Conceptions of violence

After last week, I've been catching up with some of Bowles' previous publications and related research. I've read A Cooperative Species, Bowles' masterwork with Herbert Gintis on the origin of altruism and modern society, but reading it once isn't really enough to have read it. It is a dense book filled with math and evidence, theory and data; it requires investiture.

However, Jung-Kyoo Choi and Bowles have included much of their argument in previous publications. It goes like this:

... parochial altruism could have evolved if parochialism promoted intergroup hostilities and the combination of altruism and parochialism contributed to success in these conflicts... under conditions likely to have been experienced by late Pleistocene and early Holocene humans, neither parochialism nor altruism would have been viable singly, but by promoting group conflict, they could have evolved jointly."

As we saw last week, they're leveraging the power of coevolution. But in this case, they're saying that group conflict, or war, as they go on to call it, would have been necessary for human altruism to have evolved. Also, they're effectively promoting group selection, but that's a topic for another time.
 
War is where the problem lies. This is a hot topic, steamy enough for Steven Pinker to rub his hands all over it. However, Steven Pinker's point is that war has decreased since the advent of agriculture. He has very little to say about pre-agricultural violence. Not so for Sex at Dawn, in which the authors' critically examine misconceptions about pre-agricultural life. In short, if early humans weren't violent, then A Cooperative Species' case might be invalid.

Sex at Dawn is a good book. It is thoroughly researched and well written, and one of their big points is that our ancestors are not as violent as they are often made out to be. The book has taken a lot of critical heat, which is not a surprise given the controversial views it espouses. It has many errors (one of which I am about to point out), but I think it has had a positive overall impact on the field. But I'm not here to defend the entire work, so I will discuss a single section.

I want to talk about a chimpanzee example in their chapter on violence. Chimps are not our ancestors, they are cousins, but it is informative to study them when attempting to understand our common origins, what humans used to be like. Chimps are frequently described as violent and aggressive. The best known example of this is Jane Goodall's chimpanzee group in Gombe, Tanzania. Her original study group split in two, and then one part proceeded to violently wipe out the other.

This is not evidence of innate violent tendencies in chimpanzees, says Sex at Dawn, this is merely evidence that human intervention, such as giving chimps food, will cause chimps to alter their behavior and become more aggressive. Same goes for the baboons around Cape Town: the groups with more human contact are more aggressive. They've learned that to get the most out of food hotspots (houses, stores, tourists carrying food), they must act decisively or else another baboon will gobble up all the food. When foraging in the trees for fruits and leaves, there isn't any fighting over food. Those nutrients aren't concentrated enough to be worth fighting over.

However, I must contest this implication by Sex at Dawn. I do not doubt that the Gombe chimpanzees tore themselves apart largely due to human involvement. Yet chimpanzees are routinely violent; they are simply not like their cousins, the bonobos, in this regard. I've heard both John Mitani and David Watts speak about the chimpanzee groups they study in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Mitani was particularly emphatic: these chimpanzees are violent, they fight with each other frequently, and it is not due to human involvement. It is their natural state.

This is hardly a deathblow to Sex at Dawn's argument. We are not chimpanzees; we may have as much (or more) in common with peaceful bonobos as chimps. Plus, this is only part of Sex at Dawn's argument about early human violence. Perhaps more important is the archaeological evidence.

Sex at Dawn points out that many modern scholars, including Pinker, are making their conclusions about early warfare based on sample groups taken from cultures which are not representative of early humans. For instance, the famous yonomamo tribes of South America are from the Amazon, which is a completely different environment from that which our ancestors developed in. Furthermore, the yonomamo aren't even immediate-return hunter-gatherers (like our ancestors were). These errors are not outliers, they are the norm.

A Cooperative Species is better than this. It does not throw caution to the wind and assume that it is acceptable to use modern hunter-gatherer groups as exemplars. It notes that archeological evidence is scarce, and specific evidence of violence even scarcer, and there's not much to be done about that. So it lumps other parts of the world (like Europe and the Americas) into the archaeological sample, and kind of just goes ahead with its story. It feeds in supportive bits of evidence here and there, but this is not the strongest part of the book, and not enough to convince me that war was a foundational part of early human life.

So the case goes to Sex at Dawn, whose points are enough to convince me that early modern humans were not inherently warlike. This is my belief... at least for now.

Agriculture and Property

One of the big questions in the study of ancient human history is, How did agriculture become the main technique humans use to produce food? For thousands if not millions of years, humans gathered food and hunted game to survive; some populations still live this way, as do our surviving ape cousins. To the neophyte, farming might seem like an obvious improvement over hunting and gathering (hereafter, foraging), but it turns out this isn't true. Getting started with agriculture is costly and risky, so how did it happen?

Science has attempted to grapple with this dilemma for decades, and some compelling theories have been developed to grapple with this question. Samuel Bowles' most recent publication in PNAS may be the best original research on the subject in a long time. I'm familiar with Bowles' other work, and I am regularly impressed with the rigor of his models, even if I don't always agree with all of his conclusions. It helps that he is an excellent writer because this isn't the easiest material to make accessible.

In this paper, Bowles and coauthor Jung-Kyuu Choi have built a model, on a foundation of empirical data (archaeological, climatic, and anthropological), which seeks to explain the emergence of agriculture in conjunction with the private property rights. Paleoanthropologists have previously suggested that strict property rights, generally unknown in forager societies, would be necessary for farming to become practical. But, it is difficult to explain why property rights would come into existence because, as with agriculture, there are many disincentives for foragers to adopt property rights. According the authors' model, agriculture and property coevolved: each adaptation is the key to the survival and propagation of the other.

Bowles is an economist by training, so he uses models, agent-based simulations, and game theory to validate his hypothesis. There is a particular brand of game theory called evolutionary game theory which was created to cope with just the sort of questions that Bowles routinely attempts to tackle. The best known evolutionary game theory game is the Hawk Dove game, which demonstrates how two populations of the same species which behave in seemingly irreconcilable ways manage to coexist, in what is known as an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) situation.

Like so many before them, the authors' adapt the classic Dove Hawk game to fit their needs. Instead of Doves and Hawks, the authors use Sharers, Bourgeois, and Civics. A Sharer's strategy (like a Dove's) is to split a resource by default, but if another individual claims that resource, the Sharer will give all of it up. The Bourgeois is the type that will claim all of resource if possible, contesting if necessary and appropriate (similar to a Hawk). Civics act exactly like Sharers, but if they go up against a Bourgeois, they will band together with other Civics to contest a Bourgeois trying to take the resource. These strategies are modeled on anthropological studies of extant human societies.

