The price of Complexity

I lead another book club at Rust Sanctuary (see sidebar or this post for details). Many times something from one of those books kind of relates to something from evolutionary psychology, and vice versa. Right now we are reading The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough, a biologist. She has a chapter called "Multicellularity and Death," and it got me thinking about stuff Pinker wrote in The Blank Slate.

Goodenough says that with multicellularity, we got very interesting, complex bodies that engage in sex, but we also got the death of the "soma," which is the body without the germ cells. Germ cells have a single set of chromosomes that get to go mate with another set of chromosomes, thus ensuring the immortality of some of the genes in those chromosomes. Amoebae and bacteria usually divide and are immortal. She says the price one pays for immortality is that the organism is not very complex.

Sex without death gets you single-celled algae and fungi; sex with a mortal soma gets you the rest of the eukaryotic creatures. 

Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love. 

... we arrive at one of the central ironies of human existence. Which is that our sentient brains are uniquely capable of experiencing deep regret and sorrow and fear at the prospect of our own death, yet it was the invention of death, the invention of the germ/soma dichotomy, that made possible the existence of our brains.

My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death.   

Which just reminds us that everything in biology, like everything in life, is a trade-off. It reminds me of a trade-off Pinker talked about in The Blank Slate. Obviously, we wish we could always get along with mates, family, and everyone else, but there is a flip side to the suffering we endure in human conflict. Pinker explains that, if one's mate and oneself were so similar that they could live in absolute perfect harmony, it would be more like two genetically identical cells in one body (or maybe two bees in a hive?) than like a human couple:

Heart cells and lung cells don’t have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony … There would be no falling in love … You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that’s the point: you don’t really love yourself, you are yourself. The two of you would be, as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your relationship would be governed by mindless physiology.

The same is true for our emotions toward family and friends: the richness and intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and fragility of those bonds in life. 

In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.

And this is because

Consciousness is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the rare and unpredictable things we need. 

The Cousin Tree

Here's an image taken from Wikimedia that shows the degree of genetic kinship between different family members. The more closely related two individuals are, the more likely they are to help one another out, even at the expense of their own "fitness." (The geneticist J.B.S. Haldane said "I'd lay down my life for 2 brothers or 8 cousins," illustrating this point.) This is called kin altruism, which is a behavior that comes under kin selection.  I thought this tree might be interesting as we read about altruism, even though The Origins of Virtue is largely about reciprocal altruism, not kin altruism.

The Prisoner's Dilemma

The "prisoner's dilemma" comes up frequently in books on evolutionary psychology and similar topics.  (See pp. 53+ in The Origins of Virtue, or pp. 334-335 in The Blank Slate.) The prisoner's dilemma is a scenario in which two prisoners who committed a crime together are in separate rooms, being questioned about whether or not they committed the crime. If person A says person B committed the crime without any help from A, then B goes to jail and A goes free, and vice versa. If they both admit to the crime, then they both get lighter sentences. The dilemma is what each prisoner should do, cooperate with his partner or defect (incriminate his partner), not knowing what the other person will do.
The quandary is sometimes presented mathematically--how much do you gain and lose with each option. The bottom line is that "Whatever the other person does, you are better off defecting." (Ridley, p. 54). I think this is very much like the Tragedy of the Commons, which explains why it's so hard to move forward on environmental issues.

I think the prisoner's dilemma is a clear-cut reason why we need a strong national defense. I would like it if someone in our group could explain to me why they might see this differently, because I just can't see it any other way. I realize that this has guided my basic political instincts for a long time. (Again, it's why I seem to agree with many "liberal" causes but sometimes end up voting with the conservatives.) It is not rational to expect the other side to cooperate--even more so when the other side are terrorists or totalitarian governments, because they have even less to lose by not cooperating-for example, in our society the government may be criticized by the citizens or voted out of office for not cooperating, but this won't happen in the totalitarian society. (And, it is a sad but stark fact that we in the West live lives of luxury compared to many others, so we have more to lose  on that count too.) Because democratic societies do have certain standards of openness and fairness, it is also easy for others to "cheat"--to say they will cooperate, but then defect. We are supposed to abide by standards of decency that other societies may not even hold--so doesn't that make it pretty easy for them to win?

I think it's important to always remind ourselves that evolutionary psychology doesn't say that these negative aspects of our psychology are okay and we should live with them; it just tells us what is, so that we can work on making a better society given the natures we are born with. From The Blank Slate, p. 336:

Many intellectuals have averted their gaze from the evolutionary logic of violence, fearing that acknowledging it is tantamount to accepting it or even to approving it.

However, The Origins of Virtue is supposed to be about how humans come to cooperate with each other despite these tendencies--so I should read on.

A Post from Strange Loop Nan

I knew that there were amazing examples of symbiosis in the biological world, such as the social insects (see "Thoughts on Anthill..." entry), and the mitochondria in our own cells. And I love the idea of slime molds being able to exist as single cells but communicating by cyclic AMP that it's time to congregate and make a fruiting stalk. But I was surprised to read this morning in Matt Ridley's book that the Portuguese man-o'-war is actually a colony, not a single organism. I looked it up on a great site called Animal Diversity Web. I never did take a zoology class, so I guess that's how I missed this until now.

This kind of stuff fascinates me, partly because I think it's more evidence that it's hard to draw a line between self and nonself. A while ago I read I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstader . I had to skip over the main part, the explanation of how Godel's theorem--which leads to Hofstader's conclusion that there is no "I"--because I just couldn't get it. (The best I could do was figure that the scientific community seems to find Hofstader plausible.) I really wanted to get to Hofstader's idea that we don't really exist as separate selves. I find that immensely comforting, and I began to think of myself as Strange Loop Nan (i.e., the strange loop that is called Nan). You can read a nice excerpt on why the "I" doesn't exist here.

Ridley writes about this in the context of increasing cooperation over time in the history of life.

