Archive of the Category 'Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior'

Justice in the Brain: Equity and Efficiency Are Encoded Differently

Posted: June 10, 2008

A fascinating article with the title above appeared in a May 10, 2008 report in ScienceDaily. Researchers at the University of Illinois and CalTech led by Ming Hsu asked their subjects inside a fMRI brain scanning machine, “Which is better, giving more food to a few hungry people or letting some food go to waste so that everyone gets a share?” The answers they got clearly bear on RD Theory.

The subjects were asked to make a series of tough decisions about how to allocate food donations to children in a Ugandan orphanage. The subjects were told that each child would start out with a monetary equivalent of 24 meals, an actual gift from the research team to the orphanage. Some meals would, however, have to be cut, that is ‘wasted’, from some children’s allotments. The number of meals wasted and the individual children who would be affected depended on how the subjects selected from trade-off options the researchers presented to them. Every decision option pitted efficiency (the total number of meals given as a proportion of the number originally available) against equity (how equally the burden of ‘wasted’ meals was shared among the children) and ranged from high efficiency with the burden of loss inequitably falling on only a few children, to high equity among children at the cost of more wastage. In RD terms this choice poses trade offs between the ‘waste not’ aspect of thedrive to acquire (dA) resources and the ‘ be fair’ code that goes with the drive to bond (dB). Photographs of the affected children accompanied each option. [This was an essential part of the experiment from our RD standpoint, since dB may well not really go into effect without a face-to-face view of the ‘other’]

The experimental results tend to confirm RD expectations by showing a balance in the subjects’ choices between the two polar opposites with a tilt toward equity. To cite the report, “In these trails, subjects overwhelmingly chose to preserve equity at the expense of efficiency,” Hsu said. “They were all quite inequity averse.”

Hsu further reported that the animation, in conjunction with the fMRI, allowed the researchers to view activity in the brain at critical moments in the decision-making process. After analyzing the data, they found that different brain regions — the insula, putamen and caudate — were activated differently, and at different points in the process. Initially they saw signals in the insula and the putamen. The putamen was responding only to the chosen efficiency, which was how many meals got wasted. The insula, however, responded to how equitably the burden of ‘wasted’ meals was distributed. At the end they saw the activation of the caudate. “The caudate appeared to integrate both equity and efficiency once a decision was made,” he commented.

Hsu explained that the involvement of the insula appears to support the notion that emotion plays a role in a person’s attitude towards inequity since the insula is implicated in the “the awareness of emotions” and the “mediation of fairness.” In terms of RD theory this sounds like the locus of skills that support the drive to bond (dB). While it is by no means clear, the involvement of the putamen regarding efficiency at least raises the question of whether the putamen (in the limbic area) is involved as a skill supporting the drive to acquire (dA). Finally, the activation of the caudate is frequently cited in neuroscience findings as the brain’s way of rewarding the execution of desired or ‘wanted’ behaviors, in this case perhaps the ‘wants’ of both dA and dB.

This fascinating experiment demonstrates how the ingenious experimental designs of cutting-edge neuroscientists and psychologists, using the latest in brain scanning equipment, can throw light on integrative theories, such as the Renewed Darwinian Theory of Behavior!

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Book Review: Humanism in Business

Posted: February 22, 2008

The book named above is still in press with Cambridge University Press. I received an advance draft copy from one of its five editors, Michael Pirson, who approached me after having read a draft of Being Human. [Michael not only read Being Human, he wrote a short review of it that I will post separately.] Michael’s book lives up to its sub-title, “Perspectives on the Development of Responsible Business in Society” by having 23 chapters with 28 authors. It is truly an unusual book whose goal is no less than the launching of a movement dedicated to focusing business on the improvement of the human condition, no longer on the maximization of shareholder wealth. The book’s contributors are members of an informal network called HuMaNet, and they are mostly a mix of business school academics, philosophers, along with NGO and conventional business managers. Of course, no one book will be able to establish a serious social movement but, in my opinion, this book gives their effort a serious start.As the author of Being Human, I am frankly astonished at the amount of overlap of this new book with mine, given such different origins. In contrast to Being Human, which is built on the contributions of all the sciences of human behavior starting with Darwin, the Humanism in Business book is built primarily upon the contributions of leading philosophers throughout human history. In spite of this difference their definition of human nature has significant overlap with that of RD theory. Beyond that, their implications for action directed toward the business community are remarkably parallel to those in Being Human.