Thanks to the power of modern computers and the Monte Carlo engine, the authors can vary other variables as well, such as whether or not property rights are recognized among the populations. If the resource is foraged then ownership is not easily demarcated, and Bourgeois agents will go after it. But if a resource is farmed, then property rights are easily recognized because it is obvious who produced the resource and thus who it belongs to. Bourgeois won't go after these resources; they respect property rights when they are apparent. Additionally, the authors varied climate conditions and simulated inter-group competitions on top of the usual intra-group contests.

After determining all the variables and running the simulations, the authors looked for what combination of conditions create novel ESS situations, with an eye for Bourgeois dominated scenarios since their behavior is the norm for agricultural cultures. A mixed population of Sharers and Bourgeois (but no Civics) forms a steady state, but if you don't have property rights established, Bourgeois have a strong tendency to fight with each other over resources that have no clear owner, which reduces the success of the population. However, if property rights exist, the Bourgeois don't squabble amongst themselves so much, and an all Bourgeois population becomes a stable possibility.

So far the authors have shown that their premises can be incorporated into a model that appears plausible, but does it match the historical facts? A challenge for researchers trying to model early modern human development is matching simulated data with the archaeological record. When we go this far back in time, archaeological evidence is often scarce and difficult to interpret. While agriculture leaves a clear mark on archaeological record, the same is not true for property rights, and there isn't much that anyone can do about that. We just have to make do with what we've got.The authors make do quite nicely. By throwing the Holocene environmental conditions into the mix, they find that

"in the simulations, as in the archaeological record, mixed farming and hunting–gathering is the norm over very long periods, and that the process of transition when it occurred was prolonged, highly varied, and sometimes halting." 

On the other hand,

"the chicken-and-egg problem of farming and private property in our model explains why the transition was a very unlikely event, occurring in only 31 of 1,000 metapopulations that we simulated."

Yet, to me the most striking result is that their model reliably displays the Natufian culture, the first sedentary humans, and possibly the first farmers.

To wrap things up, the authors make some important points about the role of invention in early culture:

"In many histories of technology, the key event is the invention; the subsequent spread occurs inexorably as the result of its superiority in lessening the toil required to sustain life. This model has been suggested for the Holocene revolution; but it does not work. No invention was necessary."

And so, thanks to an agreeable climate, coincident evolution of farming and property right, and well, the human capacity for cultural learning, our ancestors were able to transform from foragers into farmers. Probably. Maybe. We'll have to see what the expert critics have to say in the coming months and years.

This is a great paper. I think that it may have far a reaching influence, so if you're at all interested in the ideas, have a crack at it yourself. It is not terribly long, and quite accessible.

Bowles, S., & Choi, J. (2013). Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (22), 8830-8835 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1212149110

Tell Truths, Not Stories

On either side of a recent conference in London, where participants discussed the possibility that "human ancestors were exposed to a period of semiaquatic evolution", a number of voices have taken aim at the so-called Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. The AAH attempts to grapple with some interesting ideas, like why fish protein and fat is so important to our health, notably brain development, or why infants have an instinctual ability to swim, which disappears between 4 and 6 months. According to the mainstream theories of recent human evolution, these facts don't make a whole lot of sense.

It has been pointed out by many journalists (see the infamous Space Ape Hypothesis) that the AAH is still kind of ridiculous. Henry Gee points out the most crucial of flaws in the AAH, and more importantly, faulty underlying reasoning. For instance, sinuses, proposed to aid the theoretical Aquatic Ape in maintaining buoyancy underwater, are found in all mammals.

The AAH debate has been warmed over by a million people, both qualified and unqualified, over the course of decades. We don't need another tiny voice in that mix; I don't have anything to add about the AAH. But, the AAH represents much of what is wrong with evolutionary psychology, and points to a core issue that I've argued and discussed with many of my peers over the past several years: How do you make any progress in evolutionary psychology without creating a bunch of baseless just-so stories?

The short answer is, Slowly, and with a lot of hesitance.

When a psychologist found that that individuals who worry the most about social rejection are most likely to act out in response to rejection cues, what she found was truth. This is a fact of human psychology. There aren't any such facts about ancient psychology because we have no prehistoric psyches to work with, only archaeology, non-human primates, and modern humans.

What can we then say? Still quite a bit. Example: incest avoidance. Animals avoid mating with siblings and other close relatives because of the dangers of incest. There are many mechanisms spread across the kingdom that work to prevent incest from happening; in baboons, males disperse to a new troop to avoid reproducing with their relatives. In humans, we come to recognize those who we grow up in close company with as family members. This frequently applies to childhood friends of the opposite sex, and was a major problem for the sustainability for the Israeli kibbutz system. This is a psychological mechanism, born from an evolutionary need. It is respected enough to have been named. It is called the Westermarck effect.

Ultimately, the validity of evolutionary psychology lies with the validity of all science. If your findings aren't logically sound, other scientists will see through them, and you won't get published. Modern science has an additional tool: statistics, which allows us to falsify theories with varying degrees of confidence. Like any other field, statistics isn't perfected, but it is a powerful tool.

Unless your argument against evolutionary psychology is that all evolutionary psychologists are deranged, there is no particular reason to target evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is like psychology which is like all of science. There is fraud, there are charlatans, and sometimes just honest people get things wrong. We do what we can about that, but we don't disavow the entire field. 


If you would like to read more about the AAH itself, esteemed professors and bloggers John Hawks and PZ Meyers recommend that you go here. The site is more than just a discussion of the AAH, it is an informative primer for any interested in the logic of evolutionary psychology.

Deadbeat Moms

Why some fathers get left holding the baby.

Scientists have cracked a 140 year old mystery as to why, for some animals, it’s the father rather than the mother that takes care of their young. Researchers from the Universities of Bath, Sheffield and Veszprém (Hungary) found that role reversal was caused by an imbalance in the numbers of males relative to females.

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Another paper published in Nature. This is exciting stuff, as the press articles say, this has been a mystery "140 years old", which is to say, as old as Darwin's work, since it has always been an irrefutable fact that the males of some species do sometimes help rear children. Many researchers have grappled with this problem over the past century and a half. Earlier work tended to appeal to ecological or life history explanations. 

Ecological theories suggest that the physical habitat which the animals inhabit drives males to be involved in the rearing of young. A theoretical example (solely for the sake of discussion): an environment turns dry due to drought, resources are scarce, and if a male and mate succeed in producing live young, the male would be drawn to invest in the infant because the chances of successfully producing more progeny is severely diminished. His energy is better spent helping out. 

Similarly, a life history explanation would suggest that as males age, their ability to compete with other males for mating rights with multiple females decreases. The alternative is to monopolize a female's time, and invest energy is making sure a small number of progeny reach adulthood. While these explanations may seem entirely plausible, the evidence simply does not support these theories.

