tens of thousands to two million years ago. To the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence showing that humans evolved in largely egalitarian bands that punished attempts of dominance with social sanctioning, banishment, and death (Boehm 1999). Yes, that’s basically saying that alpha males got offed by their social group — not exactly a benefit to reproduction. It appears that human ancestors likely lived in dominance hierarchies sometime in our distant past, but probably prior to the evolution of the hominin (human) line (Boehm 1999; Debreuil 2010). These works indicate that whatever “alpha” dominance tendencies evolved in our remote ancestors has most likely been evolving in the opposite direction for a couple million years. Among related primate ancestors, we see varying levels of dominance hierarchies, but the most recent common ancestor likely dates to 6 million years ago — a very far cry from merely “tens of thousands of years ago.” It must also be noted that as an evolutionary process, these behavioral traits exist on a continuum, and can’t be precisely mapped on a timeline. However, the “tribal” evolution narrative appears to be simply wrong.

Evolutionary argument against tribal alpha-male narrative

Without going into tedious detail, it’s unlikely that the alpha-male behavioral type (however imprecise that classification may be) is particularly adaptive. Traits that confer significant reproductive advantage tend to spread through a population rapidly. That basically means that traits that consistently vary widely among a species are probably not under significant selection pressures. If being alpha was the ne plus ultra of mate wooing strategies, there would be a whooooooollle lot fewer “betas.”

Evidence of what works better

If evolved human dominance behaviors have been decreasing over time, we would expect to see something else evolve to replace it. Because of the evolution of hominin brain size and cognition across the paleolithic, we might expect that whatever trait evolved via sexual selection related to these developments. Indeed, humor and intelligence appear to be more attractive to women than testosterone-related masculinity when it matters most — during female ovulation (Kaufman, et al. 2007). Greengross & Miller (2011) also found that humor relates to intelligence, and predicts mating success. Further, their data showed that Christopher Hitchens was right, and that males use humor to be selected by women.

Verdict

Masculine or “alpha” behavior is attractive to some women sometimes. It appears to be a retained trait from multiple millions of years ago, that was once advantageous, but has lost its significance with respect to the population as a whole. I’ve personally experimented with gender stereotypes enough to know that the opposite of masculinity can be attractive to women as well. When successful, either approach will lead to massive selection bias.

So, the PUAs are partially right on the attractiveness of masculinity. However, their narrative is a myth, and buying into such myths can limit reproductive success — or whatever term the PUA flavor of the month is using for “fucking” these days.

Then again, if you have intelligence, and the humor related to it, you probably already know that playing one strategy for every game is itself a sub-optimal strategy.

References

Boehm, Christopher (1999). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.

Dubreuil, Benoit (2010). Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies: The State of Nature.

Greengross, G., & Miller, G. F. (2011). Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males. Intelligence, 39, 188-192. [PDF]

Kaufman, S. B., Kozbelt, A., Bromley, M. L., & Miller, G. F. (2007). The role of creativity and humor in mate selection. In G. Geher & G. Miller (Eds.), Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind’s reproductive system (pp. 227-262). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. [PDF]

And just a personal note: I met a zillion amazing people while at AHS – from people I draw information and inspiration from to Evolvify readers. I definitely didn’t get to spend enough time with everyone, and my friends are already tired of me name-dropping y’all, but oh well.

While I had the good fortune to have talked with other attendees about various talks right after seeing them in person, this collection isn’t meant to be some sort of barometer on the consensus of attendees. The list is my subjective list of areas of inquiry in the evolutionary health and fitness realm that I feel have the most room for exploration and application. That isn’t to say that these talks necessarily contained the most important information of the Ancestral Health Symposium. Oh and… this definitely isn’t a pure “Best Of” list because I still haven’t had a chance to watch all the talks.

AHS 2011 Awards

Best Tip of the Economics Iceberg

“Sustainability of paleo diets” by Matt Metzgar, PhD
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27926609 w=640&h=480]
Comments
This topic is so massive that it’s impossible to cover it in a < 50 minute talk. Dr. Metzgar lays out a framework for quantifying and analyzing paleo in terms of sustainability and economics. The talk is both oversimplified in terms of economics and overly detailed in terms of systemization, and will probably lose some people. However, the project is ambitious and important. This should be viewed as what it is: a work in progress that has plenty of room to progress and find broad application by synthetic thinkers.

Extending the Idea

• The feasibility of a Paleolithic diet for low-income consumers [full-text PDF]

Best Obvious Sounding Title that Applies to Depths of Life You Don’t Yet Realize

“The Lost Art of Play” by Mark Sisson
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27648777 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Yeah, “play more”,  it sounds so simple. The implications of play lost to the regimentation and systemization of agriculture and industrialization are many. This isn’t just a touchy feely concept, but something that influences our individual psychology and social interactions in ways nobody fully understands.

Extending the Idea

• Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga
• Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence [full-text PDF]

Best Primatology Informs Anthropology

“Great Apes and the Evolution of Human Diet” by Craig Stanford, PhD

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27678635 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Since we don’t have video footage from the Paleolithic, sometimes the best we can do is attempt to triangulate truth from whatever data points we do have available. The morphology and behavior of our closest relatives is one of the best avenues to pursue knowledge about our evolutionary past. I would have liked to replace a few of the speakers who talked about sugar/carbs with more applied evolutionary theory and anthropology.

Extending the Idea

• The Evolution of Hominin Diets
• Dr. Craig B. Stanford’s books on Amazon 

Best Stealth Introduction to the Best Academic Field You’ve Never Heard of: Ethology

“Wild animals, zoos, and you: The influence of habitat on health” by John Durant

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27935632 w=640&h=480]

“Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to certain other disciplines such as neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolution. Ethologists are typically interested in a behavioral process rather than in a particular animal group, and often study one type of behavior (e.g. aggression) in a number of unrelated animals.” –Wikipedia

Comments
For anyone who’s into applying evolutionary theory, but happens to be afraid of evolutionary psychology, ethology is a fruitful alternative. For those who are into evolutionary psychology, ethology can help clarify ideas and incite new lines of thought. In other words, ethology is powerful for anyone who desires to level-up their understanding of evolution as it pertains to behavior.

I don’t remember John explicitly mentioning ethology, but it’s an implicit bridge between his talk and Erwan’s “zoo humans” concept. Rats in cages have smaller brains than rats in “enhanced environments” which have smaller brains than rats in the wild. It’s infinitely naive to think our modern environment doesn’t impact us in very real ways (beyond diet) as well.

Extending the Idea

• Journal of Ethology
• Human Ethology by Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

Best Potential to Leverage the Paleo Health & Fitness Message in the Business World

“Resilliency: Human-Friendly Pathways to Optimal Physical and Mental Health” by Emily Deans, MD and Jamie Scott

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27669824 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Institutional interfaces with health and fitness practitioners is much more prevalent and has much more impact than many of us realize. Because of the efficiency of paleo concepts, this may be the next level in increasing global health through better engagement with the paleo community.

Best “I Wish I Had Tucker’s Research Notes So I Could Get to the Bottom of the Psychology of This” and Ascertain its Myriad Implications

*Talk starts at 21:35
“From cave to cage: Mixed martial arts in ancestral health” by Tucker Max

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27930992 w=640&h=480]
Comments
One of the emergent properties of modern civilization can loosely be characterized as “status ambiguity”. Hunter-gatherers tended to always know where they stood with respect to individuals in their lives. Our conceptions of self are largely influenced by indirect comparisons to abstracted archetypes of humans at the extreme long-tails of the further abstracted economic spectrum. Further, our “real” interactions are also in relation to a disproportionate number of strangers who also exist in a state of their own status ambiguity. The multiple, nested levels of abstraction result in a reality in which has very intersection of the real as it pertains to what our genes expect. Physical training and combat provide a channel to a different reality than our world tends to provide otherwise.

Best Integration of Applied Evolutionary Health, Fitness, and Science

“Body by science” by Doug McGuff, MD

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27962168 w=640&h=480]
Comment
There are moments at which I think Dr. McGuff is totally wrong, and moments I’m totally wrong about him being wrong. A lot of his stuff makes sense on a level that likely dovetails with the concepts in Tucker’s talk and Mark’s talk (both above). I’m not sure the pieces are fully connected, but my brain can’t help but weave the concepts together.

Extending the Idea

• Body by Science book by Doug McGuff

Miscellaneous Important Ideas

As I said, the above videos don’t necessarily contain all of the important topics. There were a lot of ideas that are much more important to people who aren’t me. For the most part, the talks hammering the fringes and overlap between carbs and obesity and disease are mostly lost on me… as are the general talks about paleo that seek to convince newbies or fence-sitters that all of this is a good idea. As such, I’ve unfairly left out a lot of great talks.

Talk that I Already Pretty Much Agree with and Therefore Wished Was More Philosophical

“MovNat: evolutionarily natural fitness” by Erwan LeCorre
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27930009 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Erwan’s talk is a nice introduction to MovNat. It kind of felt like a promo video for something I’m already sold on. That isn’t meant to be a slight at all. I’m just pretty confident that there’s a lot of interesting conceptual underpinning bouncing around in Erwan’s head that the world (and I, in particular) would appreciate. This reference won’t have the gravity it needs without an explanation deeper than I have time to present here, but there’s value in Simon Sinek’s (TED Talk) “Start With Why” (Book) concept that’s overlooked in the talk. It’s not a matter of quality (there’s plenty), but of resonance.

Talk that I Didn’t Watch Because I Know I Already Pretty Much Agree with It, But Think Is Still Super-Important

“The Trouble with Fructose: a Darwinian Perspective” by Robert Lustig, MD
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27563465 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Much like lactose intolerance, it’s surprising to me that so many people are quick to rubber stamp consumption of fructose. Especially when some regional populations have 14%+ rates of fructose malabsorption. Clearly there are individual differences, and qualifiers such as delivery vehicle. Primates lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C because of excessive fruit intake, it’s possible that populations lost the ability to readily metabolize fructose because of minimal fruit intake… and the biochemistry provides some support for this concern.

