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