I am in a quandary as to how to convey in a few words the evidence of this remarkable overlap. I can say that my first message back to Michael Pirson after finishing the book was, “There cannot be a shadow of a doubt that we are studying the same beast.” Beyond such a declaration I will offer below just a few highlights of this as yet unpublished book so that its relevance to the Being Human story becomes clear.

This volume starts off with an analysis of humanistic thought by citing the work of sages and philosophers across time and place. I will quote from Cherry’s chapter on ‘The Humanist Tradition’’:

“Strands of humanist thought can be seen throughout human history. Just as most human societies have held a wide range of beliefs in gods and supernatural forces, it seems too that most societies have included skeptics who have doubted these gods and sought to explain the world solely in natural terms. Many of these skeptics emphasized that happiness here on earth was more important than speculative notions about life after death. Similarly, human communities have always developed moral codes, and some have justified these codes by appeals to reason, humanity, or community, rather than to gods and the supernatural… In addition to humanist thought that stood outside of, or in opposition to, religion, we also see more or less humanist thinkers within many religions traditions… Humanism has often been portrayed as a Western invention, but in fact humanist ideas have arisen independently in cultures all over the world. The humanist heritage of ancient Greece shaped Western civilization and therefore in central to the development and spread of humanism in the modern world. However, India and China have older humanist histories. These rich humanist traditions reveal that common principles can arise in the most diverse environments, and suggest that the humanist goal of living an ethical and fulfilling life, guided by reason, is an aspiration with universal appeal.”

In a summation that appears tautological but is not, “Humans are humane, guided by reason they care about others as well as about self.” Such a definition is consistent with that of RD theory in its proposition that humans have a drive to bond and to comprehend as well as drives to acquire and defend, with the resultant conflicts worked through by the balancing and reasoning capacity of the prefrontal cortex.

The book proceeds to address how humanism is expressed through the historical development of basic human institutions, political, economic, art, religion and science. They cite the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution as a turning point in humanizing political institutions. Its watchword, ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ is the very essence of humanism. This parallels the treatment of this issue in Being Human.

At this point the book moves on to its central theme, the relevance of humanism to corporations, the business structures that grew in the 19th century to be the dominant economic institutions worldwide. The book analyzes the almost chance way corporations became defined, both by legal logic and by academic economics, in ways that locked corporate power to property ownership. This definition marginalized the contributions of all other stakeholders to corporate wealth creation. It created the presumption that the single goal of the corporation was the maximization of stockholder wealth. This presumption played out in the rapid growth of corporations to national and international scope in the 19th century. In Europe and in America this created great inequalities in the distribution of wealth along with many other abuses. Marx was moved by a humanist impulse to decry this situation, but, at enormous cost to the world, his explanations and his recommendations proved to be far off target. The book’s overall historic analysis of corporations is again parallel with that offered in Being Human, except the latter book explains the process as being more a result of the Spencerian misunderstanding of Darwin and the existence of free-riders who, without a conscience, led the way in using the corporate form to marginalize contributors other than investors.

The book moves on to examine the gradual development of humanist thought about the corporation in the 21st century. This was expressed in many ways; in the governmental reform and regulatory efforts of both of the Roosevelt administrations, in critiques of neo-classical economics, in philosophical writing about human rights and freedom from coerced choices, in reform movements within corporations themselves and in some of the research and teaching in business schools.