Talk Other than Mat Lalonde’s that I’m Most Conflicted About

“Self-experimentation: the best science” by Richard Nikoley
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27798705 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Okay, I’m not really conflicted about Richard’s talk, but I’m conflicted about the concept of self-experimentation and the whole n=1 “meme”. The conflict is simple: It’s a brilliant and important concept, but I don’t think most people are capable of executing it in a meaningful way. I too often see people talking about self-experimentation in terms of how they “feel” after doing something or changing something, or whatever. Unless the measure is objective (time, distance, etc.), it’s likely so influenced by cognitive bias that it’s either totally useless, or counter-productive. This is particularly true when talking about dietary compounds that have a short-term psychoactive effect on the brain (neurotransmitters, etc.), in longer durations that introduce stealth and unexpected confounds, or otherwise decouple inputs from outputs or experience. Poorly executed, then continuously recited, N=1 experimentation is an endless fountain of misleading anecdotes that are assigned more value than they warrant.

In other words, watch the talk and practice self-experimentation. But if, and ONLY IF, you pay close attention to the parts about scientific method, and are religious about using only [more or less] objective measures. Even if you manage that, you’re still exposed to a range of biases and need to temper and discount the reliability of your findings more than you’ll want to.

Example of almost totally useless “objective” measure… weight. Throw away your damned scale. You’re better off with a digital camera.

Uncategorized

There are three talks that I really appreciated, but don’t really have much to add to, and are proving hard to categorize along the same metrics as the above videos, so… just watch ’em:

• “Heart Disease and Molecular Degeneration” by Chris Masterjohn
• “Clues from the colon: How this organ illuminates our digestive evolution and microniche” by Melissa McEwen
• “Primal mind: nutrition & mental health—improving the way you feel & function & cultivating an ageless mind” by Nora Gedgaudas

What were your favorite talks? What kind of speakers and topics do you hope to see at AHS 2012 next August at Harvard?

I’m not exactly sure how I’d answer that, but I have a vision of some sort of mega applied evolutionary theory conference. Something between the Ancestral Health Symposium‘s focus on health and fitness, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference, and the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society‘s conference. Since that framework doesn’t exist, I do wonder to what extent the behavioral/psychological research from evolutionary theory would integrate with future AHS events.

It’s tempting to think about evolution as a function of time. This makes some intuitive sense because evolution happens over time, and longer periods of time theoretically allows for more mutations, which theoretically allows for more adaptations. However, it is misleading to use time as a heuristic for thinking about evolution in an individual species, or when making comparisons between species.

Before we dive in too far, here are some obvious qualifiers: Of course, evolution literally happens over time, and is bound by time to some extent. Thus, time isn’t completely irrelevant in the function of evolution. And again, more time generally means more mutations, which means more fodder for adaptation via selection pressures. So yes, time is a factor, but it’s not really that important when thinking about evolution. In fact, there are examples species that haven’t undergone any noticeable evolutionary change. But why not?

The fossil record does include examples of organisms changing gradually over time and undergoing speciation. However, the fossil record also includes examples of near stasis, and examples of rapid evolutionary change. No lesser names than Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould have disagreed on the rapid vs. gradual debate in evolutionary biolog. While it’s currently understood that gradual and rapid change simultaneously fit into the neo-Darwinian synthesis, debates have raged on the issue even within the last decade.

As it pertains to humans, much of the discussion of evolutionary change orbits around the ~ 6 million years separating humans from our most recent common ancestor (MRCA) with chimps/bonobos. Also commonly mentioned are our MRCA with other Great Apes (~10 MYA) and the earliest primates (~65 MYA). How are these misleading in terms of context?

Living fossils

For our purposes, we’ll roughly take “living fossils” to mean species still living today that haven’t changed much in physical structure over long periods of time (morphological stasis). There remain many examples of living fossils. At more than double the time between humans and MRCA, we find Colombian fish that haven’t noticeably undergone evolutionary change in 15 million years (Lundberg, et al. 1986). With these fish as a backdrop, if we were thinking about things in terms of time, we’d have to say that humans, chimps, gorillas, and even orangutans aren’t simply like humans, we’d have to say that they’re the same as humans. If that isn’t enough of an illustration, some species of lamprey haven’t really changed in 350 million years. That’s only a couple hundred million years before the “Jurassic” part of Jurassic Park. Using this period of stasis as analogy, if we were to compare evolution in terms of time, that would make humans the same as dogs, cats, horses, and pretty much all other mammals.

If we wanted to dig deeper into this, we could drum up mathematical models about mutation rates over time. We’d factor in things like the number of chromosomes and genes and crunch that into a formula that took into the account the time each generation takes to reach reproductive age, how long they remain in reproductive age, how many offspring they have, how many survive, et cetera. To make comparisons between species, we’d normalize all of those things across species and try to make predictions about how much evolution should have occurred. Yet, even with models taking species specific mutation loads and reproductive potential into consideration, knowing the amount of time would leave us unable to reliably predict morphological change. The main thing all the modeling and calculation and extrapolation would tell us is a probabilistic potential for evolution. But we’re still missing the crucial component.

Selection pressure

The selection pressure placed on an organism by its environment is the crucial component for thinking about evolution. More accurately, the interaction of multiple selection pressures of varying strength within an organisms total ecology over time is the crucial component for thinking about evolution. Some Colombian fish and some species of lamprey have been reproducing for millions of generations. Each generation across that time has seen a semi-reliable and reasonably predictable mutation load. Yet, we see virtually no change. Without selection pressure from the environment, the genetic material underlying phenotypic expression can simply be averaged-out over time.

Note: this isn’t to say that morphological change can’t happen over time absent selection pressure. Indeed, genetic drift can cause significant change, but it’s rather unpredictable, and doesn’t necessitate change. Further, if a species is already well adapted to its environment, negative selection may keep genetic drift in check, preventing significant change.

Let’s look at it the other way around. Think about the difference between humans and chimps that have evolved over the last ~ 6 MYA. Knowing that mutations in generations of lamprey have been happening for 350 million years, what would we expect to see in the lamprey if we multiplied the difference between humans and chimps over 350 MY? Not only would lamprey have developed electric defense mechanisms, but perhaps also the ability to fly, play Guitar Hero, and lay golden eggs.

Another way to think about the irrelevance of time is to consider a scenario in which a highly contagious and fatal pathogen sweeps through a human population. If there is a genetic immune system variance in 17% of that population that renders individuals resistant to the pathogen, you can have strong selection that may act almost instantaneously in a single generation. If the pathogen manages to survive for longer than 9 months, it will likely further exert selection pressure on the next generation – strengthening the inheritance component of the adaptation.  Between this near instantaneous (in terms of evolutionary time) adaptation, and that of the 350 million years of (relative) stasis in lamprey, we have enough to throw time out the window as a relevant factor in evolutionary heuristic thinking.

Humans aren’t cats. Neanderthal were more closely related to humans than chimps, yet Neanderthals are dead, and chimps aren’t. Lamprey don’t have superpowers. When thinking about evolutionary theory, you’ll get better mileage by thinking about how a species fits in its environment (or range of environments) than you will by thinking about time. Corollary: Think about how it doesn’t fit into its environment.

Also, it’s wise to beware of those trying to “prove” similarity or dissimilarity simply by reciting evolutionary time separating them, and without the complex context of their respective environments over that time.

References
Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. Society. [link]

Gess, R. W., Coates, M. I., & Rubidge, B. S. (2006). A lamprey from the Devonian period of South Africa. Nature, 443(7114), 981-984. [abstract]

Lundberg, J. G., Machado-Allison, A., & Kay, R. F. (1986). Miocene Characid Fishes from Colombia: Evolutionary Stasis and Extirpation . Science , 234 (4773 ), 208-209. [abstract]

Guts

• 3/4 lb. yam or sweet potato or whatever term we’re using this week
• 4 strips bacon
• Grated fresh ginger
• 1 tsp Cinnamon
• Optional: Honey or Maple Syrup

Fry up some bacon. Drain, set aside, and save the grease. Dice when sufficiently cool.

Add 1tbsp of bacon grease to sautee pan on med-high. Add diced yam. Sautee until yams are soft all the way through and begin to caramelize. Reduce heat to low. Add ginger & cinnamon. Add previously cooked bacon. Optional: Add honey or maple syrup. Remove from heat.

Shell

• 4 Eggs
• Butter or bacon grease
• Salt

Whisk eggs. Pre-heat pan to medium. Add 1 tsp of butter of bacon grease. Note: yeah, yeah, yeah, you love bacon, but… the butter adds a nice contrast and the bacon flavor can get a bit heavy. Pour approximately 1/3 of mixture in whatever size of non-stick pan Andrew used (should just thinly coat bottom of pan). Cook for exactly 43 seconds (42 is not the answer to everything). If your omelette doesn’t cook perfectly, it’s because you forgot to cover it with a lid or didn’t guess the exact temperature, it’s not because of the 43 second time, which is an infallible fixed constant.

Stuff guts into shell and wrap them up all pretty like. Add mint garnish, your photographs will thank you. Photograph. Devour with reckless abandon.

Variation: Add ricotta, cinnamon, vanilla to filling. Spread this mixture over omelette shell before adding guts.

Variation: Nix the honey and maple syrup and add mushrooms and herbs.

While you’re enjoying animal flesh, watch this video about animal rights ethicist Peter Singer. Sure, you’ll roll your eyes at some of the bioethics, but it’s still a great primer on connecting evolution and ethics. Don’t worry, it will be a while before the “expanding circle” encompasses your beloved pork belly. Singer does gloss over the reconciliation of the “is-ought problem”, but you know better.