Until now, thanks to the Liker et al's new theory. In the article's original title, the authors only claim to have answered the question in birds. It may be that no primate species are affected, that is, that role reversals in primates are not caused by an imbalance in sex ratio. Then again, there aren't many primate species in which the male ever takes over rearing for the female.

In many species, the males stick around, but do not get involved. In baboons, the males (and usually fathers) are ever present, but they don't engage in child rearing. They will interact with babies on occasion, but that is a far cry from rearing. Species in which the males play an active role in raising infants: owl monkeys and, of course, humans.

Humans are an interesting case, and not just because all my readers are human. When modern human males take over the rearing of children, is it caused by an imbalance in sex ratio? Probably not.
But then again, humans are not a good study subject for this sort of question; the environments we inhabit are not "ecological". However, our close relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, do not engage in role reversals (nor do other apes), so the particular type of sexual role reversal we've evolved may be unique.

Liker A, Freckleton RP, & Székely T (2013). The evolution of sex roles in birds is related to adult sex ratio. Nature communications, 4 PMID: 23481395

Where You're Not Quite On Top

This paper has been making the rounds, unsurprisingly, given its featured status in Science and the fact that it was picked up by the New York Times.

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Baboon Study Shows Benefits for Nice Guys, Who Finish 2nd

From the wild to Wall Street, as everyone knows, the alpha male runs the show, enjoying power over other males and, as a field biologist might put it, the best access to mating opportunities.

The beta is No. 2 in the wolf pack or the baboon troop, not such a bad position. But conversationally, the term has become an almost derisive label for the nice guy, the good boy all grown up, the husband women look for after the fling with Russell Crowe.

It may now be time to take a step back from alpha worship. Field biologists, the people who gave the culture the alpha/beta trope in the first place, have found there can be a big downside to being No. 1.

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I don't mean to imply that the paper is bad by asking this, but how exactly does the New York Times decide what to write up in their science section? I suppose a great deal of it must be author dependant, like this one by Nicholas Wade, which was clearly a topic which he would choose to write about.
The paper is a great media story, too, since it addresses a controversial issue, and manages to get into the human element of the back and forth rhetoric between Stephen Jay Gould and... well, a lot of people in paleoanthropology.

Enjoy the read. It covers a lot of old and new ground about what may and may not cause stress among primates from all walks of life, who have achieved varied levels of success. If you're trying to figure out how stressed you are and what personality type you are, you're probably still better off getting some old fashioned tests.

More Latest Stuffs on Altruism

At the time, I didn't write much about the Martin Nowab et al. paper which appeared in Nature about a year back, but it generated a bunch a hubbub mostly because everyone thought they were completely wrong.

I thought they were completely wrong, initially. Kin Selection is a wonderfully simple and elegant concept, that is honestly hard to imagine as possibly being wrong. Its too simple and fundamental. I also didn't want it to be wrong because it underlies many of my own core beliefs and personal theories (yes I admit I am allowing my confirmation bias to work here).

In all fairness, I still think they are wrong. I looked around in the months after the initial release, and was satisfied by the refutations from everyone else in the community.

Somehow, the topic came up again more recently and I went back to the original paper. I checked the supplementary materials, unsure if I had looked at them the first time.

I had not. They are almost an entirely new and different paper from the one that actually appears in print. I considered going through this monster 40+ page adversary and critiquing it page by page, but that seemed like it might become a full-time job for a few months, what with having to relearn all of Nowak's obscure mathematical presentations.

Then another article appeared in Science, about ROBOTS and simulations of kin selection in those models. Good read. Yet, Nowak's comment at the end reignited my ire. In orther sources, Nowak says that the critics aren't really going through all of their arguments no matter how many hundreds of scientists print that they're wrong. Its like he's some kind of avate-garde hipster scientist.

Truth be told, I really didn't want to be the one to "go through all their arguments," and very fortunately, someone else came close enough for my tastes, just recently, too.

Rousset and Leon actually tear away at the paper and its supplements, and, because their commentary was not published in Nature like that giant series from March, they can make some much needed criticisms of this article in context.

"The format of the paper itself is an obstacle to scientific communication. The article has two parts: a short illustrated essay for the general reader and a 43-page online mathematical Appendix. Readers who are not mathematically inclined or simply short on time may be tempted to simply trust the authors and gauge the scientific value of the paper based on the ‘weight’ of the supplementary material or on the prestige of the authors."

Thank you, Rousset and Leon. Regardless of the validity of the results, the paper's presentation is a travesty; a travesty that the authors were fully aware of. Devastating stuff, and I really hope everyone involved or even watching has learned a constructive lesson or two from this catastrophe. Now hopefully I can be satisfied that Nowak et al. have been properly refuted.


Rousset F, & Lion S (2011). Much ado about nothing: Nowak et al.'s charge against inclusive fitness theory. Journal of evolutionary biology PMID: 21457170

Instantaneous Evolution

Gorilla strolls on hind legs

Behavior might give him 'height advantage to look over the wall' at feeding time. A gorilla at a British animal park has achieved fame for walking upright on his hind legs like a human.

Read more...

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Try not to get tired of that GIF. I know I won't.

I don't have all that much to say about this discovery. Its a single gorilla who developed this talent in adulthood. There's no epigenetics madness going on here.

I think the most interesting (read: cold and unfeeling) thing we serve to learn from this dude is how his skeleton is shaped. Can he pull this off with a standard gorilla skeleton? Or are their subtle differences in his physical form which could shed light on which were the first developments in early hominid precursors (Ardipithecus and friends) which lead to bipedal locomotion.

Also this dude weighs almost 500 pounds, so these leisurely strolls are super awesome.


Edit: Pic link has been TRANSFORMED into a youtube video with more footage and interviews and all kinds of shit. Also, the original GIF was of a different gorilla...

Latest and Greatest

Its a bit rare for me to find as many newsworthy items on the great apes other than the three chimpanzees; I just haven't been interested in the others for years now. Yet what have we here? Honest, intriguing findings that are the results of gorilla studies.

Great apes 'play' tag to keep competitive advantage

ScienceDaily (2010-07-14) -- Gorillas hit-and-run in 'games' of tag in the same way humans do and for the same reason -- to keep their competitive advantage, a new study has found. It is the first study to show apes, like humans, will hit a playmate then run in order to try to get away with the upper hand. ... > read full article

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My main beef with orangutans is that they look so alien. I am especially referring to the males and their purple skin, shambling arms, and cheek flanges. Plus, think about it - all the great apes are from central Africa, except the orangs, which are way out on a couple of islands of Indonesia. It means there is a potentially fascinating evolutionary back story, but also that they don't share much in common with humans or even the rest of the apes. The people I know who've gone out there to do field with them tell some nightmarish stories about following them through the trees through the nastiest rain-forest imaginable. But here you have it, one of the worst the Killers references I've seen in quite some time, followed by an interesting article.

