Jef's web files - Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 00:36:52 -0500

Evolutionary psychology collection and observations.

Traditional Norms, Animal-style

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:01:23 -0400

"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." —from an article describing how some religious leaders and conservative magazines are embracing the blockbuster documentary.

Well, it’s 2010, and what a remarkable five years it’s been. The blockbuster success of March of the Penguins in 2005 triggered a flood of wonderful documentaries about animal reproduction, all of which provide us with inspiring affirmation of the correct way to live our lives. Here are just a few of the movies that can guide you on your path…

Dinner of the Redback Spiders: This documentary follows the heartwarming romance between two spiders that ends with the male somersaulting onto the venomous fangs of his mate, his reproductive organs still delivering semen into the female as she devours him.

The new science of race

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:27:57 -0400

Henry Harpending is about to titillate the world's conspiracy theorists with one of the most politically incorrect academic papers of the new millennium.

Why, he and his colleagues at the University of Utah asked, have Jews of European descent won 27 per cent of the Nobel Prizes given to Americans in the past century, while making up only 3 per cent of the population? Why do they produce more than half the world's chess champions? And why do they have an average IQ higher than any other ethnic group for which there's reliable data, and nearly six times as many people scoring above 140 compared with Europeans?

Prof. Harpending suggests that the reason is in their bloodline — it's genetic.

The 61-year-old anthropologist's explanation is not easily dismissed, but it crosses into the territory scientists fear most.

The Urge to Win

Tue, 31 May 2005 11:11:24 -0400

After I wrote about research showing that women have less appetite for competition than men do, a number of women wrote to inform me that they're just as competitive as any guy. If the tone of their letters is any indication, I have no doubt they are.

Nor do researchers doubt that such women exist. As Danica Patrick showed in the Indianapolis 500, some women can successfully compete with men at the highest level. But why aren't there more of them?

Discrimination is one big reason, because men have traditionally made the rules to suit themselves and keep out women. But if you think that leveling the playing field would eliminate gender disparities, consider an unintentional experiment conducted in the Scrabble world, which is hardly a hostile environment for women.

For a quarter-century, women have outnumbered men at Scrabble clubs and tournaments in America, but a woman has won the national championship only once, and all the world champions have been men. Among the top-ranked 50 players, typically about 45 are men.

Watching New Love as It Sears the Brain

Tue, 31 May 2005 10:47:54 -0400

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.

A Career Spent Learning How the Mind Emerges From the Brain

Tue, 10 May 2005 17:11:01 -0400

If you walk into the office of a scientist, chances are you'll see a white board hanging on the wall covered in scrawls. A molecular biologist's white board might be covered by hideous tangles of protein chains. A geophysicist might doodle India crashing into southern Asia.

The scribbles of Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth, are more metaphysical. Arrows travel from a pair of eyes into a cartoon brain, finally ending at the word "Apple." Another picture bluntly sums up the modern debate over free will, with a stick figure's head labeled "Brain," and two bubbles point toward it - one labeled "Judge" and the other "Neu" - short for neuroscience. Floating uncertainly off to one side is a third bubble that asks, "Mind?"

Big questions are Dr. Gazzaniga's stock in trade. In the 1980's he helped found cognitive neuroscience, a discipline designed to find out how the mind emerges from the brain. Today, at age 65, he continues to oversee a busy lab where brain scans offer clues to how we unconsciously create theories to explain the outer world and our inner lives.

All For One? Why Humans Cooperate

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 13:31:34 -0500

Cooperation Makes Humans Unique, But Study Finds Most Are Reluctant Cooperators

Despite the fact that humans sometimes fight fiercely among themselves, one of our most distinctive human traits is our willingness to cooperate with others. Why we are like that is one of the really big questions confronting evolutionary psychologists.

"The fact that people cooperate is quite mysterious," says Robert Kurzban, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. "People are constantly talking about how organisms are competing, but one thing that humans do that's distinctive is they cooperate in groups."

Other animals, from ants to wolves, also cooperate to a degree, but not as extensively as humans. As evolutionary psychologists, Kurzban and Daniel Houser of George Mason University are trying to figure out why.

Friendly foxes are cleverer

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 22:50:03 -0500

Domesticated foxes show evolution of social intelligence.

For almost half a century, a population of foxes in Siberia has been bred to be unafraid of humans and non-aggressive. Now these foxes seem to have shown that social skills come as a perk of being friendly.