More ideas from The Happiness Hypothesis

• Damasio (Descartes' Error) found that people who had a neurological defect were unable to make decisions. We think of emotion as impeding rational decision-making, but people who don't feel emotion "find themselves unable to make simple decisions or to set goals, and their lives fall apart."
• The reason we can't stop thinking about something like a white elephant, or an inappropriate and embarrassing thought, is that once we have that thought, our automatic systems take over and constantly check whether we are having that thought we don't want to have.
• When "two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other."
• "... the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things. We can't just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks."
• Whether you're a happy person or not is largely heritable. "Twin studies generally show that from 50 to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences." Haidt says that those who are generally happy and easy-going "won the cortical lottery." But: you can change your "affective style"--and the three best ways to do so are meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. "All three are effective because they work on the elephant."
• One reason many of us are so resistant to the idea of SSRI's is that we feel that "character development ought to involve a lifelong struggle to develop one's moral potential." 
• Robin Dunbar thinks that our brains became large in order to manage larger and larger social groups, and that "human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people ..."
• "In a world with no gossip, people ... would get away with a trail of rude, selfish, and antisocial acts, often oblivious to their own violations ... Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance ... Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life ... "
• Gossip also bonds us:  "Tell an aquaintance a cynical story that ends with both of you smirking and shaking your heads and voila, you've got a bond."
• Wealth and happiness: "People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than whose who don't. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller." I think many families have striven for so long to get out of poverty, that now in the past few decades in the West, when they reach the middle class or above, they are still in the mindset of seeking wealth and material goods. We don't always recognize that finally we have enough and are comfortable. 
• I wonder how much our society has been influenced by the childrearing practices of the early 20th century. If Freudians and behaviorists were telling parents not to show their children too much affection, then those children probably weren't very good parents either because of the neglect they received in childhood. 

Food for Thought-Sept. 17

The following are ideas for topics we may discuss at the book club meeting tomorrow:

• 'Evolution doesn't care if we're happy, successful, or living a meaningful life. The only goal from the point-of-view of evolution is to leave as many offspring as possible.' Does anyone in the group have a different point of view?
• Research shows that perpetrators of things we think of as evil rarely think they are doing anything wrong. In fact, they see themselves as victims responding to attacks. Does this surprise you, and does it put conflicts from local ones to international ones in a new light? Do you agree that "almost everyone has a valid point"?
• Which "universal law" appeals to you more, Kant's categorical imperative or Bentham's Utilitarianism (maximum total benefit for as many as possible)?  Do you think that your political orientation is shaped by which of these approaches appeals to you?
• Haidt talks about the "uses of adversity," and then explores whether it's just that adversity can "lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement," or whether it's imperative to experience a lot of adversity in order to grow. What do you think? Is a certain amount of adversity necessary to develop wisdom? (Haidt says the research shows that adversity at certain points in life, such as the late teens, can build character but at other points it's harder to overcome adversity.)

More on The Happiness Hypothesis

Where our different philosophical backgrounds came from regarding morality:

Haidt says that ancient cultures extolled virtues. Now we extoll moral reasoning.

The ancient Greeks gave us both the "quest for parsimony [finding just one central rule] and the worship of reason." The Enlightenment revived these two outlooks and "sought a foundation for ethics that did not depend on divine revelation or on God's enforcement." (p. 161)

The two opposing points of view on what this universal moral law should be were put forth by Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham.

Kant: (Deontologists-from Gk deon=obligation)
Moral Laws have to be universally applicable (the categorical imperative).
Would it be okay for everyone to do this thing I want to do? If not then it's not okay for me to do it.
Ethics is "a branch of applied logic."

Bentham: Utilitarianism  (Consequentialists)
"In all decision-making ... goal should be the maximum total benefit (utility), but who gets the benefit is of little concern." (p. 162)
Ethics through moral reasoning. (Haidt points out this is how we are educating our children today.)

Haidt takes a detour through Ben Franklin's attempt to live a virtuous life while fully aware of his temptations and shortcomings. He felt that Virtue was its own reward.  This encourages delayed gratification.

Durkheim talked about "anomie" (normlessness). "Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of any value." Haidt warns that because we are so careful now not to impose our norms on others, children in our society don't have a bedrock of values, but instead are encouraged to sort of create their own. This leads to the condition of anomie. 

Disgust and Divinity

"Disgust has its evolutionary origins in helping people decide what to eat." When we started eating a lot of meat, we came into contact with a lot more contagious pathogens, and disgust developed so that we wouldn't want to eat rotten food.

Haidt has done a lot of research on disgust and the value of purity in different cultures. He thinks the desire for some things to be pure and sacred is part of our natures. I've read about this before--for example, in The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade, to whom Haidt refers. I never have quite gotten the idea of the third dimension of human social space, the dimension of divinity. (Anyone have any thoughts to share on this?)

Mircea Eliade (historian of religion) says "that the modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world. This is the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force to fight against." (p. 193) Now this I do understand--that is, time and space stripped of all sacredness furthers the anomie that Durkheim talked about, so that people in our culture feel rootless. 

The Culture War and The Myth of Pure Evil

Haidt has much more to say about the moral differences between liberals and conservatives in this TED video. It is also interesting to read his "What Makes People Vote Republican?" It's particularly helpful to me--as someone who often votes Republican in national elections, but hangs out with liberals and has some very liberal viewpoints, and ends up feeling out of touch with everyone. 

But the larger reason I think it's important to read/watch these is because, as Haidt says, most of us seem to believe in a "the myth of pure evil" (pp. 72-76). He refers to a book by social psychologist Roy Baumeister:

In Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Aggression, Baumeister examined evil from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator. When taking the perpetrator's perspective, he found that people who do things we see as evil, from spousal abuse all the way to genocide, rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always see themselves as responding to attacks and provocations in ways that are justified. They often think that they themselves are victims. But, of course, you can see right through this tactic; you are good at understanding the biases that others use to protect their self-esteem. The disturbing part is that Baumeister shows us our own distortions as victims, and as righteous advocates of victims. Almost everywhere Baumeister looked in the literature, he found that victims often shared some of the blame...

... Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from the outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil...