Then, watch the second talk by Robert Sapolsky on the neuroscience of why humans aren’t just your average primate. If you’re only a quasi-geek who “doesn’t have time” to watch both, I’d recommend the second one. But really, both are brilliant and entertaining and contain essential foundations of evolutionary theory.

Does Understanding Evolution Help Us Understand Ethics?

The world-renowned Australian philosopher Peter Singer asks: does knowledge of evolution help us to understand ethics? Our moral compass may have evolved over time, but how does enhancing our reproductive fitness help us work out what is really right or wrong? While evolution is neutral with regard to values, Peter Singer tackles the question of altruism’s place in evolution’s “survival of the fittest” campaign, explaining how reciprocal and trusting relationships generally make for success. Then Singer humbles us with the reminder that innate judgments are neither necessarily correct, nor better than other judgments. He proposes that human kind has evolved to prefer those who are like us, and suggests humanity is at its best when showing it can move beyond this paradigm. This event is co-presented with Sydney Ideas and the Think Global School.

• Misconceptions: Evolution and Ethics
• Human Nature: Altruism and Self-Interest
• Survival is a Reciprocal Act
• Rational Thought: Expectation of Fairness
• The Evolutionary Impact of Ethics in Human Society
• Trolley Probelm: Sacrificing Few to Save Many
• Innate Emotional Moral Judgment
• Evaluating Moral Judgments with Reason
• Using Reason to Critique Emotional Intuition
• Extending Moral Concerns Beyond Personal Groups

Q&A

• Role of Quest to Excel? Environmental Responsibility?
• Naturalistic Fallacy a Fallacy?
• Conclusion on the Trolley Problem?
• Thoughts on Sam Harris’ Moral Landscape?
• Moral Instinct Helps Us Make Moral Choices?
• Conformity a Evolutionary Response?
• Quantify Emotional Responses?
• Happier with Incoherent Ethical Beliefs?

Peter Singer first became well-known internationally after the publication ofAnimal Liberation. His other books include: Democracy and Disobedience; Practical Ethics; The Expanding Circle; Animal Factories (with Jim Mason); ,  Ethics into Action, A Darwinian Left, The Way We Eat (with Jim Mason) and The Life You Can Save.

Are Humans Just Another Primate?

Dr. Robert Sapolsky discusses his work as professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and as a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. His enviable gift for storytelling led the New York Times to print, “If you crossed Jane Goodall with a borscht-belt comedian, she might have written a book like A Primate’s Memoir.” Dr. Sapolsky’s account of his early years as a field biologist. He is sure to dazzle and delight with tales of what it means to be human.

Dr. Sapolsky is the author of several works of nonfiction, including A Primate’s Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers andMonkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals.

• Comparing Humans to Other Animals
• The Range of Human Similarities and Differences
• Comparing Human and Primate Aggression
• Comparing Human and Primate Theory of Mind
• Human and Animal Views of the Golden Rule
• Comparing Human and Primate Empathy
• Gratification and Anticipation in Humans and Primates
• Comparing Human and Primate Culture
• The Unique Human Ability to Understand Metaphor
• Metaphor and the Ability to Feel Other People’s Pain
• Other Confusions of Mental and Physical Sensations
• The Real-World Impact of Metaphor and Symbols
• The Human Ability to Gain Strength from the Impossible

Q & A

• Classifying What Makes Humans Unique
• Animal Ability to Detect Human Emotion
• The Role of Language in Human Uniqueness
• The Uniqueness of Hypocrisy
• Comparing Human and Animal Desire for Entertainment
• How Words and Experiences Affect the Brain
• Advertising and Mental Manipulation0
• Analyzing Animal Language
• Humans and Group Action
• The Role of Genetics in Human Uniqueness

*Skip to below the videos if you don’t care about an aside about doctors.

I almost feel bad focusing this piece on one article in particular. I’ve been squinting skeptically at the talk surrounding epigenetics for months now. Because of that, much of what follows is directed at pop science journalism as much as anything.

I can’t bring myself to actually feel all that bad because Dr. Hyman is a doctor. Not only is he a doctor, but he brings up his doctoryness pretty much everywhere. And that’s fine, but training to be a medical doctor doesn’t necessarily provide special training in nutrition, exercise physiology, et cetera. It’s a problem because people respect doctors. It seems to me that people also tend to respect medical doctors (Dr. Hyman’s flavor) more than PhDs. Unfortunately for reality, the converse should often be true. The brief training medical doctors get in nutrition and exercise physiology has a higher probability of being dated (however slightly) when it comes in the form of chapters of generalized books and/or when it is taught by non-specialists. It’s certainly true that some medical doctors have stepped up their game and are exempt from this criticism, and that isn’t the point. It’s a problem of automatically granted authority where none should be granted. A recent exchange between Deepak Chopra (and M.D.) and Sam Harris (Ph.D. in neuroscience) illustrates this somewhat.

Scientific claims by Deepak Chopra

Response by Sam Harris (rewind to beginning for a funny moment: Michael Shermer calls Deepak “woo woo”)

Hilarious: Leanord Mlodinow (theoretical physicist, co-authored 2 books with Stephen Hawking) pwns Deepak

The Meat of It

“Science is now proving what we all knew intuitively—that how we live, the quality of our relationships, the food we eat, how we use our bodies, and the environment that washes over us and determines much more than our genes ever will.”

Propaganda 101: The False Dichotomy

The above (and below) quote is from a blog post, ‘Secrets to Health are in Diet and Lifestyle Not Human Genome: The Failure of Decoding the Human Genome and the Future of Medicine‘ [it actually starts with “Secretes”, but I assume that’s a typo], by Dr. Mark Hyman. There is some value here, but when I’m being offered “secrets to health” and instead given fluffy science, appeals to intuitive folk psychology, and hyperbole, I have a hard time recommending you endeavor to dig for nuggets of truth. The way the article is framed is misleading, and… well… wrong. It’s not wrong to say that epigenomics is real and important, but it is wrong to dismiss genetics in favor of epigenomics. That approach is not only a logical fallacy, but an advertising/propaganda tactic. Claims along these lines are madness when we consider that all epigenomics can ever do – by its own definition – is influence the expression of genes. Knowing this simple fact refutes the sensationalist claim that, “Science is now proving [that] the environment… determines much more than our genes ever will.” [emphasis mine]

So at first I was put off by the article. But that was before I remembered that I’ve recently been working on a theory proposing that, while beneficial to plants via chlorophyll, our yellow sun presents a contra-optimal environmental input to epidermal vitamin D synthesis. If we were able to find suitable habitat on a planet orbiting a red sun, the spectrum phase-shift would cause a hormone balance reconstituentialization switching the protein cascade of certain genes to unlock the potential for conscious human negation of both gravity and friction. Failing that, I have high hopes for the venom of radioactive spiders.

Now… if I actually believed in the Superman or Spiderman hypotheses, statements similar to those made by Dr. Hyman would enable their theoretic viability.

The Epigenome: Bypassing Darwin and Evolution

More important than our collection of genes, it now appears, is how those genes are controlled by both internal and external factors—our thoughts, stress, social connections, what we eat, our level of physical and mental activity, and our exposure to microbes and environmental toxins. These factors are switches that turn genes on and off and determine which proteins are expressed. The expressed proteins, in turn, trigger signals of disease or health.

In the context of this article, the claim that epigenomics bypasses Darwin and evolution seems to be more of a political hope than a scientifically defensible position. Now everybody, in your best Beach Boys harmony:

Wouldn’t it be nice if genes were over
‘Cause selling magic-bullets never would be wrong
And wouldn’t it be nice to live forever
In worlds where supra-malleable human beings belong

No, I am not saying Dr. Hyman made this argument explicitly. Yes, I am saying the implication of the argument unlocks false hope in a world in which epigenomic influences wield supreme power. Invoking the concept of control by external factors is problematic. It implies that, if only we can find the right environmental factor(s), we can positively or negatively bend genetic expression to overcome any malady or limitation. If genes and/or evolution don’t matter, nothing can stop us, comrades!

Yes folks, I regret to inform you that it’s the “nurture trumps nature” argument all over again. Not only is the mind a blank slate (as others claim) in this warm and fuzzy world,  but now the body is as well. Bla bla fracking bla.

It could be rightly said that I’m attributing more weight to Dr. Hyman’s mention of epigenomics than is appropriate. However, the other factors he discusses (exposomics, nutrigenomics and microbiomics, and toxigenomics) fall under my same criticism asserting an interactionist framework. In fact, while trumpeting the “failure” of genomics, he simultaneously admits “the dynamic interplay of the environment” and genes. Nutrients, microbes, toxins, and (catch-all term) exposomes all collide with the human genotype and phenotype in ways that can’t accurately be cast in a binary light in which genomics has been deemed a failure. And despite the equivocations and qualifications invoked to temper his message to be mostly accurate-ish, there’s no hope of escaping Darwin and evolution in Dr. Hyman’s position.

Three neo-Darwinist points about epigenetic switches

*Note the switch from “epigenomics” to “epigenetics”. For our purposes, epigenomics can sufficiently be thought of as a macro view of epigenetics.

As is always the case in the “nature vs. nurture debate”, there is no “nature vs. nurture debate”. The false dichotomy only exists in the polemical propaganda of the nurture Nazis (think Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi”, not reductio ad Hitlerum). No, there is no versus, there is only synthesis amidst a continuum. The 3 points below are from Oana Carja‘s excellent answer to the question, “Is it time to revise evolutionary biology textbooks to reconcile Darwin with Lamarck?” They have been edited, but the two quoted paragraphs that follow appear in their original form:

1. A property of the DNA sequence itself is the ability to switch epigenetic state, and is therefore subject to natural selection on conventional mutations.