Dogs, domesticated from their wild wolf cousins over millennia, are not only less likely to bite or bolt, but have also gained the ability to communicate with their human companions. For example, if a human points or looks at an object, the dog will also look at it.

Brian Hare, an anthropologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had previously shown that dogs are more likely than undomesticated animals - even chimps - to be able to communicate in this way with humans. But was this social sophistication something that was specifically bred for during their domestication, or was it a by-product?

Enhancing Our Truth Orientation

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 14:42:45 -0500

Humans lie to themselves, and often choose beliefs for reasons other than how closely those beliefs approximate truth. This is mainly why we disagree. Three future trends may reduce this epistemic vice. First, increased documentation and surveillance should make it harder to lie and self-deceive about the patterns of our lives. Second, speculative markets can create a relatively unbiased consensus on most debated topics in science, business, and policy. Third, brain modifications may allow minds to be more transparent, so that lies and self-deception become harder to hide. In evaluating these trends, we should be wary of moral arrogance.

The evolution of everyday life

Fri, 13 Aug 2004 09:54:04 -0400

Co-operation has brought the human race a long way in a staggeringly short time

“Our everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations.” This is the intriguing first sentence of a very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides: “The Company of Strangers”, by Paul Seabright, a professor of economics at the University of Toulouse. (The book is published by Princeton University Press.) Why is everyday life so strange? Because, explains Mr Seabright, it is so much at odds with what would have seemed, as recently as 10,000 years ago, our evolutionary destiny. It was only then that “one of the most aggressive and elusive bandit species in the entire animal kingdom” decided to settle down. In no more than the blink of an eye, in evolutionary time, these suspicious and untrusting creatures, these “shy, murderous apes”, developed co-operative networks of staggering scope and complexity—networks that rely on trust among strangers. When you come to think about it, it was an extraordinarily improbable outcome.

Animals reveal themselves to be dedicated followers of fashion

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 11:13:08 -0400

Being fashion-conscious is not confined to humans, research has shown.

Animals copy one another when making choices about places to live, where to eat and acquiring a mate.

Such behaviour allows the rapid transmission of non-genetic traits, giving rise to a form of "cultural evolution".

Researchers reviewed the evidence for animal fashion in the edition of the journal Science that appears today.

The team, led by Etienne Danchin, from the CNRS research institution in Paris, wrote: "Psychologists, economists and advertising moguls have long known that human decision-making is strongly influenced by the behaviour of others.

"A rapidly accumulating body of evidence suggests that the same is true in animals ... Public information can lead to cultural evolution, which we suggest may then affect biological evolution."

Hormones converge for couples in love

Fri, 07 May 2004 00:45:41 -0400

Men are from Mars and women from Venus - except when they are in love. During this intense period, men and women become more like each other than at any other time.

We already know that falling in love is a bit like going crazy. Donatella Marazziti of the University of Pisa in Italy showed in 1999 that levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which has a calming effect, dip below normal in those who say they are in love as well as in people with obsessive compulsive disorder. Both groups spend inordinate amounts of time obsessing about something or someone (New Scientist print edition, 31 July 1999).

Now Marazziti has looked at the hormonal changes that occur in people who are in love. Her team measured the blood levels of several key hormones in 12 men and 12 women who said they had fallen in love within the past six months. The researchers compared these hormone levels to those in 24 other volunteers who were either single or in stable long-term relationships.

The first finding was that both men and women in love have considerably higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, indicating that courtship can be somewhat stressful. "But the most intriguing finding is related to testosterone," says Marazziti.

Split the difference

Men who were in love had lower levels of the male sex hormone testosterone - linked to aggression and sex drive - than the other men. Love-struck women, in contrast, had higher levels of testosterone than their counterparts, the team will report in Psychoneuroendocrinology.

"Men, in some way, had become more like women, and women had become like men," says Marazziti. "It's as if nature wants to eliminate what can be different in men and women, because it's more important to survive and mate at this stage."

But is falling in love really responsible for these changes? Andreas Bartels of University College London points out that the hormonal changes could just be a result of increased sexual activity. "There's a high degree of affection, but there's also, without any doubt, extremely high sexual activity," he says.

Marazziti thinks that this explanation is unlikely, however, because in her study those in the control group were having sex just as often as those in the "in love" group.

Love is blind

What is more, other studies suggest that testosterone levels in men rise as sexual activity increases (New Scientist, 27 November 1999). So if the hormonal changes were just the result of sex, testosterone levels would be expected to increase in men, rather than fall.