The final chapters of the book report on several recent developments that the authors see as concrete manifestations of a here-and-now humanist movement, alive and well in business practice. They report on the activities of three corporations that have in their own industries become successful exemplars of making the improvement of the human condition the central mission of their corporate life. One chapter focuses on the development within business schools of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS). This is a rapidly growing research network that focuses on the systematic study of how business can improve its performance in human terms. Another chapter focuses on the long-term partnerships that the World Wildlife Federation has forged with several large transnational firms to jointly pursue the goal of complete sustainability in regard to natural resources and climate stabilization. One chapter deals with the great promise of micro-financing as an approach to the grass roots development of emerging economies. Another chapter deals with an amazing development in Latin American barrios that is moving forward by local youths training other local youths in computer science using ‘applied empathy’ methods. This is but one example of ‘social entrepreneurship’. The book discusses a shift in the top governance mechanisms of corporations from total control by shareholders toward the ‘stakeholder’ model of control by means of a balanced representation of all the major stakeholders including not only investors, but also employees, customers, suppliers and the general public.

The last chapter of the book, more than any other, links the theme of humanism to the evolutionary biology approach of Being Human. It was written by Muhammad Yunus, the pioneer of micro-finance and entitled, “Social Business Entrepreneurs Are the Solution.” Some quotes from Yunus’ chapter will best make my point about the linkage:

“Many of the problems in the world remain unresolved because we continue to interpret capitalism too narrowly. In this narrow interpretation, we then create a one-dimensional human being to play the role of entrepreneur. We insulate him from other dimensions of life, such as the religious, the emotional, the political, and the social. He is dedicated to one mission in his business life: maximizing profit. Masses of one-dimensional human beings support him by backing him with their investment money to achieve the same mission. The free market game, we are told, works out beautifully with one-dimensional investors and entrepreneurs. Have we been so mesmerized by the success of the free market that we don’t dare to question it? Have we worked so hard at transforming ourselves absolutely into one-dimensional human beings – as conceptualized in economic theory – to facilitate the smooth functioning of the free market mechanism?

Economic theory postulates that you contribute to society and the world in the best possible manner when you concentrate on squeezing out the maximum for yourself. Once you get your maximum, everybody else will get his or hers too. As we follow this policy, we sometimes begin to doubt whether we are doing the right thing by imitating the entrepreneur created by theory. After all, things don’t look too good around us. We nevertheless quickly brush off such doubts by maintaining that bad things happen as a result of ‘market failures’ – well-functioning markets do not produce unpleasant results, do they? I do not think things are going wrong due to ‘market failure.’ The causes lie much deeper. Let us be brave and admit that they are the result of ‘conceptualization failure.’ More specifically, it is the failure of economic theory to capture the essence of human beings. Everyday human beings are not one-dimensional entities; they are excitingly multi-dimensional… They are [also] people referred to as ‘social entrepreneurs’ in formal parlance. Social entrepreneurship is in fact an integral part of human history. Most people take pleasure in helping others and all religions encourage this quality in human beings… Once a social entrepreneur operates at 100 percent or beyond the cost recovery point, he has actually graduated into another world, the business world with its limitless expansion possibilities. This is a moment worth celebrating… This is the critical moment of significant institutional transformation. The social entrepreneur has migrated from the world of philanthropy to the world of business. To distinguish him from the first two types of entrepreneur listed earlier, we will call him a ‘social business entrepreneur.’ Social business entrepreneurs make the market-place more interesting and competitive… Social business entrepreneurs can become very powerful players in national and international economies… We do not pay attention to them because we are blinded by prevailing theories. If social business entrepreneurs exist in the real world – as it seems they do—it makes no sense that they are not accommodated within current conceptual frameworks. Once we have recognized social business entrepreneurs, the supportive institutions, policies, regulations, norms and rules can be developed to help them enter the mainstream.

In conclusion the book stresses the theme of humanism in business in terms of seeking the goal of sustainability, not only in terms of the earth’s resources, but also in terms of relationships to all the contributors to the creation of wealth. They propose that the corporation needs to be conceived as a community of people who are committed not only to one another’s sustainable well being, but beyond that to the further enrichment of one another’s lives. Call it sustainability plus.