2. Natural selection will  eliminate switches with maladaptive effects but perpetuate, and refine, those with adaptive effects.

3. The additional ‘information’ represented by a  DNA sequence’s particular epigenetic state is repeatedly being reset.

Thus, epigenetic switches do not involve cumulative, open-ended evolutionary change. Switches are wonderful tools that increase the options available to  DNA sequences but, in themselves, should not challenge the beliefs of a neo-Darwinist. The high rate of epigenetic change is also important because the level of achievable adaptive precision is limited by the  fidelity of replication. Adaptation is constantly being degraded by copying  errors and the higher the rate of errors, the larger the selective advantage that is required to maintain previous adaptation. Thus, small selective advantages are  unable to be maintained in the presence of low-fidelity replication.

Therefore,  significant adaptations are expected to be encoded genetically rather than  epigenetically. Modern neo-Darwinists do not deny that epigenetic mechanisms play an important role during development nor do they deny that these mechanisms  enable a variety of adaptive responses to the environment. Recurrent,  predictable changes of epigenetic state provide a useful set of switches that allow genetically identical cells to acquire differentiated functions and allow facultative responses of a genotype to environmental changes (provided that  ‘similar’ changes have occurred repeatedly in the past). However, most neo-Darwinists would claim that the ability to adaptively switch epigenetic state is a property of the DNA sequence (in the sense that alternative  sequences would show different switching behavior) and that any increase of adaptedness in the system has come about by a process of natural selection.

In other words, epigenetic switches themselves are subject to evolution. Thus, I must sincerely apologize for my current inability to christen epigenetics as the long-awaited mechanism to bring the DC vs. Marvel debate into the scientific realm.

The astute among us may have realized by now that my criticism of Dr. Hyman’s article relies almost entirely on just four of his words. If “failure” wasn’t in the title, and “control” wasn’t used in reference to extra-genomic influence, and “bypassed” didn’t precede Darwin and evolution,  and “determines” wasn’t attributed to epigenetic influence, I may not have been forced to write this. In actuality, those four little words poison an otherwise interesting article in a way that misleads casual readers. I’ll just put aside the problems with the use of “much more” in the lead quote unless someone raises further concern in the comments.

Epigenetics is interesting. Epigenetics is useful. However, epigenetic influence remains confined by genetic potential and Darwinian selection. Let us not make it out to be the panacea it is not. Beyond that, I believe we’re at, or even beyond, the point at which there needs to be some push-back on pop science framings of epigenetics as something that somehow undermines neo-Darwinian evolution. From a strategic perspective, misconstrued epigenetics can be taken out of context far too conveniently by the Creationist and/or Intelligent Design programs.

Oh, and for those of the paleo persuasion… Dr. Hyman’s prescription for gut health? “Eat whole unprocessed foods with plenty of fiber… beans… and whole grains.” Beans and whole grains for gut health!? I don’t feel bad about picking on this article for four words after all. Please don’t take that as ad hominem; it supports the thoughts in the preface.

I hate postmodern feminism. As a man by birth, not by choice, I call shenanigans on the idea of a vast male conspiracy in which I’m hopelessly complicit. The charge that I am conditioned from birth to oppress all of the women I love, all of the women I know, and all of the women on the planet is not one with which I’m likely to acquiesce. The notion that I’m doomed to omni-directional socialization smacks of Christianity’s putrid communicable mind-disease of “Original Sin”. But while Christianity offers potential salvation through authoritarian subjugation of our minds and the rest of our human nature after a life of guilt, postmodern feminism offers nothing more than perpetual guilt and a labryinthian trial of futility that would lead Josef K to rejoice in the relative clarity of his nightmare of Kafka’s prison. Like the magical monotheisms’ strategic defense by placing its rules outside the observable world and beyond the understanding of feeble brains, postmodern feminism holds its truths just on the other side of spectacular society’s aim or grasp. We are all inside the conspiracy, and thus, forever powerless to question its pervasive hold with our tainted minds.

But let’s get to the bad news…

Apparently, I am guilty as charged. I openly view women as different from men… and I like it. What’s worse, I have been known to love women precisely because of their femininity. And I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I have been successful in being smitten by oppressing women to degree that they have appreciated my undying appreciation of said femininity. Thus, I have apparently pulled off the masterstroke of Pavlovian conditioning by convincing women that there is something special different about them worthy of distinction, and that that inherent beauty defect is a point of delineation warranting irrepressible affection and admiration objectification.

Yet despite my actual loathing for postmodern feminism, and tongue-in-cheek embrace of their accusatory program, I consider myself a Darwinian feminist. Let’s be clear… that is a political position of feminist bias influenced by Darwinian science. This is not to be confused with the scientific position of feminist Darwinism, in which scientific hypotheses are formed through the perspective gained by freeing oneself from the scientific community’s irrepressible patriarchy (Vandermassen 2008). I take this position of political bias because since the agricultural revolution, feminists have an indisputable point (generally speaking). One of the first sociopolitical developments of agricultural society was property. Besides land, women were subjected to the forefront of the legal ownership construct. It’s difficult to disentangle the development of agriculture, writing, law, oppression, and theistic religion. This difficulty is explained in their mutually supportive natures (the Matrix beta version?).

In my overlap into the paleosphere, I wonder about the influence of gendered conflagrations of caveman romanticism. I think the first of Melissa McEwan’s posts I ever read was on the question of ‘Sexism and Paleo‘. Though I disagree with a few of the points in that piece, I share a disdain for the popularized caveman stereotype. On one level, I’ve wandered around a lot of wilderness looking for caves, and I can verify that they’re not a reliable strategy for shelter from the elements or protection from predators. Thus, I vote for burying the “caveman” concept along with agricultural dominance hierarchies and the vegetarian myth. On the psychosocial level, I see the caveman image of a clubbed woman being dragged off to be used as a reproduction machine as an overt misogynistic cultural amplification of testosterone-drunk wish-thinking. As a man, I’m also not going to pretend that I can’t imagine where that impulse comes from. If you take that last sentence as a justification, you don’t understand me and should probably stop reading now.

*Much of what follows was influenced by a 4-participant, 5-article throwdown in the “Feminist Forum” feature on the intersection of feminism and Darwinism in a 2008 issue of Sex Roles…  a peer-reviewed, openly feminist leaning journal. The journal is offering free and direct access through December 31, 2010. Rebecca Hannagan wrote the target article which was reponded to by feminists Laurett Liesen, Griet Vandermassen, and Celeste Condit. Hannagan also provides a follow-up on the others’ comments.

“Ignorant” Evolutionary Psychology vs. “Ignorant” Feminism

And thus begins the typical impasse between evolutionary psychology and feminism. Feminists charge evolutionary psychologists with indiscriminate justification of evil, and evolutionary psychologists accuse feminists of misunderstanding that the “job of scientists is to find out how things work, to try to be evenhanded with the evidence, and to present their findings…” (Vandermassen 2008). The project of science is understanding. The project of evolutionary psychology is understanding psychology in the context of evolution. Beware anyone who conflates understanding with justification.

“Evolutionary psychologists’ continued ignorance of feminism and their ongoing failure to recognize the vast contributions by feminist evolutionists is at worst the continuation of male bias, and at best scholarly negligence.” (Liesen 2008)

“[P]reviously considered an “archaic debate” [, genetic determinism], turned out to be a real concern still in the minds of many feminists. As Jonathan Waage and Patricia Gowaty (1997) write in their conclusion, “[t]erminology, politics, and ignorance are, inretrospect, major barriers to the dialectic of feminism and evolutionary biology” (p. 585).” (Vandermassen 2008)

Darwin: More Feminist than the Feminists

Darwin’s world-view was certainly steeped in a world of Victorian ideals. As such, he tended to ethnocentrize, anthropomorphize, and Victorianify a bit too frequently. However, behind the now anachronistic veneer, his wisdom was potent.

“Darwin also attributed a more important evolutionary role to females than did most evolutionists for nearly a century after him: female choice in sexual selection. Since females bear the greater parental investment through pregnancy and lactation, they have more to gain from being highly selective about with whom to mate than do males. As a result, certain traits are selected for in males if, over time, females choose to mate with the males that bear those traits more than those who do not.” (Hannagan 2008)

That first sentence could have also read, “Darwin also attributed a more important evolutionary role to females than did most feminists for nearly a century after him.” In the concept of sexual selection, we have a solid foundation from which to sweep away all attempts to legitimize gendered patriarchy. In the concept of sexual selection, we have a power structure that, excepting violence, is nearly irrefutable for men. Across the millions of species of the animal kingdom, females exercise ultimate say in selecting with whom to reproduce. The whims of females have given us everything from the peacocks’ tail (Darwin 1972) to the bowerbirds fantastic nests and 12 foot antlers of the Irish elk (Coyne 2009) to our very creativity and intelligence (Miller 2001). Sexual selection is almost universally ignored, and when it is considered, is often misunderstood as a patriarchal mechanism for herding women. Competition between men acts as a fitness cue that aids women in selecting mates (intrasexual sexual selection). Direct displays by men to women also act as fitness cues to aid women in selecting mates (intersexual sexual selection). This isn’t to say that dominance hierarchies don’t exist in various species, but it is necessary to question the assumption that intrasexual selection is a dominance hierarchy rather than a fitness cue. Intersexual selection is always the latter.

The positive implications of sexual selection for a Darwinian feminism are many. Yet ironically, and to the detriment of their program, postmodern feminism has attacked evolutionary biology after missing the point.