Signal like you mean it: Orangutan gestures carry specific intentional meanings, study finds

ScienceDaily (2010-06-17) -- Great ape gestures have intentional meaning and are made with the expectation of specific behavioral responses, according to researchers. The study of meaning in animal communication takes a significant step forward with the authors' new systematic approach to assessing intentional meaning in the gestural communication of non-humans, applied here to a group of orangutan gestures. ... > read full article

Odd they may be, but you'll not likely see me insult orang intelligence.

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Finally, a chimpanzee field study by the great Klaus Zuberbuhler and company, yielding impressively metacognitive linguistic findings. Right up my alley.

Chimpanzees are aware of the social impact of their communications, primatologists have discovered.

Chimps communicate using a variety of calls and gestures, including making vocalizations known as pant grunts, which signal subordination. But researchers have found that chimps will change what they "say" depending on who is listening. That reveals a previously unrecognized social awareness that has implications for the origin of human language.

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Oops, I lied. Since I like to emphasize that humans are great apes, and close relatives of chimpanzees, I went looking for result research on Homo sapiens and I actually found one I liked. 

Too Fine to Sign:

Very attractive job seekers may face discrimination from prospective employers of the same sex, according to a new study just published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

I'm still surprised by the number of upper-middle class (and above) people I encounter who aren't fully aware of our status as apes. Someone should really do something about that.

Trees Please

A sibling of mine made me aware of a few recent studies published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, which have yielded results which I do not find surprising. Nevertheless, it is wonderful that someone went out, collected the data, analyzed it, and alleviated doubts on the matter. It might also explain my altered moods of late.

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Spending time in nature makes people feel more alive, study shows

ScienceDaily (2010-06-04) -- Being outside in nature makes people feel more alive, finds a series of studies. And that sense of increased vitality exists above and beyond the energizing effects of physical activity and social interaction that are often associated with our forays into the natural world. ... > read full article

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I buy it. I've found that when I'm living in a city, it helps a great deal to have easy access to natural areas. In Boston, it was very convenient just to be by the river and esplanade, though I found it even more relaxing to ride out onto the Emerald Necklace, a chain of parks and arboretums weaving their way into South Boston. Cape Town is, well... Cape Town. There's no shortage of natural splendor in that city.

Imprinting may also play an important role in these effects. The primordial human living conditions were under strong sun, on the plains and in the fields. Most people I meet are a bit depressed when the sun doesn't shine on a given day, but that doesn't bother me. I spent all of my childhood in the rainswept Pacific Northwest, living beneath a hillside forest. Despite how much I despised rain as a child, these days I find myself energized by rain and forests. In particular, I enjoy those warm, almost tropical summer rains, the kind you can smell in the air several minutes before they begin.

Field work obviously places one in natural settings a great deal, and probably does wonders for a person's health. Unfortunately, my personal experience doesn't shed too much light on this, since my lifestyle differs drastically when I'm doing field work; there's a lot of hidden factors that could be confounding my experience. Its very interesting that they mention biodiversity as being a crucial factor, since Cape Town provides data points from both extremes of the spectrum.

Fynbos and the entire Cape Floral Kingdom is one of the most diverse environments on the planet, despite being so rare. On the other hand, for hundreds of years, European settlers have grown timber plantations on land which was previously filled with fynbos. These plantations must have very low biodiversity, as the trees are imported, regularly planted to maximize yield, and devoid of most undergrowth. Baboons seem to like the trees, though.

Could we find a significant difference in mood between when I've followed the baboons through plantation or fynbos? I'm inclined to to be pessimistic since any harmony established by the fynbos is negated by the annoyance of having to trudge through a dozen species of spined shrubbery.

Sediba means natural spring in Sotho

One of the worst parts about traveling around is having to deal with a laptop keyboard for all your purposes (if you've even got a lappy with you at all). I'll go ahead and say it: laptop keyboards take the joy out of life.

A funny thing happened. I was going through some old blog posts on my feeds which I hadn't gotten around to reading in some time. I opened one of the stories from Afarensis in a new tab, but then didn't get around to reading it, probably because is got lost in the seventy or more tabs I keep open at most times.

Yes, I acknowledge that I have a problem.

When I did return to said tab, I had completely forgotten that some time had passed, and the news was old to begin with. I also very foolishly blocked out the little line of red text meant to inform me that this information dated back to mid-April.

The story concerned the recent discovery of Authrulopithecus sediba, the latest hominid fossil skeleton discovered in Africa. South Africa to be precise. It seems we've found yet another quality missing link. But, if you're behind the times like me and want the story, I recommend you ask the good Mr. Hawks.

The last amusing bit on this is that word of this discovery passed to me some months before the break to the public through an acquaintance of a friend of a colleague, or some chain like that. Not that there was any actual information conveyed, just "something pretty big was discovered up north." Perhaps that was the cost of my tardiness in getting the actual story about sediba.

Relevant recent research round-up

Much has been going on in the various realms of mind research, and quite a little backlog of interesting studies have come off the presses. Stories featured in order of appearance. 

Compulsive eating shares addictive biochemical mechanism with cocaine, heroin abuse, study shows

ScienceDaily (2010-03-29) -- In a newly published study, scientists have shown for the first time that the same molecular mechanisms that drive people into drug addiction are behind the compulsion to overeat, pushing people into obesity. ... > read full article

Addiction fascinates me. I, for one, greatly enjoy eating. I appreciate food, but one can enjoy a good meal and eat a whole lot of it. A few years ago, I could get away with eating any quantity of food, and I wouldn't gain any significant quantity of weight. That's changed lately, which bothers me since I appear to be just as ravenous in my desire for food. Am I addicted to eating? If one combines the statistics for obesity, alcoholism, and drug addictions, I get the feeling you'd find yourself confronted with a disturbingly large portion of the population. This problem may be more prevalent in the States, which is apt enough, since NIH funds the research.

Unconscious learning uses old parts of the brain

ScienceDaily (2010-04-07) -- A new study provides evidence that basic human learning systems use areas of the brain that also exist in the most primitive vertebrates, such as certain fish, reptiles and amphibians. The study involved an investigation into the limbic striatum, one of the evolutionarily oldest parts of the brain, and the ability to learn movements, consciously and unconsciously, through repetition. ... > read full article

I am a big "fan" of studying the unconscious parts of the brain. The older it gets, the more important it is for our functionality. Of course, if you look at stuff that is too old, then you wind up dealing with medulla structures which regulate the contractions of your digestive track. Since consciousness is probably a very recent development, it makes perfect sense that unconscious (implicit) learning and memory is tied to older brain structures. Its good that someone confirmed this.