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The Loss of a Great Mind

Posted: January 18, 2008

Yesterday a colleague called my attention to an obituary in The New York Times of January 10, 2008, about Dr. Paul MacLean, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist. This obituary provided me with my first chance to learn of Dr. MacLean’s work. I can now see that his studies of how the brain works, conducted primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, actually laid out the basic foundation for own my work over the last 20-some years. Those familiar with Being Human will see this clearly in the following quotes from his obituary:

[Dr. MacLean developed the] intriguing theory of the “triune brain” to explain its evolution and to try to reconcile rational human behavior with its more primal and violent side… Dr. MacLean termed the brain’s center of emotions the limbic system, and described an area that includes structures called the hippocampus and amygdala… He proposed that the limbic system had evolved in early mammals to control fight-or-flight responses and react to both emotionally pleasurable and painful sensations… The idea of the limbic system leads to a recognition that its presence “represents the history of the evolution of mammals and their distinctive family way of life.”… In addition to identifying the limbic system, he pointed to a more primitive brain called the R-complex, related to reptiles, which controls basic functions like muscle movement and breathing. The third part, the neocortex, controls speech and reasoning and is the most recent evolutionary arrival… All three systems remain in place and in frequent competition; indeed, their conflicts help explain extremes in human behavior… Writing in The New York Times in 1971 and surveying the problem of intolerance and violence worldwide, Dr. MacLean found that “language barriers among nations present great obstacles. But the greatest language barrier lies between man and his animal brains; the neural machinery does not exist for intercommunication in verbal terms.

I am frankly amazed at the uncanny way that my more detailed description of how the brain works is so totally consistent with the basic framework described by Dr. MacLean. Obviously, I must have learned a great deal from his work without even being aware of his existence. Note, for example, that the last sentence quoted above is
parallel with my claim that it is through the emotions and intuitive senses, not through words, that the limbic and neocortex systems communicate with each other. I am greatly indebted to Dr. MacLean and very pleased that I can now acknowledge it.

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Book Review: Constant Battles

Posted: January 2, 2008

I was recently introduced by Richard Wrangham to a book I should have read in 2002 when it was published. It is Constant Battles by Steven LeBlanc, a physical anthropologist colleague of Wrangham’s at Harvard. LeBlanc’s book pulls together the uniformities of the behavior of ancient tribes as revealed at their living and battle sites around the world. The behavior pattern that emerged is well captured by the book’s title. These battles had high mortality rates: they were not the sham battles that some have reported. Even contemporary tribes such as the Hopi, with their well-deserved reputation of peacefulness, have a history of constant battles in the not-too-distant past. My lingering belief in the “myth of the noble savage” has been wiped out by the facts. However, I hasten to add, LeBlanc’s facts also reinforce the point made in Being Human, that tribal people were well bonded in mutual-caring ties within their tribes. The constant fighting was inter-tribal. I will be doing some rewriting of Chapter 5 of Being Human, where this issue is discussed, to take account of LeBlanc’s work.

But LeBlanc’s second point is the bigger one. He assembles evidence that inter-tribal fighting was tightly associated with an imbalance between the carrying capacity of the local eco-system and the size of the local population. In simple terms, when a tribes’ hunger exceeded its local food supply, the desperate tribe fought for the food of its neighbors. Hunter-gatherer tribes around the globe never seemed able to achieve a sustainable balance between their population levels and their local eco-system. Warfare was the consequence. This dramatic finding clearly has significant implications for the 21st century. There can be no doubt that the current worldwide balance between population levels and essential resources is moving toward the negative zone, and the problem of warfare has not yet been solved by any means. Of course, it can be argued that contemporary wars are often caused by ideological or cultural conflicts, and they might well be led by egomaniacal free-riders. But even if LeBlanc’s causes are only partial ones in today’s world, it is very difficult to argue that the search for ecological balance is not essential and urgent for the future of our species.

LeBlanc does offer us some good news. This is the finding that, if the tribes studied were ever able to attain an ecosystem /population balance as the Hopi now have, they became peaceable. There was no evidence of a universal aggression drive. This argues that it is possible for humans, with RD theory’s four drives at work in harness with a powerful cognitive capacity, to achieve a peaceful and comfortable life for all. There are sound reasons to expect that, if humans can now work their way into a sustainable relationship with the earth’s resources and constrain free-riders, a WWIII holocaust can be avoided.