Another area that’s often ignored or assigned to the evils of patriarchy is competition between females. It would be naive to assume that sexual selection is unidirectional. It is true that females have the highest degree of choice, but men also gain reproductive advantage by choosing the “best” mate. Intrasexual female competition has serious negative consequences. Stereotypically female behaviors from fashion to makeup to anorexia have been attributed to competition between females (Li, et al. 2010). Interestingly, Li, et al also found this intrasexual competition functioning similarly in homosexual men. Activities motivated by intrasexual female competition have traditionally been prime targets for postmodern feminists to assign to patriarchal power structures. However, it seems that this may be a misguided confusion of intrasexual and intersexual competition.

Men and Women Are Different

That is not a claim or implication that a male brain or a female brain is better, it is a statement of fact. While – Top 5 target of anti-evolutionary psychology deniers – Steven Pinker had already convincingly refuted “blank slate” conflagrations in his 2001 book, “The Blank Slate” (linked below), neuroscience has since been demonstrating differences via fMRI and other brain studies. Sexual dimorphism (differences) in brain development have been observed to be directly influenced by differences in XX vs. XY chromosome factors (that is at the genetic, pre-hormonal level), and by gonadal hormone differences (e.g. testosterone) (Arnold 2004).

“Genes that are found on the sex chromosomes influence sexually dimorphic brain development both by causing sex differences in gonadal secretions and by acting in brain cells themselves to differentiate XX and XY brains. Because it is easier to manipulate hormone levels than the expression of sex chromosome genes, the effects of hormones have been studied much more extensively, and are much better understood, than the direct actions in the brain of sex chromosome genes. Although the differentiating effects of gonadal secretions seem to be dominant, the theories and findings discussed above support the idea that sex differences in neural expression of X and Y genes significantly contribute to sex differences in brain functions and disease.” (Arnold 2004) [emphasis mine]

“Many neurological and psychological diseases vary in incidence or severity between the sexes. Some of these diseases are known to involve X-linked genes. The vulnerability of males to mutations of X-linked genes is an obvious source of sex differences in diseases. However, more subtle variation of the same loci probably accounts for some of the differences in psychological and neural function among populations of males and females.Recent improvements in methods to manipulate and measure gene action will lead to further insights on the role of X and Y genes in brain gender.” (Arnold 2004)

Recent theoretical developments in neuronal plasticity have given the postmodern feminists and other blank-slaters a new angle to make us all the same. Some now claim that the overarching and nefarious social construct causes brains to physically develop gender identities based on patriarchal domination by way of language faculty alteration (Kaiser, et al. 2009). That’s right folks, males are so crafty that we’ve figured out how to physically alter the neuronal structure of women’s minds to do our bidding as hapless automatons. To say that gender bias goes deep is apparently an understatement of mind-bending proportions. Curiously, all such studies seem to recognize, or ignore, sex differences in the brains of all other animal species, but resort to neck-down Darwinism when considering humans. Again, the postmodern feminist position parallels that of religion in its insistence that evil forces corrupt us on unseen levels, and by excluding the human brain as the one thing Darwinian considerations can’t mustn’t be applied to.

Years after Pinker’s work, Hannagan is still comfortable enough about sex differences to say: “Broad personality constructs, such as neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness, are heritable and there are small but consistent differences between men and women on two of the big five personality constructs—extraversion and agreeableness.” (Hannagan 2008b) [emphasis mine]

This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg regarding physical (brain included) and psychological differences.

Against the Caveman Mystique

It’s hard for me to imagine the caveman stereotype existing without the logically flawed, but evolutionarily advantageous, human cognitive availability bias (or heuristic). In short, since we find evidence of humans in many caves, but not out in the open, we tend to assume humans were more often inhabiting caves than out in the open. The art and human remains found in caves are not found there because a majority of our ancestors were “cavemen”. They are found there because caves offer protective value for preservation, and because caves are geographically obvious places to look. Thus, the probability we’ll look in caves multiplied by the probability of evidence being preserved in caves skews cave evidence to secure an artificially elevated place in our consciousness. It’s also the case that human remains are dragged to caves by whatever ate them, or humans died in caves by becoming trapped. All of this is further multiplied by the caveman narrative in culture… it’s easy to picture, and therefore remember, and therefore spreads.

The following excerpt is from a review of the apparently poorly received book, ‘The Caveman Mystique‘ by Martha McCaughey. While it’s directed at the McCaughey’s view of the caveman stereotype, I suggest that it should also be tested against feminist theory.

Perhaps the most curious omission in the book is any discussion of the evolutionary psychological view of the human female. We are repeatedly told the dubious notion that the evolutionary view of the male is that of the stereotypical caveman who drags women off by the hair for sex. But what is the corresponding picture of the female? Evidently McCaughey doesn’t think this is informative. If men are interested in having sex with as many women as possible, what does this say about women? It is a fact of simple arithmetic that the average number of sexual partners must be identical for males and females (assuming a 50-50 sex ratio). So if men have X female partners on average, the average woman must also have X male partners. What does this logic imply about the female side of mating? (McBurney 2009)

Hunter-Gatherers: Hierarchy vs. Egalitarianism

The hunter-gatherer stereotype often does no better than the caveman tripe. Rather than the overt “masculinity” of clubbing all women of one’s choosing, it’s replaced by the overt “masculinity” of killing a wily beast and the implied “masculine” domination associated with bestowing such a gift upon the rest of the band. Unfortunately, the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis that was forwarded to explain human cognitive development has been considered inaccurate almost consistently since the 1970s (Hannagan 2008).

In discussing sexual selection above, I argued that there is a fundamental refutation of patriarchy inherent in the Darwinian framework. That itself should sound the death knell for any attempts at misogyny or gendered political dominance. However, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer existence takes that a step further. It is likely that the prevailing form of social arrangement for the bulk of human evolution was social anarchism in the context of small hunter-gatherer bands. It is important not to assume contemporary stereotypes of socialism and anarchy here.

As found by anthropological studies of recent hunter-gatherer bands, hunter-gatherer bands exhibit high levels of communitarian and cooperative behaviors combined with an often explicit rejection of hierarchy. To observe this clearly, we also need to make a distinction between immediate-return hunter-gatherers and delayed-return hunter-gatherers. The immediate vs. delayed distinction refers initially to the timeframe in which they consume hunted and gathered food. With immediate-return bands, we see daily consumption of most food, little storage, and a tendency to an almost perpetually nomadic existence. Delayed-return hunter-gatherer bands tend to differ in that they are geographically isolated, or have borders imposed upon them by surrounding populations . In this transitional stage between ancestral hunter-gatherer existence and agriculture, we see more evidence of hierarchy, despite a lack of private property relative to modern agrarian cultures (Gray 2009).

Overall, we see a general lack of ownership or conceptions of private-property within hunter-gatherer social arrangements. The division of labor is an economic strategy that benefits both individuals and the group. Value is not necessarily assigned a priori to male or female, or to hunter or gatherer.

In some examples, anthropologists have noted a significant degree of male group control over “marriages”. This is often imposed not by potential suitors, but by the male family members of the woman. This is misleading as it’s often an ethnocentric assignment of our notions of monogamy on cultures which don’t necessarily share the same sexual norms. Even in societies with supposed marriages, females exercise a high degree of mate choice when it comes to actual reproduction:

“Having high status as a good hunter has been shown to raise a man’s reproductive success everywhere the relationship has been investigated, one of the pathways being that it gains him sexual access to more and higher quality women, whether officially or in extra-marital affairs.” (Vandermassen 2008) [emphasis mine]

At first glance, this would seem to refute my comment a couple paragraphs back about non-assignment of value to the hunter role. However, it merely reinforces my qualification that such value is not assigned a priori. Hunters, as a category, do not automatically benefit. Hunters who excel are assigned a higher fitness value and therefore tend to be selected by females to father offspring. This does however, refute the claim that arranged marriages act as true control over women’s reproduction.

Autonomy

In another word, freedom. Why is every sovereign individual (by that I mean every individual) in the 21st century born not as a human, but as a proprietary asset on the balance sheet of a nation-state? Why do all agricultural societies suffer from drastically diminished levels of freedom? Why do geographically and otherwise isolated delayed-return hunter-gatherer bands tend toward political hierarchy while their immediate-return analogues do not? The atomization of individuals within the supra-organism of culture has been elevated over the autonomy our ancestors were born with, but why?

For 99%+ of human evolution, every able-bodied human has had the option of leaving oppressive regimes. Every individual had the choice to opt out of social games stacked against them. The fact of human migration across the totality of earth is proof that this strategy was employed many times. However, it would have happened more rapidly if remaining in a group was not generally more advantageous for each individual. The ability to round up a group of like-minded individuals to leave was somewhat balanced by the group’s recognition of a general strength in numbers. Call it the invisible hand of exploration, or call it migration, but it acted as a perpetual check on all forms of unwelcome domination. Their complete lack of the geographical and legal boundaries we’re faced with today allowed an entirely different paradigm for human social interaction. This concept is not new. The right to cross all borders to leave oppression is legitimized in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, it is ignored by every country on earth for reasons beyond the scope of this piece. Further, the concept loses its actual value when there is no more frontier, but only trading one domination hierarchy for the flag of another.

The temptation to form in-groups and out-groups along lines of gender, ethnicity, education, running skills, or other coin flips is a curse of a stone age brain in an information age world. Yielding to such temptations will invariably lead to error. The unbearable lightness of paranoia that accompanies postmodernist cynicism is a direct path to your own distracted energy. You’re all formally invited to ditch the postmodern feminist doomsday machine for a refreshing trip to the history of the Galapagos…

Hey! I finished in under 4,000 words! Is this the part where I get called a misogynist then burned at the altar of Margaret Mead, or… perhaps you have other thoughts? (If you have questions or comments that you think are too far off topic, you can also post ’em in the forum.)