Converging levels of testosterone may not be the only thing that helps a man and woman overcome their differences. Other research has shown that falling in love really does make us blind to our partner's faults.

Bartels's team has found that when people look at their lovers, the neural circuits that are normally associated with critical social assessment of other people are suppressed (Neuroimage, vol 21, p 1155).

But the blissful state that is romantic love does not last. When Marazziti retested the same people one or two years later, when they said they were no longer madly in love, their hormone levels had returned to normal.

Brains like feeling fat

Sun, 11 Apr 2004 16:50:47 -0400

Filling our mouths with fat lights up pleasure centres in the brain, scientists have found, which may help us understand why we cannot get enough of certain foods.

Plenty of researchers have studied how tastes and smells trigger different spots in the brain. But few have examined how our brains respond to texture, such as the oiliness of cream, the thickness of gravy or the grittiness of nuts.

Pulling Our Own Strings

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 17:08:48 -0400

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Yes, declares the controversial philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. "Human freedom," he writes in his important new book Freedom Evolves (Viking), "is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us."

One might think that Dennett’s ringing endorsement of the reality of human freedom would make him popular with other intellectuals. It doesn’t. On the right, the conservative Weekly Standard denounces him as "a vigorous evangelist for evolutionary psychology." The neoconservative journal The Public Interest has called him "an evolutionary fundamentalist." That view was shared by the late left-wing evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who disparaged Dennett as a "Darwinian fundamentalist." Gould’s scientific collaborator Niles Eldredge concurs, dismissing him as an "ultra-Darwinian." The liberal American Prospect accuses him of "cybernetic totalism."

But Dennett has his admirers too. The New York Times Book Review selected his Consciousness Explained as one of the 10 best books of 1991. The Wall Street Journal raved about 1995’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, and declared that Dennett "does one of the things philosophers are supposed to be good at: clearing up conceptual muddles in the sciences." Zoologist Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue, hails him as the "ebullient, pugnacious and ever pithy sage of Boston."

Born in 1942, Daniel Dennett studied philosophy at Harvard University and Oxford University. His philosophical views can be traced most clearly to the influence of his Oxford teacher, philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle famously attacked Cartesian mind-body dualism, dismissing it as the doctrine of "the ghost in the machine." Dennett is now the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Dennett has spent his intellectual career trying to extend the Enlightenment project of putting philosophy and morality on a scientific and naturalistic basis. In a sense, Dennett is updating David Hume in the light of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In doing so, he provides us with fascinating new ways to think about the meaning
of choice, the value of morality, and how the evolution of the human brain and its capabilities has made us more free.

Indeed, Dennett argues that human freedom is dramatically expanding. Language and culture, especially when abetted by modern science and technology, enable us to increase the range of our choices. As our understanding of our genes and brains increases, he believes we will increase our freedom rather than limit it. We will be able to prevent and cure more diseases, improve our social institutions, and even enhance human capabilities. He says that we defend freedom, especially political freedom, because among other things it enables people to make better and better choices over time. As important, Dennett maintains that to whatever extent we were ever at the mercy of our genes and biological evolution, we no longer are. Instead our genes are now at the mercy of our brains.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey interviewed Dennett in February.

Scientific study validates feelings

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 16:04:17 -0400

The next time you lock horns with your boss, your friend or your spouse and she tells you to leave emotion out of it, tell her that science proves that's a lousy idea. Block that emotion and all you're likely to produce are bad decisions.

That heretical insight is at the heart of a revolution today in neuroscience and psychotherapy. The story, as told at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in Washington by Chicago-area marital therapist Brent Atkinson, starts with a 19th-century medical patient.

Phineas Cage was a railway worker who in 1848 had a 3 1/2-foot iron rod blown through his skull in an explosion. To the surprise of doctors, he survived. Though he recovered physically with his intellectual faculties and motor skills intact, he was a changed man. He swore constantly, appeared fitful and abandoned plans as fast as he made them. Not until the 1990s -- when scientists produced computerized brain models based on photos of his skull -- was the reason for his character change confirmed: damage to the prefrontal cortex, a brain region that processes emotions governing social behavior.

Since then, similar behavior has been observed in some patients with brain damage from stroke, seizure or surgery. In each case, researchers have traced behavioral problems to the loss or malfunction of an emotion-processing center.

What does any of this have to do with psychotherapy practice today? If emotion is so central to our behavior that we can't bypass it without cost, then therapeutic approaches that appeal principally to logic and reason are bound to fail.