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Book Review: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

Posted: January 2, 2008

I just finished reading a new book entitled: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. It was written by two evolutionary psychologists, Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, and its subtitle tells us that it is an integrated theory of human behavior. “From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire–Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do.” Clearly the authors are offering an alternative general theory to the Renewed Darwinian (RD) Theory of Human Behavior and this calls for our attention and a book review.

This book provides us a number of useful additions to our knowledge of human behavior in terms of specific adaptations that help human pursue their goals. In spite of this fact, the book serves to highlight that the field of evolutionary psychology suffers from a single flaw that seriously undermines the reliability of many of its findings. The field as a whole seems stuck, as is neo-classical economics, on Spencer’s version of the ultimate drives of human behavior, and ignores Darwin’s version. They clearly see the human drives to acquire and defend, but are blind to the drives to bond and comprehend. In terms of RD theory that makes them, in effect, half right, but, unfortunately, half wrong.

The authors designed their book as “an introduction to evolutionary psychology for a general nonacademic audience” (preface xiv). In my opinion they have done this superbly. Chapter 1 is entitled, ”What is Evolutionary Psychology.” It answers this question not only clearly and concisely, but, more importantly from our point of view, their answers are almost totally congruent with RD theory. They define evolutionary psychology as the application of evolutionary biology to human behavior. They contrast their theory with the “Standard Social Science Model.” As a person whose training has been in this model, their characterization of this model is painful and harsh, but I cannot deny its accuracy.

To quote:

a set of related principles characterize its main tenets.
1. Human [behavior] is exempt form biology…
2. Evolution stops at the neck,…
3. Human nature is a tabula rasa (a blank slate)…
4. Human behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. (Pg. 12-13)

They contrast these statements with the four principles of evolutionary psychology:

1. Humans are animals [subject to the same laws of evolution as other animals]…
2. There is nothing special about the human brain… [The brain is just another body part, just like the hand or the pancreas]…
3. Human nature is innate…
4. Human behavior is the product of both innate human nature and the environment.

RD theory not only is congruent with these principles, it builds upon them. I found only two points to question in this chapter, but they are important ones. They argue that, “human evolution pretty much stopped about ten thousand years ago”. RD theory argues that human evolution has not stopped and can never stop as long as the species survives. It is moving at its regular pace and perhaps even somewhat faster. This is true, even though the cutting-edge of change in modern times has moved on to changes originated by culture and science. More importantly, RD theory takes exception to their statement that “all adaptations are domain-specific, and operate and solve problems only within narrow aspects of life.” This statement clarifies that the only kind of adaptations evolutionary psychologists are looking for are local and narrow. What about more basic adaptations to the problem of survival on our particular planet? How do they classify evolutionary mechanisms in the brain that enable any earthly creature, human or otherwise, to seek out life sustaining resources and avoid life-threatening ones, the drives to acquire and defend?

At some very early point in time such basic adaptations must have evolved. And, according to RD theory, equally basic adaptations (the drive to bond and to comprehend) were made relatively recently in connection with the evolution of H. sapiens. For humans all other narrow and domain-specific adaptations would be means to the fulfillment of our basic four adaptations, our ultimate motives. RD theory supports these points with a significant amount of evidence. The implicit reliance of evolutionary psychology scholars on just the underlying drives to acquire and defend (the Spencerian error) inevitably pushes them into making deductive statements that are hard to defend with solid evidence. I will cite a few examples:

From page 120:

“Another surprising finding in this area is that criminals are not so different from other men. All men (criminal or not) are more of less the same. The ultimate reason why men do what they do whether they be criminals, musicians, painters, writers, or scientists—is to impress women so that they will sleep with them. Men do everything they do in order to get laid.”