...Neither the 9/11 hijackers nor Osama bin Laden were particularly upset because American women can drive, vote, and wear bikinis. Rather, many Islamic extremists want to kill Americans because they are using the Myth of Pure Evil to interpret Arab history and current events. (pp. 74-76)

Baumeister also found, unfortunately, "The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism ... Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means." (p. 76)

I keep telling my husband, who often thinks of writing about how to promote a more civil society, that he and some of his colleagues should collaborate with Haidt or other social psychologists looking at this stuff.

The Age of Empathy, and Selfish Genes

I had suggested that this be the core book for our October meeting, while encouraging people to read other books on altruism/cooperation as well.

I have started to read The Age of Empathy, and am not finding it that enlightening.

For one, he rails against Social Darwinism quite a bit--wasn't Social Darwinsim discredited in the early 1900's? Definition from Wikipedia:

Social Darwinism is a pejorative term used for various late nineteenth century ideologies which, while often contradictory, exploited ideas of survival of the fittest. More from the Wikipedia article

Sadly, "survival of the fittest" is what some lay people (and some scholars in the social sciences) still think of when they think of Darwin. I read today that Darwin did use the term, but that Herbert Spencer came up with it before Darwin published On the Origin of the Species. It is an unfortunate phrase, as it makes people think that Darwin is saying that life is all about competing, and that only the physically strongest and most aggressive survive. "Fit" refers to fit to survive and leave offspring in the environment the organism finds itself--it could be brute strength that is called for, but it could mean so many other things, such as having a nose that can filter cold air if you find yourself living in Ice Age Europe.

As we read in Genome, humans who tended to live in monogamous pairs were more fit at some point in our history: Men hunted; high-quality protein was necessary for our larger brains; women gave birth to premature infants because of head size; men helped care for the infants and provided meat; women did not need to go out and hunt, so could stay with the young child while digging roots and tubers, which were a more reliable source of steady calories when no meat was killed. The pairs who lived that way tended to leave more offspring at that point in human history. So, "fit" in this case means cooperating in a monogamous pair.

One thing I didn't know was that Enron's "CEO, Jeff Skilling ... was a great fan of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and deliberately tried to mimic nature by instigating cutthroat competition within his company." (p. 39) This seems to be a misunderstanding of what I think Dawkins was saying (it's been a long time since I read the book). Genes are selfish--in that a gene's ultimate purpose is to get itself reproduced--but that doesn't always mean that the organism they find themselves in is necessarily selfish. (Well, I believe that organisms are ultimately selfish; that's what our discussion of altruism in evolution is all about.) But even though the ultimate aim is for the organism to reproduce itself, the proximal aim could be to do so by showing generosity to the rest of one's group in the hope that they will reciprocate with more altruism. So the selfish gene theory doesn't rule out altruism and cooperation. Apparently de Waal and Dawkins have had disagreements about the meaning of the "selfish gene." (p. 40)

I keep waiting to get to an examination of primate cooperation, but so far (p. 43), the book rambles with anecdotes. And de Waal seems more interested in making political statements than sticking to biology. He starts out in the first paragraph of the preface with politics:

Greed is out, empathy is in.

The global financial crisis of 2008, together with the election of a new American president, has produced a seismic shift in society. Many have felt as if they were waking up from a bad dream about a big casino where the people's money had been gambled away, enriching a happy few without the slightest worry about the rest of us. This nightmare was set in motion a quarter of a century earlier by Reagan-Thatcher trickle-down economics and the soothing reassurance that markets are wonderful at self-regulation. No one believes that anymore.

Can't I just read about primate behavior?

I will finish this book--it is a quick read, since it doesn't go into much depth. Then I'm going to read one of the others on the list to discuss at the October meeting (see sidebar).

Here's a review that had some criticisms of The Age of Empathy that I agree with. For example,

This is a wonderful book to dip into, but a frustrating one to read from start to finish, since it is hard to discern a clear organizing principle for the chapters. After reading a few pages, one tends to run out of momentum, because themes seem to repeat.

Evolutionary psychology can help us move beyond violence

It's alarming that anti-Muslim sentiment is growing. On an NPR report on Friday, you could hear people in the background shouting ugly things like "we don't want you people here." I think it's important that we see this for what (I think) it is: ingroup vs. outgroup, and competition for resources. (And, obviously, stress among those who are unemployed, losing their home, etc., and wanting a scapegoat for that.) Evolutionary psychology tells us that we are only connected to our ingroup through our hatred of the outgroup: girls in middle school move up the social ladder by shedding friendships with less popular girls. It is by keeping others out that we form a cohesive group. We have to move past this, but I think people need to come to terms with our basic drives first.

I don't think it's about the religion, at its base. (I doubt many of the people shouting attend church. They just come from a Christian cultural heritage.) It's about ethnic rivalry. And "ethnic" refers more to our cultural group than to a biological group--because science shows that we can't be grouped by race--for example, see Race: The Power of an Illusion. (Although for one rebuttal click here.) I have read that the human species is less diverse than a population of chimps living on one mountainside! Humans had a recent bottleneck, a time when most of us died out, so that the remaining gene pool was very small. This was around 75,000 years ago. So all humans are closely related to one another, compared with other species.

Another obvious point is that most (all?) religions have engaged in horrific violence. Again, I don't think (as Dawkins, Hitchens, others do) that it's the religion itself causing the violence. The religion just defines the ethnic group that hates the other groups because they are competing for resources and because the cohesiveness of our ingroup is defined by our disdain of the outgroups. I think the groups would hate each other, religion or no religion. Obviously, most of our religions have used violence in trying to convert others or in competing for resources (such as land) with others. It is maddening when people suggest that Islam is a religion with violence at its core, because there is so much violence in the history of every Abrahamic religion. Every religion grew out of the point-of-view of an ancient people--people who wanted to preserve themselves at the expense of outsiders. In the Old Testament, Yahweh often told the Hebrews to slaughter other tribes. Steven Pinker points out (sorry, I constantly refer this same TED video) that hunter-gatherer groups would preemptively attack other groups, because they would assume the other group was planning to preemptively attack them. That's the culture we came from, and maybe that was still the norm in the time of the Old Testament. In fact, I think that's one thing Jesus was trying to get us to move beyond. (Then Christianity, like all human institutions, became more about preserving the institution than about loving one's neighbor.) Muhammad was trying to get the Arab tribes who were warring among themselves to unite, at least that's what I gleaned from Karen Armstrong.