Brain shuts off in response to healer's prayer - life - 27 April 2010 - New Scientist

WHEN we fall under the spell of a charismatic figure, areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active. That's the finding of a study which looked at people's response to prayers spoken by someone purportedly possessing divine healing powers...

I'd like to begin by stating that I heartily dislike The New Scientist. I was going to say that I "abhor" the publication, but that isn't quite accurate. I would be okay if TNS accepted its role as a popular, light science publication, but they continually attempt to make themselves out to be a serious journal, which the quality of their reports prohibits.

Anyway, this research is still pretty interesting. I'd definitely wager that this commanding effect of charismatic leaders can be seen outside of religious domains.

Social networking helps hermit crabs find homes

ScienceDaily (2010-04-28) -- Biologists have discovered that, contrary to their name, hermit crabs may locate new and improved housing using previously unknown social networking skills. These behaviors may shed light on any animal that relies on discrete and reusable resources, from hole-nesting woodpeckers to urban apartment dwellers. ... > read full article

Despite the buzz-wordiness of the title, this is exceptionally interesting stuff - they've discovered new behaviors among hermit crabs! If a crab in need of a home finds an empty shell that is too large, it will wait around for another crab to come by and take the shell in hopes of picking up the larger crab's old shell. I won't argue that there are massive impacts on our understanding of human social behavior, but still, that's pretty neat.

Researcher explores role of human behavior in infectious disease emergence

ScienceDaily (2010-04-30) -- A wildlife scientist has examined how different human behaviors influence disease transmission between domestic dogs and the African wild dog, an endangered species. ... > read full article

On that last note, here's a study which definitely does have a lot to say about the betterment of the human condition via understanding social behavior. On reading this story, my first musing concerned how far back these human-dog social behaviors related to disease go back. Dog domestication could easily predate the agricultural revolution, and possibly even the formation of complex hunter-gatherers. Thus, the origin of these behaviors might be evolutionary and not environmental, which ought to alter our approach to handling these issues.

How nerve cells distinguish odors

ScienceDaily (2010-05-03) -- Whether different odors can be quickly distinguished depends on certain synapses in the brain that inhibit nerve stimulation. Researchers have shown that mice in which a certain receptor in the olfactory center is missing can distinguish similar smells more quickly than mice without genetic manipulation. ... > read full article

 Once, I did a bit of work in the neuroscience of taste and smell perception (in rats and mice). I worked at the systems/behavioral level, but there's a great deal more research occurring one step down, at the cellular level. This stuff is some pretty heavy neurochemistry, but if you are up to date on that knowledge, this is intriguing research.

Cavemen among us: Some humans are 4 percent Neanderthal - CSMonitor.com

We have met Neanderthals, and they are us – or about 1 to 4 percent of each of us.

That is one implication of a four-year effort to sequence the Neanderthal genome – essentially setting out in order some 3 billion combinations of four key molecules that together represent the Neanderthals' genetic blueprint...

Yet another result of the data being churned out of Svante Pääbo's legendary Neanderthal genomics project. As they mention in the article, "the results and their further refinement are expected to yield a treasure-trove of information on what makes modern humans distinct from Neanderthals, humans' closest extinct relative." Considering the prior lack of evidence in favor of any of the conflicting theories of what became of the Neanderthals, this is a fine change of pace. Plus, I'm at a lucky stage in life where I'm not in favor of any of the particular theories, so these findings do not offend my sensibilities.

Blinking neurons give thoughts away

ScienceDaily (2010-05-10) -- Scientists have used a genetic light source to measure brain signals. Electrical currents are invisible to the naked eye -- at least they are when they flow through metal cables. In nerve cells, however, scientists are able to make electrical signals visible. Scientists have now successfully used a specialized fluorescent protein to visualize electrical activity in neurons of living mice. In a milestone study, scientists are able to apply the method to watch activity in nerve cells during animal behavior. ... > read full article

I swear, I had this same idea a couple of years ago, but I didn't   Plus, I honestly didn't see how it would be a more useful technique than modern two-photon imaging techniques. The advantage I did not for see was that if one can ditch the cumbersome microscope equipment needed for two-photon excitation imaging, you could attach a fibre-optic connection which would allow you to visualize brain activity while the animal was behaving. I confess that I have a soft spot for calcium imaging, so I'm quite pleased by this, but there are still some big issues, like the fact that you can't do this in humans, and its hard to visualize the neurons below the top layers of the cortex.

Alrighty then. Until... next month?

Human Ethology: Induction Machines

When I started writing ethological analyses of various disparate topics a few weeks ago, I found myself running up against a particular issue which seemed unavoidable. Rather than skirt that issue, I'm going to approach it now and explain the "deal" so I can refer back to it later.

The problem we face as human is that we're inclined to make inductive leaps. We're designed to do it, in fact. This goes way beyond the philosophical Problem of Induction, which addresses the validity of science. The fact that we jump to so many conclusions certainly implies that we're not naturally good at science, which is why it takes so many years to perfect our logic for it, and even then mistakes are very common.

How many times have you heard someone say something like "So much for global warming!" when a big snow hits your city early in wintertime? Its called global warming for good reason, yet a single data point from a single city on a single day of the year is enough to bring serious doubt into some minds. That's at least a little bit dumb.

Malcolm Gladwell provides a highly enjoyable discussion of human induction issues in the modern world in his book Blink. Many more books have been written about this human weakness, in fact. Such books tend to answer the questions of How - how are we predisposed to make quick choices? For my part, I think I'll talk a little bit about why, which as usual takes us back to our hunter-gatherer buddies.

Imagine yourself in the position of an ancestral hunter-gatherer (H-G). For starters, you live in the open fields, barely shielded from the elements by crude structures. You reside with a group of about 50 people. You'll live with and know these people your entire life, likely, unless you get married into an adjoining village. Then you'll meet 50 more people. There will be people you encounter from surrounding communities which will raise the total number above a hundred, maybe even close to 200 depending on your particular culture.

You lead a nomadic life, moving from place to place so as not to expend all the resources in a given area and go hungry. Over the course of the seasons, you might have to change your strategies, but this is cyclical. Years go by without significant change.

My work with the baboons comes in surprisingly handy here. Baboon live in dry, savanna landscapes, as our ancestors and many hunter gatehrers still do. The great apes and lesser apes (gibbons) all live in dense forests, which present different challenges to staying alive (though it would be great to get some first hand exposure to the anthropological sites in Africa). Whether you're a chimp, gibbon, or baboon, there's one thing you have in common: life is pretty boring.

The same goes for hunter-gatherers. The gatherers have to spend most of the day searching for food in order to gather enough to get by. The hunters have to spend multiple days looking for game, wounding it, and then often chasing it at length across the savannas while it slowly loses energy. Much of the "excess" time is spent with chores and upkeep. Those simple core axes don't sharpen themselves. The days are long, tiring, and monotonous. There just isn't a lot of new stuff happening. Things don't change.