From page 168-9:

“Our enemies in the current “War on Terror” are very different. They aim to endanger as many lives as possible, including their own, and they do not seem to have clearly stated political goals… Many of these puzzles begin to make more sense when you look at the situation from the evolutionary psychological perspective. Maybe these devastating suicide bombings are not “terrorist” acts, as the term is usually used. Maybe they have nothing to do with Israel or the American and British troops. Maybe they’re all about sex, as everything else in life is.”

From page 143:

“[T]he underling motive of all human behavior is reproductive; reproductive success is the purpose of all biological existence, including humans.”

And a final quote from page 133 that puts just about everything under the sex drive:

“In reality, however, women do often say no to men. This is why men throughout history have had to conquer foreign lands, win battles and wars, compose symphonies, author books, write sonnets, paint portraits and cathedral ceilings, make scientific discoveries, play in rock bands, and write new computer software in order to impress women so that they will agree to have sex with them.”

It is clear that these writers give significant attention to sex, but what do they neglect? I have looked throughout the book without finding any discussions of such human emotions as empathy, compassion, love, guilt, curiosity, wonder or awe that the RD theory addresses and explains at length. These authors, rather strangely, do little even with the emotions of fear, terror or hatred, or even of greed or lust. They have little or no discussion of the findings from neuroscience or genetics or from paleontology or other specialists of deep human history. They do not draw on the work of institutional scholars or from systematic studies of historic human times. The field of evolutionary psychology deserves to be thanked for steering scholars of human behavior away from the blind spots of the standard social science model, but they seem to have stuck themselves with equally handicapping assumptions. In this regard they are ignoring the lead of their own eminent scholar, Steven Pinker, who, as cited in Being Human on page 40, wrote in How the Mind Works, “Intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles… The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals… Emotion triggers the cascade of subgoals and sub-subgoals that we call thinking and action.”

I will illustrate this point by a final example regarding monogamy and polygamy. Miller and Kanazawa, along with many other evolutionary psychologists, claim that humans are naturally polygamous. In contrast RD theory holds that only the elite class in human societies have practiced polygamy as a norm, while all other contemporary humans practice monogamy as the norm, even among present and past hunter-gatherer societies. This factual question is obviously in doubt and probably needs more research to resolve. But Miller and Kanazawa inadvertently provide us with one clue as to how their assumptions seemingly distort their reasoning in this regard.

Quoting from page 86:

“It turns out that the clear evidence of our ancestors’ polygamy is embodied in each of us. Both among primate and nonprimate species, the species-typical degree of polygamy (how polygamous members of a given species are on average) highly correlates with the degree of sexual dimorphism in size (the extent to which males of a species are larger than females). The more polygamous the species, the greater the size disparity between the sexes. For example, among the completely monogamous gibbons, there is no sexual dimorphism in size; both by height and by weight males are about the same size as females. In contrast, among the extremely polygamous gorillas, males are 1.3 times as large by height and twice as large by weight as females. On this scale, humans are somewhere in the middle, but closer to the gibbons’ end than that of the gorillas. Typically, human males are 1.1 times as large by height and 1.2 times as large by weight as human females. This suggests that, throughout evolutionary history, humans have been mildly polygamous, not as polygamous as gorillas but not completely monogamous like gibbons either. This is how we know that humans are naturally polygamous.”

I have trouble following their reasoning in this quotation. Using their numbers, monogamous gibbons would be 1.0 on the monogamy scale (1.0 ht.+1.0 wt./2=1.0). The polygamous gorillas would be 1.65 on this same scale (1.3 ht.+2.0 wt./2=1.65). Finally humans would be 1.15 on this same scale (1.1 ht.+1.2 wt./2=1.15). In fact, I cite this evidence about dimorphism in Being Human (Pg. 123) and conclude that humans are much closer to gibbons than to gorillas and can fairly be classified as naturally monogamous. While some evolutionary psychologists might well acknowledge that Miller and Kanazawa had simply make a human error and had also made some of their statements too extreme, I believe they would have a harder time denying that their model of man does not posit any independent drives to bond and to comprehend as being as basic to our natures as the drives to acquire and defend. This same issue arose regarding the integrative book of evolutionary psychologist David Geary, as cited in Chapter 12, page 427, of Being Human. This difference between the two theories does lend itself to conclusive testing.