I do hope that the mainstream churches are actively discouraging this violence toward Muslims.

For more on how quickly skin color can change in the human species click here.

Signature Strengths

If you are interested, here is the link to the Authentic Happiness website. You have to create a name and password to use it. The character strengths survey that Jon Haidt writes about and other surveys are found on this website.

If you already know yourself pretty well, you may find this survey redundant.

The Happiness Hypothesis

Evolution doesn't "care" if we're happy, successful, or living a meaningful life. The only goal from the point-of-view of evolution is to leave as many offspring as possible.

We can still learn to be happy and live a meaningful life in spite of the fact that our brains didn't evolve for the purpose of making us happy.

We just have to "retrain the elephant, " as Haidt says.

The elephant is the old part of the brain that's been shaped by evolution for a long time. The "rider" is the newer part that tries to control the elephant. He also refers to the rider as the "lawyer" who comes up with logical-sounding arguments to support whatever gut reaction the elephant has already had to an issue.

The elephant was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life, and part of its strategy is to impress others, gain their admiration, and rise in relative rank. The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious. The elephant will pursue its evolutionary goals even when greater happiness can be found elsewhere... (p. 101).

See also: blog entry "The Good Life," which talks about the concept of flow as well as this book.

It's intriguing that Haidt (while writing this book, he says) began to question whether the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment is the best solution to the human conundrum. I have found the concept of nonattachment very inspiring, and it seems to me to be the solution to the problem of being human, since humans have the capacity to dwell on our own mortality and the transience of everything. My attachment to nonattachment may have been partly because my dad often quoted Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science, the religion of my grandparents, although it turns out that Eddy was quoting Shakespeare): "There is nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so." Haidt also points out that whether nonattachment is the best approach may depend on the era in which you live--the Buddha lived during turbulent times, whereas "people living in a wealthy democracy can set long-term goals and expect to meet them." (Aside: Steven Pinker notes that, in spite of how it appears, the world has become less violent over time.) Haidt also writes that maybe Buddha should have gotten out of his chariot and actually asked people if they were miserable. Research shows that whether people are happy or miserable is only slightly based upon their circumstances, but mostly based on their "happiness set-point" or whether they "won the cortical lottery" as Haidt puts it. Another psychologist, Dan Gilbert, whose amusing video you can watch on TED, says if the event happened over three months ago, it has little impact on one's happiness. Unbelievable. And more reason to work on changing our brains.

One of Haidt's main points in this book is that we humans think that we are unbiased, but research shows that we are all biased. (This gets back to the rider as lawyer, coming up with statements to support our biases.) Some of the classic experiments on this were done on people who had undergone surgery (for seizures) to sever the corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain. These experiments showed that the left hemisphere can come up with explanations for things the right hemisphere has seen but has not entered into normal consciousness. (Haidt, pp. 8-10) Even when told that humans are biased, we can see how others are biased but still maintain our own neutrality. He touches on the fact that depressed people may think differently, because they are convinced they are worse than average (most people apparently are convinced they are better than average. I have also read elsewhere that depressed people are more in touch with reality!)

I think I am more aware of bias than your average person, but Haidt would say I am just as deluded as everyone else, I suppose. I think I've been influenced to be more able to see points of view by my husband, who is a very diplomatic (sometimes to a fault!) person. He's very effective at mediation because he can see that each side has a point and wants their grievances heard. I especially noticed this when he was working in Central America.

In the past several years I have come to realize that everyone has a point-Republicans, Democrats, Christians, Atheists, whatever. For example, I think Creationists are afraid that if they accept all the implications of evolution and cosmology they will have to confront the fact that we live in a meaningless universe that doesn't care about us. (And then one has to move beyond this realization to look for meaning, as forward-thinking theologians would probably agree.) I just wish people could be honest with themselves about why they believe what they do.

I think a lot of political and religious extremism can be attributed to the fact that each person forms opinions because of gut reactions, and then comes up with logical explanations for his or her opinions. Maybe this is an obvious conclusion, but I think it's important that the public understand this tendency we have to logically explain away our opinions. Then maybe we could question the fervor with which we hold opinions these days.

Meeting on July 17

Lots of discussion:

1. Whether humans are "evolving" to a new level of altruism at the societal level--Ken Wilber wrote a book suggesting we're on a "brink" of something new. This also goes along with what we've probably mentioned at each meeting ... the idea (first from Julie's professor) that life is evolving towards greater cooperation. However, there is probably a distinction between biological evolution, and the cultural evolution that happens now that evolution gave us these brains to contemplate stuff like this. Similar to the distinction between genes and memes. Note: I was just now watching Robert Sapolsky's Great Courses lecture series on Biology and Human Behavior, and he pointed out that many of us were taught evolution by that old TV program Wild Kingdom, where the wildebeest, say, would "sacrifice himself" for the good of the species by letting the crocodiles eat him while the other wildebeest swam to safety. Sapolsky said that what the TV neglected to show us was that the wildebeest (or whatever other animal was featured) was probably the oldest one and got pushed into the water rather than sacrificing himself. Sapolsky says "evolution is not about evolving behaviors that optimize the survival of your species."

2. The origins of agriculture as a step towards a more difficult, if more secure life. As we have increases in technology such as agriculture, we are able to avoid or survive some of the smaller catastrophes (frequent famine), but the trade-off is that when we do have a catastrophe, it's bigger (we can't just pick up and move like the hunter-gatherers can, for example). (Idea from Brian Fagan, The Long Summer, and the concept of "trading up on the scale of vulnerability.")

3. If we have evidence that, say, sociopaths have innately different brains than the average, or that Einstein had particularily large and unusually shaped parietal lobules, what does that mean for us in terms of who we are (and how much pride or shame we can take in being that person)?