Life was largely formulaic, at least in the mid to long term, i.e. where to go next for food, who to marry your daughter to. Its in the short term that people needed to make decisions as individuals. But quick decisions were pretty unimportant, except in one particular case: when your life is at risk.

When faced with life or death decisions, you had to make decisions based on the small amounts of info you had. The most important thing to do was make it quickly (because otherwise you'd probably just take a dirt nap). That meant jumping to conclusions. The sacrifices for this behavior were small - so you jump to a conclusion and offend someone in a conversation. You'll both get over it. That's a small price to pay for being equipped with the mental architecture that will save your life time after time.

Under the circumstances of the great outdoor savannas, we were damn good at making smart decisions quickly. But we don't live in the savannahs anymore. We live in fast moving, rapidly changing, crowded civilizations. This creates two problems:

1.  The quick decisions we don't turn out as well as we might think because we're a bit out of place.
2. We're called on to make logical, thought out decisions, which we're not very good at.

I have no solutions to offer for these problems. At least not stated as such. They're too big and too deeply ingrained in our biology. But I can offer solutions to the effects ancestral baggage such as this, I just needed to get this basic thing out of the way. Our snap judgments can still be very useful and accurate, but they need to be applied differently.

I think this might as well be the best time for me to shamelessly expose my favorite sociobiology quote of all time:

It seems clear that human beings are the most flexible and adaptable creatures on earth, capable of choosing their own destiny. At the same time, it is also clear that there is a definite genetic influence on many aspects of our behavior, especially when it comes to sex, violence, parenting, even tendencies for altruism and selfishness. The more we understand that influence, the more free we are to chart our own course.

-David P. Barash

The fact that we manage to live in giant cities and have these ethological problems is a good sign. The next step is to continue our upwards course while being mindful of our origins. Humans are exceptional at being able to pick up new skills and learn them until they become second nature. Rather than skirt these ethological issues, we ought to be working with them, taking advantage of our natural strengths while cultivating new ones.

But enough proselytizing. Next time: ethology and microblogging. Yes, I am entirely serious. Long story made short, Google wanted me to start using Buzz, so I did, got seriously annoyed, started looking at it critically, then realized that there is so much wrong with microblogging from an ethological perspective. The Internet may prove to be a common topic for these discussions since when I don't live in Africa I live here, and also because I hear people on the internet like reading about the internet. So meta.

Human Ethology: Part I of ?

When I started getting into primatology field work, I went to talk to Jerry Schneider, my former teacher and boss from my 9.20 days, to ask his advice. Jerry's known a lot of behavior people over the years, and he was right there in Boston through the whole sociobiology controversy. Jerry's recommended a lot of books to me over the years, this time he said that if I was interested in primatology, specifically an anthrocentric view, I ought to read Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt's Human Ethology.

Ethology is the study of the natural behavior of animals. Human ethology focuses on humans, though evolutionary science often brings chimps, bonobos, and other primates into the picture. Human ethology is basically a different way of looking at anthropology, instead of taking a cognitive approach, or working down from societies and cultures to the individual, human ethology examines anthropology from an evolutionary standpoint, a sociobiological standpoint. It attacks problems by asking what the adaptability of human behaviors are.

I brought the tome with me to Africa, and have since burned through its contents. Eibl-Eibesfeldt's work remains a liberating source of knowlegde, but it does have a few drawbacks:

1. The text is outdated. It was originally published 1989, and while I have the "Second Edition" from 2008, it is effectively just a reprint and does not incorporate new data from the intervening twenty years.
2. Eibl-Eibesfeldt's primary goal was to present the facts of natural human behavior, rather than give recommendations on one ought to do. He does give some tips, as it would be impossible not to in a good discussion. The book is in turth a textbook; a descriptive work, not a persuasive one.

I'm interested in taking the findings presented by Eibl-Eibesfeldt and others (who are hopefully more up to date), and seeing how we can improved short and long term aspects of one's lifestyle. Self-help, basically.

So what's new in this line of advocacy? We already have methods in ergonomics, which were invented in order to take advantage of how we were meant to sit. We have products like the FiveFingers, designed to be as much like a normal human foot as possible, so that we can run the way we were meant to. Perhaps most popular are the "new" diets, based on prehistoric peoples who didn't have the option of processing their grains into bleached flour, so they just ate the wholegrains, nuts, and fruits, which could be easily gathered in their habitat - how we're meant to eat. Human ethology grapples with a broader and arguably different problem: how are we meant to act?

Our minds and bodies are attuned for life running through savannas, hunting, picking berries, laying the the dirt, being exposed to the elements under the sun all day. Life under the protective watch of civilization does open up all kinds of new avenues of discovery and enlightenment, but sometime our environment can become over-protective, leading to negative effects. Stress levels are higher, overall health is declining, infections race through populations unchecked. Simply put, people aren't meant to live this way. The nature-versus-nuture debate tell us that both influences come into play when shaping a person's development. We are not blank slates, and we possess many innate qualities and tendencies. We need to figure out how we can work with our natural affinities, not around them or ignoring them entirely. We need to able to find a way to keep progressing while not losing sight of our roots. Human ethology allows us to do this.
  
For my purposes, I'm going to use human ethology as a blanket to cover related topic, like nutrition and exercise, which I've already discussed. These topics still have a strong behavioral component because of the power of choice. For example, diet becomes more useful and interesting to discuss when we try to understand why we make poor dietary choices. The more you know, the better you can make the informed decision.

Here's a quick but telling example: Birthing. Unquestionably one of the most crucial moments in human life. In my discussions with primatologists, I've learned that monkeys and apes don't have much of a problem with giving birth, which is certainly not true for humans. Our births are long and arduous, with a high mortality rate for mother and child. There are a number of reasons for this, but can we do anything to combat mortality? We can't increase the size of our pelvic girdle or stop walking upright - these are unalterable physical traits. Yet we can alter alter our approach to the situation; how we behave under these circumstances.

Modern hospitals have been getting with the picture in terms of providing ethological birthing beds, but the problem is still worth noting, since the majority of readers were probably born under poor conditions. "Primitive" cultures all around the globe rely on squatting births, which is how our other ape buddies do it. Gravity is a powerful factor, but more fundamentally, this was how the human birth canal was designed to be used. If you're not giving birth in a squat, you're basically doing it wrong (unless there are extenuating circumstances, of course). And doing birth wrong is one of the biggest mistakes you could make.