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“What Makes Us Good/Evil?”

Posted: December 24, 2007

On December 3rd, Time Magazine published an excellent cover story by Jeffery Kluger about morality. The cover featured pictures of Ghandi and Hitler, along with a dramatic picture of the human brain. The accompanying text headlined:“What Makes Us Good/Evil? Humans are the planets’ most noble creatures – and its most savage. Science is discovering why.”

What a provocative challenge to put before the RD Theory of Human Behavior!

The article cited a number of scientists who have contributed to the answers so far to the age-old good/evil question. And they are familiar names to the readers of Being Human, notably Marc Hauser, E. O. Wilson, Franz de Waal and Joshua Greene. Their work has gone a long way toward tying Ghandi into the morality story, but Kluger did not know about Being Human, the book that could have shown him one way to tie Hitler into a more complete story.

One of the major parts of Kluger’s account, totally new to me, told of the highly relevant work of the psychologist, Michael Schulman, co-author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. To quote the Time article:

Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn that it’s not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it’s not. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. But if the same teacher says it’s also O.K. to push another student off a chair, the child hesitates. He’ll respond, ‘No, the teacher shouldn’t say that’… In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it. That’s the difference between a matter of morality and one of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately.

Schulman’s experimental findings offer strong support for the innate nature of certain basic moral rules that are proposed in Being Human as having evolved to help fulfill the elemental human drive to bond with others in long-term caring relationships. I intend to learn more about Schulman’s work and cite it in the final version of Being Human.

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Book Review: The Stuff of Thought

Posted: December 7, 2007

I recently finished reading Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature. Having read this book, I do not think there is much more to be said about the nature of language as a fascinating, powerful, complex and flexible tool for reaching human goals. It offers a synthesis of the work of many scholars; linguists, philosophers and psychologists. In my opinion it supercedes all prior theories on this subject. Beautifully written as well as funny, it even connects solidly with RD Theory.

It makes an essential distinction between thoughts and words/sentences. For Pinker, thoughts are elemental, innate concepts that predate language. They are basic senses of space, time, objects (animate and inanimate), action (intended and unintended), and hence causation. As Pinker sums it up on page 232:

“Kant was surely right that our minds “cleave the air” with concepts of substance, space, time and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: noun, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law…. Yet when examined through the window of language, these concepts turn out to be quite unlike the best guesses about the nature of space, time and causality in Kant’s day. They are digital where the world is analogue, austere and schematic where the world is rich and textured, vague even when we crave precision and parochial to human goals and interests even when we ought to seek the view from nowhere.”

The book provides depth in understanding the pivotal role of language in human evolution. It reveals the quirks and limitations of language as a way to comprehend the world, while it also explains the basis for the amazing strength of our languages in helping us steer our lives successfully. Language is always in this sense subjective even as it strives for scientific objectivity. He highlights the capacity of language for evolving further in capturing the essence of new phenomenon, of new complexities, mostly by using the tools of metaphor and new combinations.

Its subtitle is revealing about its solid connection to RD Theory. I found no points on which it was other than consistent with the RD Theory of Human Behavior. This is especially apparent in its treatment of language as a tool in handling social relationships, even in reconciling the tension between our elemental drive to acquire life-sustaining resources and our drive to sustain our bonds with others. In this regard he examines the nature of “polite” speech on pages 380-383.

“The politeness story gets more interesting… when we turn to the gestures of verbal deference… Commands and requests are among the most face-threatening speech acts, because they challenge the hearer’s autonomy… The speaker is ordering the hearer around.., something you don’t do to a stranger or a superior and might even think twice about dong with an intimate. So requests are often accompanied by various forms:

• Questioning rather than commanding: Will you lend me your car?
• Expressing pessimism: I don’t suppose you might close the window.
• Hedging the request: Close the door, if you can.
• Minimizing the imposition: I just want to borrow a little bit of paper.
• Hesitating: Can I, uh, borrow your bicycle?
• Acknowledging the impingement: I’m sure you’re busy, but…
• Apologizing: I’m sorry to bother you, but…
• Impersonalizing: Smoking is not permitted.
• Acknowledging a debt: I’d be eternally grateful if you would…”

What complex language skills! In RD terms Pinker is revealing that the energy behind our language skills comes from all four drives and the tension between them.