How much discretion did the “you” making the choices actually have if the outcome could have been predicted in advance, at least probablilistically, based on events that took place in your mother’s fallopian tubes decades ago?

(We had discussed this when we read The Blank Slate, too--the above quote is from page 51 of that book.)

TED video of neuroscientist Jim Fallon talking about psychopathic brains

Notes on Matt Ridley's Genome

Chap. 1:

I find the opening paragraph to this book so uplifting:

In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in the stream of entropy and make them live. The word transformed the land surface of the planet from a dusty hell to a verdant paradise. The word eventually blossomed and became sufficiently ingenious to build a porridgy contraption called a human brain that could discover and be aware of the word itself. (p.11)

It is said that humans have a need for mythmaking. Here is beautiful, poetic version of a very old myth--a version that we can relate to.

A few pages later, Ridley suggests that the 120-letter gene called 5S RNA that repeats over and over on Chromosome 1 is "as close as we can get to an echo of the original word."

What is Life?

• "...consists of two very different skills: the ability to replicate and the ability to create order."
• Organisms "...build packets of order and complexity called bodies ... from the random chaos of the world."
• "Anything that can use the resources of the world to get copies of itself made is alive..."
• Information and entropy are opposite faces of the same coin--as entropy increases, information decreases.

One theory of the beginning of life is that there was an"RNA world" long before DNA came along. RNA can copy itself without assistance (w/o proteins). RNA was the replicator and the thing that was replicated.

DNA was invented by trial and error, because RNA degrades in 2 hours.

We've been told that Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, may have been a "bacterium in a warm pond," but now it's thought more likely that we are descended from "the whole community of genetic organisms" because there was a lot of gene swapping before there were permanent bodies. On page 20 Ridley says

You can look on such a conclusion as a fuzzy piece of comforting, holistic philosophy-we are all descended from society, not from an individual species-or you can see it as the ultimate proof of the theory of the selfish gene: in those days, even more than today, the war was carried on between the genes, using organisms as temporary chariots and forming only transient alliances; today it is more of a team game. Take your pick.

You may recall that in one of our book club meetings Julie talked about how her professor said that life is moving in the direction of increased cooperation.

One scientist argues that the first modern organisms may have been protozoa-like, and that bacteria that live in hot volcanic vents at the bottom of the seas came later. "... Bacteria are much more 'highly evolved' than we are" because we retain very old RNA in our cells, doing unnecessary things, whereas the bacteria dropped these pieces of RNA.

Chap 2:

Wow--the human Chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ape chromosomes!

"Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress." (p. 24)

"Human beings are an ecological success ... Yet the remarkable truth is that we come from a long line of failures." (p. 25)

Our timeline--I find if helpful to write this down, because I never can remember these dates:

• 10 million years ago: Two apes:

One the ancestor of humans & chimps
Other the ancestor of gorillas.

• Around 5 mya: The ancestors of humans & chimps split apart
• Or, "less than 300,000 human generations since the common ancestor of both species lived in central Africa."

It's clear that humans underwent a genetic bottleneck, because compared to other species we have less variability in our genome.

Why did our brains grow so big?

"Big brains, meat eating, slow development, the 'neotinised' retention into adulthood of childhood characters (bare skin, small jaws and a domed cranium)-all these went together." (p. 33)

Sexual selection may have driven the development of bigger brains. The fact that there was less sexual dimorphism in humans that in other apes means that humans probably had developed monogamous relationships. In monogamous relationships, men become choosy too (not just women)--both sexes preferred the neotenous look of the large-domed head, which drove evolution of bigger brains.

The division of labor over food is unique to humans. Sharing plant food meant men could take the risk of hunting. Women got high protein food without having to leave their offspring. Division of labor led to ability to share.

A clump of trends: meat for big brains--->food sharing allowed a meaty diet--->need big brains for foodsharing, to keep track of cheaters--->sexual division of labor promoted monogamy--->monogamy led to neotenous sexual selection (desire for youthfulness in mates)

Chap 5:

Mendelian genetics: "Your peas are either wrinkled or they are smooth"

"The world is not like that ... Mendelian genetics is no more relevant to understanding heredity in the real world than Euclidean geometry is to understanding the shape of an oak tree."

Pleiotropy: multiple effects of multiple genes--Unlike in last chapter on Huntington's disease, where the certainty of getting the disease was determined by the number of repeats

Increase in asthma and related "atopies?"

• dust mites--from central-heated indoor winter stuffiness, carpets, bedding
• Mycobacteria stimulates one part of immune system, the two parts are in kind of a balance--since kids don't get the mycob. from dirt, but do get vaccinated, leads to hyperactive Th2 system (which flushes parasites from the wall of the gut w/ massive release of histamine. (NOTE: current info on good effects of mycobacteria)
• IgE fought roundworms, tapeworms, hookworms & flukes during Stone Age (note: someone brought this up in a previous meeting, the guy who infected himself in order to cure his asthma.)
• common colds on increase

Ch. 6:

"Being in the same family has no discernible effect on IQ at all." (p 83) This is what Pinker said in The Blank Slate. Separated identical twins are similar in intelligence; adopted siblings are not.

"The influence upon our intelligence of events that happened in the womb is three times as great as anything our parents did to us after birth." (wow) p. 84

Francis Galton: two sticks floating downstream; hit obstacles and so forth, but pretty much travel at nearly the same rate overall. Thus with intelligence.

There are differences between individuals, but there is not difference among racial categories.

Perhaps fewer developmental stresses in the womb or in childhood (facial symmetry among high IQ-people)

"The genes may create an appetite, not an aptitude."--Yes, this makes so much sense!

Chap. 7:

Back to what we learned about with Pinker. "The tabula was never rasa"

Determinism. (I personally am too much of a reductionist; I tend to see everything as being caused in some way by the physics that led to the chemistry that led to the biology. I think this is largely right, but I am often reminded (such as by this chapter) that this is another form of determinism.)

Chomsky: "argued that human language, the most blatantly cultural of all our behaviours, owes as much to instinct as it does to culture."