The circumstances are another thing we don't need to take for granted. A hospital is not a fun place to be. Few enjoy being in a hospital for the obvious reason of its-a-hospital-full-of-sick-and-dying-people-oh-this-is-depressing. That's not the whole story though - a hospital is bare, sterile, mechanistic. They are cold and unfamiliar: hospital interiors are unlike anything else in our lives, except for the occasional nursing home or science lab.

Animals want to give birth somewhere comfortable. This varies among animals, I've learned from the baboons that they tend to do it at night, when they're around their sleeping site, a known safe location. The rest of the troop can be gotten away from for more privacy and comfort, but the mother knows they are nearby for assistance if she needs it. Humans are more needy in birth than baboons, desiring assistance to be on hand throughout, usually in the form of female relatives. A female rushed to a hospital and dumped in a bed is put under enormous stress, and she must get used to the unfamiliar location before giving birth. This is going to lengthen the birthing time by a lot - studies have revealed that home births take significantly less time than hospital birth.

We've stumbled upon the first lesson of human ethology - you should never assume physical comfort is good for you. Bringing ergonomics back into the picture, La-Z-Boy makes these wonderfully soft couches which look great and do feel great at first, but provide very little support. Pretty soon, you'll probably develop a sore back or buttocks from sitting on one of those. Since we are so distantly removed from our primordial homelands, our behavior is removed as well, which requires we contemplate our drives and desires, and interpret them in the unnatural context of our everyday lives. We're aren't a blank slate, our minds are the most malleable and fluid in the world. This advantage might have gotten us into this jam in the first place, but it can definitely get us out.

Wars and Alliances

Some mouse sperm can identify, and even cooperate with, its brethren

ScienceDaily (2010-01-25) -- Some mouse sperm can discriminate between its brethren and competing sperm from other males, clustering with its closest relatives to swim faster in the race to the egg. But this sort of cooperation appears to be present only in certain promiscuous species, where it affords an individual's sperm a competitive advantage over that of other males. ... > read full article

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Back in the day I wrote a diddy on Sperm Warfare, which is a sweet book worth reading. It is also a controversial book, and the results have been challenged in the years since its publication. However, as one famous but egotistically arrogant professor told me, "don't believe any results until at least five different labs replicate the findings."

Which brings us to today's news item: more support for the idea that sperm are highly adaptable, multipurpose creations. For some time, it was believed that a large portion of sperm were not viable, thus not functional. Sociobiologically, something sounds wrong with this statement. Evolution doesn't waste such an important commodity.

Some truly wasted sperm are bound to be malformed, but not a significant number. Sperm Wars (and the research behind the book) suggests that there are many varieties of sperm, all of which are functional in their own way. Inseminators, warriors, blockers, and now cooperators. If sperm are shown to be doing something adaptive, then chances are this isn't going to be an isolated example.

The authors of the paper mention that most human sperm do not possess the necessary head shape to facilitate cooperative clustering. Human sperm is known for quite high variability, however, so I wouldn't rule out the possibility just yet. Again, at least five labs ought to reproduce the data. Plus, this could catch on in humans any day now.

Sperm competition is the counter to female cryptic choice, another devious reproductive tactics. Sperm Wars received considerable flak because the subject material is frankly disturbing, largely because it talks about the adaptability of infidelity. As with Wilson's original Sociobiology, it the book did not support any such actions. The fair view is to recognize the utility of all major strategies, paying due homage to the monogamous family which dominates human bonding.

More Late Breaking Bonobo News

... Because I only check some of my RSS feeds on a regular basis.

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'Peter Pan' apes never seem to learn selfishness

ScienceDaily (2010-02-01) -- Sharing is a behavior on which day care workers and kindergarten teachers tend to offer young humans a lot of coaching. But for our ape cousins the bonobos, sharing just comes naturally. ... > read full article

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Very similar story to last time. I heard about food sharing among bonobos a little while back, which I do not think has been observed in captive studies. Whenever food sharing happens among primates, its a pretty big deal and researchers immediately want to determine the adaptability of such behaviors. Some baboon-ists joke about making their key breakthrough by discovering food sharing in baboons. Hare and Wrangham are pressing towards some highly interesting conclusions.

The Quest

There are a few questions which transcend science and capture the imagination and thoughts of the greater population. One such question sits at the nexus of the fields of anthropology, sociobiology, ethology, psychology, evolutionary/population genetics, primatology, and archaeology there sits a question which is the Holy Grail of biological inquiries. Progressive hypotheses have been posed for hundreds of years, hopefully been getting closer and closer to the truth. But we're still not there. It is a topic which has influenced religion, literature, philosophy; thousands of books and stories have hinged on this question, some of the most notable recent examples include Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, the Chrono series, and even the modern reinterpretation of Battlestar Galactica.

Simply put, the question is, "Why are we here?" However, with our existing knowledge of physics and the biology of natural selection, we can focus the question into "How did we get here?" Well, where exactly is here? We know how we got to this planet - astrophysics and primordial soup. So where have we gone that other life hasn't? Well, we appear to defy many "rules" of nature, and we've created complex cultures and vast civilizations, spanning the entire globe. No other creature has come close to extending as far as our species has. "How did we get to where we are today?"

My actions at this very moment rely on a collection of unique human accomplishments: writing this blog post about human understanding of natural science on the internet for a global community. Your pet snake and my monkey friends will never see one of their species capable of understanding even one of these concepts. So, the question has now reached the form, "How were humans able to become civilized and advanced beyond any other animal?"

The question is not, "How are humans different form other animals?" This question has been addressed for years, and our understanding of the answer is quite concrete. To be certain, this information is important to understanding my question, but alone it is not a solution. If you're interested in the answer to this other question, I recommend Human, by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, a modern overview of the known difference between man and the other apes.

The real question, the true Grail, concerns events which happened tens of thousands of years ago. Humans weren't always able to do these neat things we take for granted in the modern age. So when and did these developments start? For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived as hunter-gatherers (H-G), and for millions of years past our emergence, our authrolopithecine ancestors lived this way as well. The prehistoric hunter-gatherer lifestyle is actually quite similar to how modern chimpanzees live. Even my friends, the baboons, gather their food in much the same way our cro-magnon ancestors did.

Then something happened. It transpired tens of thousands of years ago, and may have been a transition which itself took thousands of years.

Agriculture used to be a big deal in terms of fundamental human achievements. Don't take this the wrong way, the invention of agriculture was huge, but it wasn't what set us apart. Something happened before agriculture, something which allowed us to develop massive living groups.

A hundred thousand years ago and earlier, our ancestors lived as simple hunter-gatherers. Between simple hunter-gatherers and agricultural based towns is an intermediate step: complex hunter-gatherers. Complex hunter-gatherers lived in a larger groups, used more complex tools, and practiced the gathering tactic of radiating mobility.