References
Arnold, Arthur P. “Sex chromosomes and brain gender..” Nature reviews. Neuroscience 5, no. 9 (September 2004): 701-8.
Curry, Oliver. “Who’ s Afraid of the Naturalistic Fallacy?”. Evolutionary Psychology (2006): 234-247.
Gray, Peter. “Play as a Foundation for Hunter- Gatherer Social Existence s.” The American Journal of Play 1, no. 4 (2009): 476-522.
Hannagan, Rebecca J. “Gendered political behavior: A Darwinian feminist approach.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7/8 (2008).
Hannagan, Rebecca J. “Genes, Brains and Gendered Behavior: Rethinking Power and Politics in Response to Condit, Liesen, and Vandermassen.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (September 2008): 504-511.
Kaiser, Anelis, Sven Haller, Sigrid Schmitz, and Cordula Nitsch. “On sex/gender related similarities and differences in fMRI language research..” Brain research reviews 61, no. 2 (October 2009): 49-59.
Li, N. P., Smith, A. R., Griskevicius, V., Cason, M. J., & Bryan, A. (2010). Intrasexual competition and eating restriction in heterosexual and homosexual individuals. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 365-372.
Liesen, Laurette T. “The Evolution of Gendered Political Behavior: Contributions from Feminist Evolutionists.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (July 2008): 476-481.
McBurney, Donald H. “REVIEW – The Caveman Mystique: Pop Darwinism and the Debates over Sex, Violence, and Science.” Sex Roles 62, no. 1-2 (June 2009): 138-140.
Trivers, R.L. . Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871-1971 (1972) : 136-179. Chicago, IL: Aldine. ISBN 0-435-62157-2
Vandermassen, Griet. “Can Darwinian Feminism Save Female Autonomy and Leadership in Egalitarian Society?.” Sex Roles 59, no. 7-8 (August 2008): 482-491.
Waage, J., & Gowaty, P. (1997). Myths of genetic determinism. In P. Gowaty (Ed.), Feminism and evolutionary biology: Boundaries, intersections, and frontiers (pp. 585–613). New York: Chapman & Hall.
Walter, Alex. “The Anti-naturalistic Fallacy : Evolutionary Moral Psychology and the Insistence of Brute Facts.” Evolutionary Psychology, no. 1999 (2006): 33-48.
Wilson, David Sloan, Eric Dietrich, and Anne B Clark. “On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology.” Evolutionary Psychology (2003): 669-682.

Dr. Disotell received his Ph.D. and Masters degrees from Harvard University, and his Bachelor’s degree from Cornell University.

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Target

The seeds of this article have been on my mind for a while, but its timing is a reaction to an article I saw yesterday in the Chicago Sun Times titled “Meaty fad diet goes back to Stone Age“. Here we go… Back to the 3.4 million year “fad”. The author added to the fad rhetoric by calling the paleo diet “silly”. That sort of title is pretty common in the anti-paleo polemics that circulate in the blogosphere. However, this was from what I presumed to be a nominally significant traditional media outlet. It was clearly written by a non-journalist, which is fine I guess, but it struck me as particularly poorly researched. There were no online responses when I read it, so I fired off a hasty, but I think accurate, comment. At the time of this writing, it’s the first of a few comments, but who knows what whims might change that.

Semi-Irrelevant Backstory

When I first read the article, I read every word, but stopped at the 2nd to last sentence of the piece: “Cornell McClellan is the owner of Naturally Fit… a personal training and wellness facility.” Maybe it’s not fair nor accurate, but when I think gym owner / personal trainer, I envision a wall of supplements and meal replacement bars and powders… you know…. merchandise that needs to be “moved”. Thus, I tend to take their advice on nutrition with a grain of yeah, right. In missing the last sentence, I missed something that would have changed my comment somewhat. Here’s that non-trivial sentence: “He is also the fitness trainer for the President of the United States and the First Lady.” Yes, you may {insert scratching record sound here}.

Let it be known that I am was in no way hostile to the Obama administration when I read the article. Sure, I could work up a reasonable critique of a dozen or so things I think were bad policy decisions, but my critiques of the Bush Jr. administration would be measured in hundreds or thousands. For reasons mentioned by neither Democrats nor Republicans, I find the health care bill to be flawed. It also strikes me as unconstitutional, but I went to the law school of James Spader and William Shatner. To the Presiden’ts credit, as a non-theist, the following may be my favorite quote by any U.S. President since James Madison:

“I’m somebody who deeply believes that the bedrock strength of this country is that it embraces people of many faiths and no faith. This is a country that is still predominantly Christian, but we have… atheists, agnostics… that we have to revere and respect….” Barack Obama, September 28, 2010.<

The only reason I’m writing this article is that I got curious and googled Cornell McClellan. It was then that I found out he’s 1 of 16 official members of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition. It was only after finding that page that I went back to the article and connected all of the dots. I remain skeptical of its claim that Mr. McClellan has an “extensive knowledge of the human body and nutrition.”

The Meat of It

Cornell McClellan’s article really is garbage. I do encourage you to read the whole thing to take in the totality of its emptiness. The portrait of the paleo diet that he paints is more a cartoonish mischaracterization of the Atkins diet than paleo. And to be fair to the Atkins folks, it’s not a fair representation of them either.

The problem with this sort of article is that the average person sincerely looking for a way to improve their health is not likely to see through the unsupported assertions made by someone who’s a professional personal trainer backed by the President and officially promoted as an outstanding exemplar by the United States government. My thoughts and references follow each of the quoted snippets.

“a recent study has come out that refutes some of [the paleo diet’s] basic tenets. Findings from archeological digs in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic suggest that cavemen did not only rely on meat for sustenance, as evidenced by traces of starch grains found on stones used for grinding and preparing food.”

Well at least Mr. McClellan did go so far as to read the Reuters blurb on this and maybe even the NYT piece [“page not found” error as of this writing]. However, the actual study did not reveal evidence of “grains” in the sense that would be appropriate for a paleo diet discussion of grains… namely, cereal grains such as wheat, barley, amaranth, millet, et cetera. The grains being referred to are grains in the sense that they are particulates; that is, the result of grinding. The popular science media misconstrued this research ad nauseum when it was first published. Its implications for paleo dieters are approximately zero. It’s been refuted many times, but Melissa McEwen provides my favorite critique thus far. It’s based on the actual study, not the other journalists’ general audience pieces, and she even bothered to include a relevant chart from the study that shows the non-grain plants in question.

Not trivial in the media coverage of this study was the post-publishing opining by some of the article’s authors. At least one made a wild and unsubstantiated guess that they used the ground plant material to make bread. I ask again, who among you thinks mashed potatoes are the same as bread? Perhaps we have to be scientists to make such a determination?

Archeologists were shocked to discover that our carnivorous ancestors actually were making and preparing foods such as roots, vegetables and perhaps even cracker-like foods.

Now this is just ridiculous. First of all, no serious scientist currently thinks our ancestors were “carnivores”. It is widely accepted by archaeologists and anthropologists that humans evolved as omnivores. I’d let laymen off the hook on this distinction, but Mr. McClellan knows better and is exaggerating for effect. The paleo diet approach simply echoes a range of foods our omnivorous ancestors would have had access to. Second, there are longstanding hypotheses and evidence of hominid “preparation” of roots and vegetables. The rest of us know that crackers were invented by the Keebler elves, no earlier than the First Age of Middle-Earth. Proving that humans made crackers in the paleolithic is about as likely as leading us to a magical elven forest.

These recent findings suggest that man cannot live on meat alone, but that hasn’t stopped thousands of people from signing up for the Paleo Diet.

Now we’re getting ridiculous-er. The paleolithic diet doesn’t suggest that anyone could, should, or would survive on meat alone.  I’m sure someone could make a case that humans could survive on meat alone, but it would remain a question of how long and how well. Scientists do hypothesize that Neanderthals were mostly carnivorous, but they’re a separate species and that argument is beside the point.

a meat-heavy diet isn’t recommended for most people. Not only do I discourage any diet that disallows entire food groups, but cholesterol levels are directly linked to the ingestion of animal products.

Meat-heavy is vague, unhelpful, and pejorative in a way the author clearly intended. Here we also have a legitimate disagreement on what constitutes a food group. Grain might be a Food Group, but it is not a group of foods or nutrients required for human health. There are no essential nutrients found in grains that are not found in dramatically higher concentrations in the other “food groups”. Yes, grains, as a practical matter, are necessary to sustain the massive current global population of Homo sapiens with the current agribusiness-dominated farming system, but they are by no means necessary for individual people. Please examine your assumptions, Mr. McClellan.

The final claim about cholesterol and animal products is too big to discuss here. I’ll blindly assert his unsupported claim has been sufficiently refuted and address references should they be provided at some future time.

Eating a steak three times a day can potentially whittle your waistline, but the impact it’s having on your insides might not be as attractive. Sadly, Paleo dieters also are encouraged to limit fruit to small helpings, as it believed that our ancestors didn’t have access to the amazing produce offerings that we now do.

Until I see a citation for the “steak three times a day” charge, I’m going to assume that it’s again made up for dramatization of the author’s non-point. While our ancestors did eat a lot of meat when it was available, it wasn’t available in steak form three times a day. Such is life when you don’t have refrigeration and a pantry.

Paleo dieters are encouraged to adjust fruit consumption based on their current body composition and how much exercise they’re getting. Fruit generally has naturally high levels of sugar. Is it really sad to suggest that obese, sedentary individuals throttle back on their intake of sugar, while marathon runners shovel it down as needed?

Not only are these diet choices somewhat questionable, it’s also worth pointing out that our Stone Age ancestors were not eating factory-farmed meat, which is full of chemicals and hormones. Unless you have a spear handy and access to unlimited buffalo, you are going to have a hard time truly eating like a caveman.