(William James had also thought this way)

Universal human grammar: 4-year-olds just seem to know rules about grammar which we are never taught.

Pinker: "human language instinct"

• All languages are of comparable grammatical complexity (even though speakers deny this!! Spanish speakers have said Portuguese is badly spoken Spanish; a Portuguese speaker told me that his language was more advanced than Spanish). Slang dialects have a grammar.
• Children make mistakes like "goed" at certain stages in their development, after using "went" properly. "They learn to speak by themselves at a much younger age with the least of help from us"--unlike reading & writing, which are taught.
• Examples of pidgins, with no grammar--just people of different languages struggling to get points across. Second generation spontaneously develops a grammar (at which point the language becomes a creole rather than a pidgin.)

Why it is so hard to learn second languages: "the instinct works on speech that it hears, not rules that it memorises."

The idea that language determines thought has been a hoax.

Broca's aphasia: difficulty with the grammar encoded in word order

Damage to Wernicke's area: people can produce a rich but senseless stream of words.

K family: Speak English (their native language) the way the rest of us speak a second language--problems working out plurals, past tense, passive voice, various word-order rules, suffixes, etc. of English--"stuff that we each so unconsciously know"

Evolutionary Psychology: Pinker, Tooby, Cosmides (and William James):

The human brain has modules, like a Swiss army knife. "The machines are meaningless except when described in terms of their particular function: what is this blade for?"

Chap. 8:

In this chapter we are reminded that evolution

• is not about the survival of the species
• is not even really about the survival of the individual
• but is about the survival of the genes themselves, and many of those genes are retroviruses and other parasites embedded in the DNA of any particular species

And this can be very depressing to a human being, who likes to think that they are "here for a reason." But reading this chapter just confirms for me that Existentialism is the life-philosophy that makes the most sense: There is no meaning, so you have to go out and make your own meaning. (At least that's my limited understanding of existentialism.)

One thing that is uplifting is that Matt Ridley is actually an optimist! He thinks the world is becoming a better and better place. Here's an interview with him about his latest book, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

Reading about selfish genes in this chapter and the previous one ("Chromosomes X and Y, or Conflict") does make me wish that more people knew this information. I think it would make us a lot more honest. Mostly the news is filled with people outraged by this and saying the government should do something about that, and there seems to be little introspection into "it would benefit me personally if the government would do such-and-such." (And there's not too much introspection into, "well, I am using fossil fuels every day, and that is the ultimate reason that BP drilled an offshore oil well ...")

But is honesty even the proper goal? It makes sense in terms of evolutionary psychology that we don't know our own true motives--deception, including self-deception, is a big part of our cogntive makeup. I think that before the 20th century, we were probably more honest about our own selfishness--if you happened to live in the castle you probably didn't spend give much thought to the impoverished lives of the peasants--but now we are taught that we should care about all the creatures on the planet, especially the other humans, so we are more dishonest with ourselves about our true motives. Maybe it's not dishonesty but hypocrisy that is the most annoying trait.

Chap. 9:

A key idea that I wish everyone in the public understood:

"The very combination that is most beneficial in your generation guarantees you some susceptible children." (p. 140)

Pressures of parasites cause human genetic variation?

In nature, "there might be no equilibrium outcome: that eternal chaotic motion could flow from a deterministic system. ... Chaos theory." Another thing I wish the public understood was that there is no long-term balance in nature--in fact there is a book on this topic in the Rust Shop called The Balance of Nature that I started reading last week.

Chap. 10:

Fascinating suggestion that the Ice Age in Europe selected for "better able to withstand cold in these parts: people with high metabolic rates" but "just as in foxes and rats, shy and suspicious types are paler than bold types"--we also saw this in Covenant of the Wild--research about puppies by Raymond Coppinger I think. So blue-eyed, fair people might be more anxious.

Chap. 13:

One of my all-time favorite topics: The connection between the spread 0f genes and the spread of languages.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza: Genes, Peoples, and Languages covers this and is something we might want to read.

Cultivators can afford more polygamy that h-g's, and "do not allow their women to marry the foragers, but the male cultivators do take forager wives." And we can see this is Finland, where the people are genetically similar to the rest of Europe, but they have a "distinct Y chromosome, which looks much more like the Y chromosome of northern Asian people." The Finns speak a Uralic language. Obviously the Uralic people invaded the Indo-Europeans at some time in the past.

Jews were able to almost eliminate cystic fibrosis from U.S. Jews by discouraging marriage between carriers of the gene.

Lactose intolerance: Most westerners have a gene mutation that allows us to digest milk as adults. This happened because certain populations started dairying and drinking milk. Possible reasons for the difference:

• milk drinking was a convenient and sustainable food supply for pastoralists
• northern Europeans needed extra vitamin D, so drank raw milk
• dairying began in dry places such as Arabia (camels)

Someone asked if there was any similar reason that there is so much gluten intolerance in our population.

Take-home message there is that cultural change can lead to evolutionary change.

Chap. 17:

Cancer is an unfortunate side effect of evolution. The zeal of the gene to reproduce itself, and the occasional mutations that arise when DNA is copied, lead not only to evolutionary change but also to cancer. And cancer seems kind of inevitable, if one lives long enough.

Mutiny is a perpetual problem. Cells are continually forgetting their patriotic duty, which is to serve the germ cells, and setting out to reproduce themselves. After all, each cell is descended from a long line of reproducing cells; it goes against the grain to cease dividing for a whole generation. And so, in every tissue every day, there is a cell that breaks ranks and starts to divide again, as if unable to resist the age-old call of the genes to reproduce themselves. If the cell cannot be stopped, we call the result cancer.

TP53, "a gene that detects abnormal behaviour in a cell and issues an instruction to different genes to dismantle the cell from the inside: to commit suicide," is broken in 55% of human cancers. There is a cascade of mutations that has to happen to let cancer develop.

The longer we live, the more mistakes we accumulate in our genes, and the greater the chance that an oncogene may be jammed on and three tumour-suppressor genes jammed off in the same cell. The chances of this occurring are almost unimaginably small, but then the number of cells we make in our lifetimes is almost unimaginably large. As Robert Weinberg has put it: 'One fatal malignancy per one hundred million billion cell divisions does not seem so bad after all.'

