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.)