Yes, the mythical all meat diet that excludes spuriously essential food groups and bans fruit would definitely be questionable. Unfortunately for the arguments of Mr. McClellan, that isn’t the paleo diet. The paleolithic dieters are fully aware of the problems with factory farmed, chemically-treated meat and make it a point to eat naturally fed (typically grass or pastured) meats. And yes, such meats are difficult to find at a fast food window, but they are often available at standard grocery stores. And as I’ve said before, paleo is a logical framework applied to modern humans, not a historical reenactment.

Finally, any diet that is as restrictive as the Paleo Diet is problematic because it requires cavemen-sized willpower, which means many people will soon abandon their hunks of meat for a modern-day helping of lasagna.

The willpower problem is a modern diet carbohydrate addiction problem, not a paleolithic problem. Direct links have been demonstrated between carbohydrate cravings and obesity (Spring 2008). In effect, suggesting that sufficient willpower is too difficult implies that we should all simply give up and submit to an unbreakable cycle of carbohydrate addiction. The cool thing about paleolithic diets is that most people find the addiction and cravings go away. Indeed, you find yourself quite full if you eat ample amounts of meat, fruit, and vegetables.

After discovering the naive nutritional understanding of “The First Trainer”, I’m a little worried for the President. I hope his doctors aren’t using similarly anachronistic, post-medieval methods. Nobody likes leeches and bloodletting.

McClellan’s sagelike advice? Don’t eat “Big Macs”. Deet deeeet deeet deet deeeet… This just in off the news wire.

Dear President Obama, myself and many others in the paleo community would be happy to update your nutrition regime. P.S. Please tell President Clinton he could probably use a bit more protein these days. Bonus: Many of us have a natural immune system resistance to TV and radio pundits. Which brings me to my next point…

Religion

Religion (in some forms) is fundamentally anti-paleo. Obvious culprits in this regard are Creationists. While I formally and warmly invite them to apply paleolithic ideas to their eating and exercise habits, it’s also pretty obvious that the paleo diet relies on the logic of Darwinian evolution. Some folks who believe in “intelligent” design may also be inclined to reject the logic of the paleo diet. The adaptive power of natural selection in evolutionary theory is a foundation of the paleo diet. If a divine force was guiding the process, adaptation would be irrelevant. It could be claimed that the “intelligence” knew all along that humans would need grain to force an artificially large population explosion, and therefore, paleolithic habits would be irrelevant.

I personally know Creationists who have been quite successful on the paleo diet. I wonder how they ignore the implications there. If their holy books tell them eating bread is a good thing, how do they reconcile that unhealthy advice with reality?

Corporate Interests

I don’t want to get all conspiratorial, but I think it’s at least worth considering financial influence in politics as it relates to pushback against paleolithic dieting. As the famous quote from the 1976 film All the President’s Men says, “Follow the money”. And lookey here, we just happen to be talking about one of the President’s men. The list below highlights a few publicly traded companies with direct financial interest in producing, fertilizing, transporting, and/or distributing paleo-unfriendly wheat & corn products for human consumption [2010 Fortune 500 Rank, $Revenue]. Major direct producers in bold.

• Wal-Mart [1]
• Exxon Mobil [2]
• Chevron [3]
• ConocoPhillips [6]
• CVS Caremark [18]
• Procter & Gamble [22]
• Kroger [23]
• Costco Wholesale [25]
• Walgreen [32]
• Marathon Oil [41]
• PepsiCo [50, $43 billion]
• Safeway [52]
• Kraft Foods [53, $40 billion]
• Sysco [55, $37 billion]
• Coca-Cola [72, $31 billion]
• Tyson Foods [87, $27 billion]
• Rite Aid [89]
• Publix Super Markets [99]
• Deere [107]
• McDonald’s [108, $23 billion]
• Coca-Cola Enterprises [113, $22 billion]
• Tesoro [139]
• General Mills [155 $15 billion]
• Smithfield Foods [163, $14 billion]
• Pepsi Bottling [174, $13 billion]
• ConAgra Foods [178, $13 billion]
• Sara Lee [180, $13 billion]
• Kellog [184, $13 billion]
• Monsanto [197]

I’ll just leave it at that for now. Government subsidies of the crops in question raises an entirely different, yet equally important level of questioning. If I get requests to flesh this out further, maybe I’ll put some more work into it.

Vegan / Vegetarian

Noooooo… Not again! There are a lot of veg*ans out there. They’re politically active, they like to team up, and they [some] hate that other people eat meat.

Guilt by Association / Ad Hominem

We see this time and again in propagandists rallying against those of unknown motives trying to quash the idea that eating grains is bad (see the reference to Gwyneth Paltrow in the intro here). This is true in attacks on anti-gluten folks and anti-paleo folks.  Indeed Cornell McClellan injects this approach into his piece, “celebrities such as Megan Fox are rumored to owe their hot bodies to this ancient diet plan… there is no secret behind the body of your favorite celebrity”. Dismissing something as a celebrity fad is itself a fad and it carries with it a very real sign (in the semiotic sense) value. Its cultural meaning instantly evokes mental images of superficiality, imminent expiration, and flakiness. Thus, accusing something of being a celebrity fad associates the idea of hollow vapidity to whatever is linked to it. Propaganda 101, baby.

Conclusion

We have good reason to question the personal business motivations, political motivations, and religious motivations of individuals launching derisive attacks at paleo. The financial stakes alone are in the hundreds of billions (more likely trillions) annually. The perceived religious stakes are just as powerful and perhaps more, if slightly less lucrative and less…um… what’s the word I’m looking for here? The stakes for vegetarians can be just as powerful and personal.

There are reasonable arguments within the scientific community that are worth having. However, when pieces such as McClellan’s hit the media with such a gaping chasm between the known science and the claims, red flags should go off and alarm bells should ring.

Yes, our knowledge of the paleolithic environment in which humans evolved is less than 100% complete. However, we know a lot more about it than Mr. McClellan and other politically motivated paleo haters would lead you to believe. We know enough to help people in a very real and immediate way. I’ll link up a couple books below, and feel free to ask me questions if you’re not sure about where to start or where to go next.

Slainte,

Andrew

UPDATE: Cornell McClellan is a vegan advocate!

References

Spring, B., Schneider, K., Smith, M., Kendzor, D., Appelhans, B., Hedeker, D., et al. (2008). Abuse potential of carbohydrates for overweight carbohydrate cravers. Psychopharmacology, 197(4), 637-647.

What is the “Adventure Gene”?

The science on the genetics of personality is still in its infancy. It landed on the world in 1996, with two papers attempting to link Novelty Seeking (NS) and Extraversion with the DRD4 gene coding for a particular dopamine receptor in the brain (Ebstein 2006). It’s important to consider that the interaction of particular gene expressions within individuals is quite complex. The interaction of multiple genes can yield a range of results. Therefore, we can’t say the gene discussed here is an on or off switch that says people with one variant will necessarily act a certain way and those with another variant will necessarily act according to another set of expectations. So literally… there is no single, binary adventure gene that determines whether or not you’ll be boring or awesome. However, links to personality traits that would tend to bias an individual toward certain personality traits that would lead someone to be more adventurous are starting to pop up. Enough of the scientifically required equivocation… back to DRD4…

Novelty Seeking

The problem with science is that somebody has to pay for it. Don’t get all “it’s all a drug company conspiracy” on me now! What that means for this discussion is that most of the early research on the genetics of personality has involved “disorders” such as ADHD. Thus, we need to parse a bit of the jargon. “Novelty Seeking” is a specific personality used by researchers and professionals to make comparisons from one person to the next. The research here talks about it like crazy, but let’s go colloquial.

The Non-Technical Guide to Novelty Seeking

• Tendency to respond strongly to novelty
• Exploratory activity in pursuit of rewards
• Active avoidance of monotony
• Active avoidance of punishment
• Less influenced by emotion (especially fear) in risk assessment (Roussos et al. 2009)

Say what? Novelty seeking means seeking novelty? Shocker… I know. The trouble is that if you read the literature, much of it discusses NS in terms that may make you think of depraved gambling addicted meth fiend crack head zombies (see Igor, science fun). As it turns out, novelty, and the other tendencies, have serious implications when we start to talk about how this relates to human evolution and the spirit of adventure required to populate the entire planet.

When we start looking at DRD4, it turns out that a specific variant significantly correlates with NS. In such individuals, those with the “adventure gene” present by using less emotion to make decisions and are less impacted by the negative emotions of others when forced to make decisions. Some people are more inclined to be “response ready” when faced with tough decisions in situations of uncertainty and emergency. (Wang et al. 2004)

Consistent with this “response ready” behavior hypothesis is the significantly better performance of DRD4 knockout mice on tests of complex coordination and the observed faster reaction times exhibited by individuals with [the adventure gene], in comparison to [the boring gene] individuals (Roussos et al. 2009).

Humans with the adventure gene also tend to be startled less. What I found interesting about that is not only do they seem less startled physically (they don’t tend to jump and squeal with shock), but their emotional response to being startled is also attenuated. This tendency is true on a short-term scale, but also holds up when stretched over time. These individuals maintained their ability to plan, make decisions, and undertake complex problem solving in the face of direct threat or in novel environments (Roussos et al. 2009).

We’re starting to get a pretty solid picture of the type of person you might want to turn to when things get ugly. For now, we’ll go ahead and ignore the fact that this sort of behavior can be problematic when my ex-girlfriends others have to deal with me these relatively detached wayward souls on a day-to-day basis… when nothing dramatic is afoot.

Paleo Exit from Africa

So much happened in the paleolithic! Not only did our favorite species, Homo sapiens, hit the scene, but the travel industry was born! The migration of humans across the globe had such an impact on our psychology that, to this day, we can simply put “travel” in a list of things we like and all the sexy people in a hundred mile radius will feel an irresistible attraction to us.