Radiation and chemotherapy work by damaging the cells enough to activate TP53 to "help the body help itself" by instructing cells to undergo apoptosis (cell suicide).

One reason to sequence the genome was because it was necessary for cancer research.

Five-month-old fetus: nearly seven million germ cells

This is culled down to 400 that will be ovulated during the lifetime! Apoptosis is what gets rid of the rest.

But, Ridley asks, how could apoptosis have evolved? Only by group selection--a body whose cells kill themselves off if they are imperfect or selfish, survives better than a body whose cells are less unselfish in this way.

Also in this chapter: Interesting comments about the social insects; Ridley says they are similar to the individual cells in our body. I wrote about this in my blog on Anthill in April,but now I realize I probably got this idea from Ridley when I read Genome several years ago!

The Good Life

Reading about evolutionary psychology is interesting in and of itself. But I realize that another reason I read up on this stuff is that I am curious about the best way to live--the way to have a meaningful life. Probably every human being is interested in finding out the best way to live, but a lot of people just get stuck in the materialism phase, acting out what their Pleistocene brain tells them to do (such as accumulating things, because resources were always limited up until the present). But, like the Ecclesiastes story tells us, there can be more to life than this.

You may be aware that there are many books out there along the lines of "positive psychology," "happiness," and "flow." In many cases evolutionary psychology is a part of figuring out what the good life is, because if we don't understand what our basic instincts are, we can't work to move beyond them. These books also address how it can be that we live lifestyles of comfort that would be unimaginable to earlier peoples, but we still don't seem to be that happy.

Right now I am reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is "the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake." --TED talk by Csikszentmihalyi.

I think it is something like "being in the moment" or "in the zone." It's always seemed to me that my mind just buzzes away without being in the moment, which is why I wanted to read this book.

He talks about how mostly we are either doing what our instincts tell us to do or whatever society has conditioned us to do. He points out something the kids and I have joked about forever: at school, kids are told to work hard in kindergarten so you can go to first grade, to work hard in 5th grade to get ready for middle school, work hard in high school so you can go to a great college, and work hard in college to get a good-paying job, etc. etc. until pretty soon you're looking at retirement. (What about doing it all for the joy of finding out about the universe you live in?)

He calls that state when we're not in flow "psychic entropy," meaning that consciousness is unstructured if we don't work at it by engaging in creative activities (including all kinds of work and other things) that challenge us just at the right level.

He points out that "enjoyment," which is what we get from flow, is different from pleasure, which we could get from eating or sex--pleasure is fine, but it doesn't help us grow and reach new levels of organization of our consciousness.

I think I experience flow when gardening. It's one time I don't feel as though I really ought to be doing something else. And one interesting thing leads to another.

Another life-changing book for me was The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at UVA. Haidt talks about flow and all sorts of other things--basically how to find happiness, given the human nature we're born with and drawing on "ancient wisdom" as well. More about that later.

Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness website

Did Neandertals Live a Sustainable Lifestyle?

I don't know if any of you saw The Human Spark, the 3-part PBS program hosted by Alan Alda in January. It examined what made us Cro-Magnons different from the Neandertals--basically why they died out and we didn't. Here is a comment I made at the time:

I was disappointed that the point of the program seemed to be to find out why we were "better" than the Neanderthals. I guess Alda was just kidding around, but this furthers the public's misconception that the "winners" in the evolution game--the survivors, the fittest--are objectively better than the species that die out. The winners are just those that are better adapted to the particular environment they find themselves in at that time.

The smaller, more dispersed Neanderthal settlements and their lack of creativity and technological innovation made me think the following: What they seem to have had was a sustainable system . . . the very thing we Moderns have not been able to come up with. What's wrong with using the same toolbox of technological skills for hundreds of thousands of years if it's working just fine?

The differences between us and the Neanderthals are undeniably fascinating. The comments referring to our superiority were tedious.

Also, my husband wants to know how we know all that cultural and genetic innovation that we Cro-Magnons developed, from language to spearpoints, was for hunting . . . maybe it was for waging war instead?

The Invention of Lying

We watched the movie The Invention of Lying this week. It's full of evolutionary psychology themes! And hilarious. It's my new favorite movie. It showed the importance of deception in mate choice, religion, and also in just helping social interaction run more smoothly--something I think about a lot because I have been accused of being "honest to a fault."

In the movie, it has never occurred to anyone in the history of humankind to tell a lie. There also isn't any fiction or story-telling in the society. Then one day a guy discovers he can lie.

When you think about it, to be able to lie is to have a theory of mind, right? You are able to see that another person has their own viewpoint separate from yours, and that if you misrepresent the truth, they won't know because they don't know what's going on in your head. And I think humans might be the only ones who can do this. Although maybe that's not true--there is deception in biology all the time--a bird pretending to be wounded to lure a predator away from its nest might be the classic example. Or, getting beyond behavior to traits themselves, the coloring of a butterfly trying to pass as a monarch. Or weeds that resemble domesticated crops growing among the crop plants, and getting harvested and dispersed by man as he harvests the crop. I think Johnsongrass does this on farms all the time, imitating the corn crop. There must be tons of examples in nature, especially in genetics.

I wonder, though, if purposefully saying something untrue is still another step. Anyway, it makes for an amusing plot.

Neandertal Genes

Science Friday had an interesting segment this week on the recent sequencing of part of the Neandertal genome:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126611419

And here's a nice website by Science magazine:

http://www.sciencemag.org/special/neandertal/feature/index.html

The website points out that "because Neandertals are much closer kin to us than are chimpanzees, which diverged from the human lineage 5 to 7 million years ago, matching Neandertal DNA against our own has the potential to reveal genetic changes that help define who we are."

The authors of the study think that non-African human genomes may have about 1 - 4 % Neandertal genes. (The mixing with the Neandertals could only have happened after humans left Africa, because Neandertals were never in Africa.)