Simple hunter-gatherers are characterized by their circular mobility and lack of permanent settlements. They would travel from place to place, using some of the local resources and then moving on before completely draining the area. They would follow game to satisfy their need for protein, and gather as they would go, altering their movements seasonally to accommodate migration and ripening of fruit. The baboons do almost exactly what I'm describing, except without the hunting.

Complex tools and sophisticated hunting and gathering techniques are no big deal. We're part of the branch of primates (chimpanzees) which excels at technology. It makes decent sense for us to be able to do the seemingly insane things we do with technology, both modern and ancient.

It is the large group size which is the confusing part of this situation. Chimps can maintain group sizes of 70 at the most. Complex hunter-gatherers managed to push this number up into the hundreds and beyond. Simple hunter-gatherering humans didn't live this way. They still don't. Contemporary African bushmen camps contain about a dozen tiny stick huts populated by approximately 40 people.

So how'd we do it? We lived as simple hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. Why the sudden change to larger groups? Animal behavior is adaptive, which means we wouldn't have done it unless it helped us out somehow. In hindsight, the advantages of agriculture over complex H-G over simple H-G are obvious, and our vast population expansion which occurred over the last ten thousand years is further proof of our unique accomplishments. But why should we have managed to succeed when in the millions of years of hominid history, no one else figured it out?

Scientists have ideas. Lots of them. Yet, whatever happened, it happened so long ago that little evidence remains. This is the biggest impediment we face in our attempts to tackle the question. We must work with extremely limited remains of tools, shelters, and bodies. Human remains provide limited genetic data, which may be the most useful data at our disposal.

My main purpose in writing this is so I have the neccessary background info readily at hand for discussions of the various theories which seek to answer the question. There are a slew of papers, some old, most new, which seek to give answer(s). They're interesting to read and this is "kind of a big deal" so I think they are worth the attention. Although, I'll also say right here and now that I don't believe any of these papers have it right, which makes the debate all the more fun.

Why am I personally interested? Well, we're basically talking about figuring out the most important  development in human history! That sounds pretty exciting to me. Its also controversial, and I can't help myself, I'm drawn towards a good struggle. Plus, I have the advantage of having already read many of these papers, and I believe there are some conclusions being misrepresented, and something I can add from there...

Repeat: That was a weird book

This post is borrowed from my old journal of years past. I liked/wanted the content enough to carry it over and bring it up to date.

I picked up a copy of "The Cognitive Neurosciences" Third Edition from the MIT Press garage sale by chance, which was a damn nice find (its a fatty and probably would cost about a hundred bucks new - I paid ten); one of those texts I see often on the shelves of grad students, post-docs, and profs in Course 9. When glancing through it, I found that Sapolsky contributed a section for it called "Stress and Cognition," which sums up much of his own academic research, plus that of others, and is pretty much exactly the research I am talking about when I attack MIT student life circumstances. Plus, its quite a well written piece. It unfortunately isn't available for public consumption on the web, but here are a few articles that talk about the same issue to a less complete degree.

However, my desire is to talk about an entirely different book. My 9.20 professor urged me to try reading a book he had mentioned to me entitled "Sperm Wars." Its about the underlying science (I can't stress this enough, the author is a professor of Biology at Manchester, and has spent years running carefully regulated studies involving thousands upon thousands of samples) of human sexual behavior. So I'm interested in this sort of stuff, and the book seemed pretty cool (and if you examine the back cover, already mildly shocking), so I gave it a read.

The stuff in there is really weird. Downright boggling. Also fascinating, for a number of reasons. For example, one of the scientific findings highlighted in the book is that 10% of all children born to married couples do not possess the genes of their "father." Another: male and female homosexuality exists as a genetic balanced polymorphism. Because of the very real reproductive advantages given by bisexual genes, homophobia probably developed in heterosexuals because the others were a threat to reproductive fitness, plus there is that unfortunate problem of the spreading disease. Its worse in industrial societies; secluded populations with less disease exhibit much higher rates of bisexual behavior and little taboo exists. There's a lot more where that came from, too.

The primary goal of the book is to discuss the anatomy and physiology of human reproduction, leaving all aspects of societal influences out of it. The anatomy and physiology is certainly enough to fill the book since there is some weird weird shit that does make sense from an animal behavior perspective, but is stuff I would not dream of on my own. It is a strange strange thing we've got going for ourselves. I'm not sure I always agree with his uses of "scenes" to illustrate examples of behaviors. Some of it is pretty shocking, which is probably the author's intention, since without presenting the reader with realistic shock value, the legitimate points he is trying to get across simply wouldn't set in.

Perhaps the author's primary takeaway point is that naturally, human reproduction is not innately cooperative. To our Freudian Id (Actuality: Hypothalamus, lower brain areas, endocrine organs, etc.), tis an everlasting conflict against the opposing gender. The male "shotgun" approach is often viewed derisively as crude and stupid, but there is a lot more intelligence in these behaviors than it appears. Its quite unsettling how much simple hormones and unconscious planning/scheming are able to manipulate our actions without our conscious understanding. Due to the drastic difference in "how stuff works down there," the science says males should spread their genes to as many people as possible, minimizing personal risk, and women should try to collect the strongest genes possible (again minimizing risk) while maintaining supportive relationships with at least one male. What does it mean to be the strongest? Well, that's always changing and fluctuating, but that unconscious machine happens to know damn well what's "best," and its often not what our minds are seeing.

In one of Sapolsky's published essay collections, he wrote a little piece about the neurophysiology of escalating arguments amongst people: where they come from, why the develop, how they end up exploding, and at the very end of the piece, what we can consciously do to take advantage of our own physiology and stop ourselves from being stupid. This book is not that. To the author's credit, he explains that he wanted to present the bare facts, unclouded by bias or agenda. To alleviate small arguments is easy, but to take a stance on what people should or shouldn't do sexually involves many questions of morality and ethics, issues we've been seriously debating for hundreds of years. To delve into that would needlessly distort what the book means to do.

Which is to provide fair and balanced view of both genders and the various behaviors and structures involved. He does a relatively good job. After all, the guy knows his ethology and sociobiology, and he's in no way just pulling this out of his ass. I'd have liked to see more data, but that's not what this book is for. Hundreds of additional articles exist for that purpose. Plus, the book really does only touch on one side of human behavior. If we were talking about dogs, bears, monkeys, or any other animal, then this would be it. But, we're not that, and the author recognizes this from the outset.

I'm not sure if this a book that I really think everyone ought to read. The information contained within is important, but its presentation is perhaps not ideal, which is unfortunate because people really should be aware of how we actually work. Some stuff in the book should probably be viewed with skepticism, but many of the results have been shown to be reproducible... Ha. Ha ha.

I think what it really boils down too is, as those silly G.I. Joe cartoons used to say, "knowing is half the battle."