Sure, Homo erectus had the travel industry cornered a few hundred thousand years before us, but hey… they’re kind of us too. Current estimates for the last out-of Africa exodus focus on 44,000-47,000 years ago. And wouldn’t you now it, the explosion of the adventure gene in the population has been dated to 40,000-50,000 years ago by completely different methods (Wang et al. 2004; Roussos et al. 2009).

“The simplest explanation, then, for this worldwide [spread] is the most straightforward: the [adventure gene] was strongly selected for at about the time of the last major out-of-Africa exodus (Wang et al. 2004)”.

Now why oh why would something christened “the adventure gene” by hyperbolic determinism have been strongly selected for during a global migration?

Evolutionary Considerations

Make no mistake about it, we’ve ventured well beyond evolutionary biology to get to this point. We’re talking about genes that directly influence behavior and cognition for favorable survival and reproductive success. That’s right confused minions… evolutionary psychology. Before long, we’ll all be automatons controlled by our genes making us tell everyone we want to be astronauts and firemen! Oh Noes!

“It has been suggested that [the adventure gene] would have great evolutionary importance contributing to major human migratory expansions in the past. Indeed, it is conceivable that risk taking with efficient problem solving, under-reactivity to unconditioned aversive stimuli and low emotional reactivity in the face of preserved attentional processing of emotional stimuli may have been advantageous phenotypic characteristics fostering migration and expansion. Low emotional reactivity is associated with high emotional endurance which can afford physical, emotional and mental resilience in the face of adversity in perilous environments. The disadvantageous decision making in [the adventure gene], high NS individuals does not necessarily result in dysfunctional behavior, since all our subjects were normal healthy volunteers, with no history or presence of psychiatric illness. It may even be that [the adventure] genotype may be protective against stress, anxiety and depression by moving attention away from emotional adversity, as an analogue to the psychological termof “denial” (Roussos et al. 2009).”

In other words… “[The adventure gene] appears to be favoured by selection (1) when benefits can be gained from migrating to new environments , and (2) under resource-rich environmental conditions (Penke et al. 2007 )”. And the extra bonus is that it may protect individuals from downward emotional spirals in adverse situations. So maybe you get accused of a little misanthropy from time to time. Ah well… it will probably seem worth it when you’re having more fun than everyone else.

What could be the behavioral differences that are selected for? By observing current genetically influenced differences in human personality, it has been suggested that resource-depleted, time-critical, or rapidly changing environments might select for individuals with “response ready” adaptations, whereas resource-rich, time-optimal, or little-changing environments might select against such adaptations . We have speculated that such a “response ready” adaptation might have played a role in the out-of-Africa exodus and that allele frequencies of genes associated with such behavior certainly would be influenced, subsequently, by the local cultural milieu (Wang et al. 2004).

Referring to these findings, [others] noted that under conditions of environmental harshness and resource scarcity (as is common in hunter-gatherer societies), intensive cooperation, strong family ties, stable pair bonds, and biparental investment are necessary for survival and successful reproduction. These ancestrally typical conditions would maintain the more risk-averse, ancestral form of the [the adventure gene] (Penke et al. 2007)

In this model, the 4R variant has been honed for hundreds of thousands of years to function optimally, whereas [the adventure gene] variants are suboptimal yet confer a behavioral advantage in some environments. Though the “response ready” hypothesis was proposed as an environmental adaptation, sexual selection has long been proposed as another source of human variation (Darwin 1871). (Wang et al. 2004)

The next question for me is… “So what do we do with this information?” If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them below. To my mind, it would be an act of violence (in the parlance of Foucault) for society to place constraints on this group of people. If some of us suffer rapt elation at the prospect of adventure and exploration, wouldn’t herding such children into pens of monotony be a “tyrrany of the majority” of a serious flavor? Or is it better to reign in such impulses… to keep them in hibernation until such characteristics are needed?

And… Why is adventure so damned sexy that it’s the foundation of memes?

Please leave a minimum of 3 comments (yes, 3 each ya slackers) below.

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But under more luxuriant environmental conditions, when children can survive without so much paternal support (as in most agricultural and modern societies), the more risk-seeking 7R allele should be favoured by selection, as it leads to a personality more prone to sexual promiscuity and intrasexual competition (Penke et al. 2007).

and… Your paleo brain in the modern world…

We have speculated that the same traits that may be selected for in individuals with a DRD4 7R allele also may predispose behaviors that are deemed inappropriate in the typical classroom setting and hence diagnosed as ADHD. In this environmental-mismatch hypothesis (Hartman 1993; Jensen et al. 1997), the DRD4 7R subset of individuals diagnosed with ADHD is assumed to have a different, evolutionarily successful behavioral strategy, rather than a disorder. It is also possible, however, that DRD4 7R, although selected for in human populations, could have deleterious effects when combined with genetic variants in other genes. (Wang et al. 2004)

Oh your heart is pounding just thinking about it! I can almost feel it. No, seriously. You didn’t feel that?

References

Ebstein, R. P. (2006). The molecular genetic architecture of human personality: beyond self-report questionnaires. Molecular psychiatry, 11(5), 427-45. [Link]

Penke, L., Denissen, J. J., & Miller, G. F. (2007). The evolutionary genetics of personality. European Journal of Personality, 21, 549-587. [Link]

Roussos, P., Giakoumaki, S. G., & Bitsios, P. (2009). Cognitive and emotional processing in high novelty seeking associated with the L-DRD4 genotype. Neuropsychologia, 47(7), 1654-9. [Link]

Wang, E., Ding, Y., Flodman, P., Kidd, J. R., Kidd, K. K., Grady, D. L., et al. (2004). The genetic architecture of selection at the human dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) gene locus. American journal of human genetics, 74(5), 931-44. [Link]

Despite what Christine O’Donnell might tell you, masturbation exists in other species. Bonobos get all kinds of freaky with it. What’s interesting is that the large brained apes we are have somehow figured out a way to involve psychology in sex and mating. In a sense, human orgasm is somewhat decoupled from the mechanics. If you haven’t figured out the element of imagination or fantasy that’s involved in sex, you’re doing it wrong. But as far as we know, we’re the only species that uses pornography. There’s an interesting scientific article from 2005 that’s often cited as evidence of “monkey porn”. The article does have some fascinating implications, however, it’s not about porn. The reason it’s often mistaken for monkeys indulging in pornography is that male monkeys were willing to pay (using fruit juice as a currency) to look at pictures of females. But the monkeys didn’t mix this viewing with masturbation. It appears that they were examining the photos for visual signs of fertility. That’s important information for evolution, information worth paying for.

It’s also likely that humans are using the same visual cues to make determinations about potential mates in human pornography. However, we don’t think about that when we experience porn. Humans have decoupled the cues for fertility with the concept of fertility. And in humans this makes a lot of sense because unlike the rhesus macaques mentioned in the study, human ovulation is biologically concealed. So humans use the cues for visuals to fecundity (general ability to reproduce). I’ll tackle the evolved concept of beauty and attraction in another article. What’s important to know here is that humans have a very real emotional and visceral response when beauty and attraction are witnessed. And I’ll go on a limb and assume that you get that. But still, that doesn’t answer the question of the existence of pornography. And when are we ever going to get to the part where racism is proved to be arbitrary, in the grand scheme of humanity?

Biased by Nature

The answer to both ultimately lies in the second syllable of “pornography”. Yep… the graph, or visual, part. There’s a concept within sexual selection known as “sensory bias”. Basically, we use the senses we have to make the best determination of things that will increase our chances of survival and reproduction. And to be more correct, we evolved the senses we have to give us the ability to make determinations to help with survival and reproductive success. Vision is great for judging spatial distances advantageous in hunting. It’s beneficial for a zillion other things too. Color vision is great if you’re gathering fruit and need to quickly be able to discern ripeness… especially from a few trees away. For an extreme example, we even have the colloquial phrase “eagle eye” to highlight the visual prowess of birds who conduct hunting surveillance from extreme altitudes.

But all animals don’t have the same biases. In other environments, smell or sonar or sensitivity to the infrared spectrum are more advantageous. Among our many senses, humans have a decidedly visual bias. No, this isn’t fixed. Many studies show that there is an actual heightening (or hightening of awareness) of auditory sensitivity in blind people. But in general, our sensory bias is visual. It’s because of a combination of this sensory bias, big brains, and emotional complexity that porn exists. Without any of them, porn wouldn’t work on us. And yes, hearing porn has similar impacts, but that doesn’t lead us any closer to highlighting the inanity of racism.

Racism

Racism is made possible in humans by our visual sensory bias. Skin pigmentation, and other shapes and colorations are generally irrelevant distinctions in matters not relating to vitamin D and skin cancer. While our modern civilizations pile a variety of deleterious effects because of our skin pigmentation, the differences don’t play a major role in survival or reproduction (caveat: during normal reproductive years). In other words, skin pigmentation is highlighted by the human visual bias. This is similar to the underlying reason firetrucks are painted red (or yellow).

The human sensory bias combines with another group of related human biases to really drive racism into high-gear. Our bias toward grouping, ethnocentricity, and xenophobia cause us to make extreme distinctions by grouping people based on any markers at our disposal. Humans have been shown to form emotional group ties on something as little as a coin flip. This tendency to form groups was a useful decision making heuristic for our distant ancestors. In some instances, it remains so today. However, it fires way too often in individuals living in the relative safety of modern civilization. Seth Godin has tried to make tribalism sound like a good thing in his book Tribes, but that’s ultimately just a conscious attempt to capitalize on an antiquated artifact of evolution that’s largely lost its use in our world.

Racism and pornography both spring wholly from a combination of non-logical biases we all share as humans. We can debate the merits of pornography in terms of human happiness and flourishing, but racism is arbitrary and thus, completely untenable.