This is particularly interesting to our family because we have a long-running family joke that my husband and his relatives are Neandertals. He first became aware of his Neandertal characteristics in an anthropology class in college when the professor said that the strong brow ridge and occipital bun were distinguishing characteristics. (The occipital bun is a little knob at the back of the skull. His is very pronounced, but my kids have them too.) When my daughter was 3 months old, the doctor was so concerned about her fontanels not closing properly that she sent her for genetic testing (which I am still mad about because the insensitive doctor was clearly hoping that she had discovered a serious genetic problem). But when the geneticist met with us, she took pictures of my husband's head and palms because she found him so interesting ... has to be those Neandertal genes!

Germs influence societal structures

Societal traits may be influenced by how threatened we are by parasitic diseases:

Link to article

I remember reading once the theory that the caste system in India arose when the Indo-Europeans or some other group invaded the locals--the caste system was a way of keeping the germs from crossing caste borders.

I have also wondered over the years of parenting whether the availability of antibiotics influences how reckless we encourage our children to be. I started out really anxious (in parenting as well as in everything else) but then you see that children do seem resilient, and society in general encourages you not to baby them. But I've wondered if we would be less cavalier about allowing them to risk injury if each small injury had the capacity to turn into untreatable sepsis or something.

I don't understand why he talks about parasitic diseases only--would diseases caused by bacteria (which, it seems to me, are the ones that we worry about here in the U.S.) not fall into this model?

Thoughts on Anthill and other things

I am reading the middle section of E.O. Wilson's Anthill right now, the part about a fictional colony of ants. Wilson and Bert Holldobler wrote a book called The Superorganism (which would probably be way over my head). But I love thinking about ant colonies as superorganisms, perhaps analogous to our bodies being made up of cells, or maybe to all the neurons in our brain communicating with each other, like the ants communicate with pheromones. I know Julie is taking a course on insect ecology now so maybe she has something to add here.

Ants within a colony are completely altruistic--they know their caste and their role in life, and they just perform their jobs. They don't take food from each other and if they are sick they get away from the other ants so as not to bother them or infect them. But--and I don't think I got this until I read The Blank Slate--the reason complete altruism works in this case is that they are all genetically identical to one another. (They all come from the queen and the sperm she was inseminated with (from one male ant) on the day she left her birth colony. It says the sperm survive inside her body, waiting to be used in turn, for up to 20 years!)

The reason we can't live like this, always acting for the greater good of humans in general, or even for the greater good of our ingroup, is that we aren't genetically identical. And Pinker says that we should be glad of it, because "without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all." p. 268 He also says that "Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflict to thank for the fact that we have feelings towards other people at all." p. 267.

But I wonder if an ant colony is analogous to a multicellular organism. I'm not quite sure if that's what Wilson says.

Unfortunately, reading about the individual ants in the colony, and their pointless lives (for example, the male that inseminates the queen lives a very short time and that's his whole goal in life, to mate with a queen--he can't even eat on his own. Being the queen is no picnic either from what I can tell) is also mildly depressing to me as it further indicates that there is no meaning to life. All of this behavior is completely about the genes replicating themselves. I really do believe in the Selfish Gene--Life, in every species, is all about the genes wanting to make more of themselves, not about the lives of the organisms. The ants aren't happy or sad--they just are. Where did we humans get the idea that we have a right to be happy?

This is my biggest stumbling block with mainstream Christianity. There is no objective purpose to any of us being here. Religion will have to continue to evolve towards the idea that you need to make your own purpose and then live that to the fullest.

One review of The Superorganism

Grief in Chimps

Perhaps the rest of you heard this story on the way home today too:

Grief in Chimps

E.O. Wilson's talk last night

Nancy W. and I went to hear E.O. Wilson speak about his new novel, Anthill, last night.

I jotted down some of the many interesting things he had to say, several of which related to things we've talked about in our group.

• "Kin selection" is no longer a tenable theory. This relates to altruism, which we discussed at the last meeting. (I think. I meant to, anyway.) Altruism is a problem for evolutionary biologists, because why would we do things--like share resources--that increase someone else's fitness at the expense of our own? I looked up kin selection theory on Wikipedia: " ...(A) gene that prompts behaviour which enhances the fitness of relatives but lowers that of the individual displaying the behavior, may nonetheless increase in frequency, because relatives often carry the same gene; this is the fundamental principle behind the theory of kin selection... Evolutionary psychologists have attempted to explain prosocial behavior through kin selection by stating that “behaviors that help a genetic relative are favored by natural selection.” " But, now current evolutionary biologists like Wilson are saying that evolution doesn't work this way. Instead, he says that individual selfishness drives altruism (which is the same thing Pinker is saying).

• I think Wilson said altruism has developed only about 20 times in the history of life.

• Competition between groups of humans is what drives the evolution of what we tend to think of as the highest human qualities, the most "noble" qualities. I think he's saying that a lot of things such as love and altruism and honor are actually things that help your tribe defeat the neighboring tribe. For millenia we tended to behave in these positive ways about our in-group. Pinker (see that website that Karen sent) sees that with modernity we have been able to extend who we see as being in "our" group, and that because of this, and contrary to what it looks like, there is less violence as time goes on.

• Along the same lines--I think--one of the most remarkable things that Pinker explained in The Blank Slate was "...without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all." (p 268) So it's competition over resources, and strife, basically, that has driven us to be the conscious beings we are.

• Humans are tribal in nature. Religion is a manifestation of tribalism. A group's creation story is the story of how they came about and why they are the chosen group of the Creator. (I have often thought that one of Jesus' missions was to try to "extend the tribe"--i.e. think of more and more people as "us"--hence the stuff about loving all your brothers and sisters and helping people like Samaritans (an outgroup from the Jewish point of view). (I think Christians who raise Christianity as some sort of superior belief system are missing one of Jesus' main points, personally.) I think Karen Armstrong saw a similar widening of the circle and extending social justice in the religious movements around 800 B.C. by the way.

• The human condition: we have

Paleolithic emotions
Medieval institutions
but Godlike technology