Pinker’s last chapter, “Escaping the Cave”, closes on an optimistic note. He is, of course, referring to Plato’s famous allegory of the prisoners in the cave.

“Captives are shackled in a grotto, their heads and bodies chained so that they can look only at the rear wall. The cave is a kind of movie theater out of The Flintstones, with a fire behind a balcony on which projectionists hold up cutouts and puppets, which cast moving shadows onto the wall. This movie is all that the prisoners know of the world… In one interpretation of the allegory, the cave is our skull, and our acquaintance with the world consists only of the shadowy representations our minds make available to us….

Though language exposes the walls of our cave, it also shows us how we can venture out of it, at least partway…When you combine two aptitudes—metaphor and compositionality–the language of thought can be pressed into service to conceive and express a ceaseless geyser of ideas. People can discover new metaphors in their effort to understand something and can combine them to form still newer and more complex metaphors and analogies… None of this, of course, comes easily to us. Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically liberal democracy… The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated formulations The view from language shows us the cave we inhabit and also the best way out of it.”

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Download My New Manuscript

Posted: November 16, 2007

I am pleased to be able to offer the manuscript of my new book, “Being Human: A Darwinian Perspective on Human Behavior” for download on my website. This book represents the cumulation of nearly 60 years of research that I have done on the topic of human behavior. As the subtitle suggests, I believe Darwin’s insights into human behavior are a key to constructing a synthetic model that combines traditional theory with current research findings. Please view the summary page for a concise walkthrough of the theory. I would encourage you to leave comments about the theory and the manuscript in the comments below!

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Human Evolution: Hidden Charms

Posted: October 23, 2007

A colleague of mine has called my attention to an item in The Economist of October 13, 2007 with the provocative title, “Lap Dancers Earn More When They Are Fertile.” He wonders whether this reported finding would push me to revamp significantly the explanation in Chapter 4 of Being Human of how the four ultimate drives of humans evolved. My short answer is, not surprisingly, no.

The Economist indicates, of course, that this research has been done by a serious scholar, Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, who has found that the ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ of Albuquerque are as revealing of human biology as the Serengeti is of the biology of lions. In particular Miller wondered whether this setting gave him a chance to test the orthodox theory of human mating that oestrus—the outward signs of ovulation—had been hidden so that men cannot tell when women are fertile. To quote the article:

This theory is based on the idea that in evolutionary terms it benefits women to disguise when they are fertile so that their menfolk will stick around all the time. Otherwise, the theory goes, a man might go hunting for alternative mating opportunities at moments when he knew that his partner was infertile and thus that her infidelity could not result in children.
However, this should result in an evolutionary arms race between the sexes, as men evolve ever-heightened sensitivity to signs of female fertility. Dr Miller thought lap-dancing clubs a good place to study this arms race, because male detection of female fertility cues would probably translate into an easily quantifiable signal, namely dollars earned. He therefore recruited some of the girls into his experiment, with a view to comparing the earnings of those on the Pill (whose fertility was thus suppressed) with those not on the Pill.
The results support the idea that if evolution has favoured concealed ovulation in women, it has also favoured ovulation-detection in men. The average earnings per shift of women who were ovulating was $335. During menstruation (when they were infertile) that dropped to $185—about what women on the Pill made throughout the month. The lessons are clear. A woman is sexier when she is most fertile. And if she wishes to earn a good living as a dancer, she should stay off the Pill.

The Renewed Darwinian Theory presented in Being Human argues that Miller is examining the difference in certain particular bodily features (for females) and sensory skills (for males) that evolved in both sexes as a means to the end of fulfilling the underlying unconscious drives that foster the successful representation of each individuals genes in subsequent generations. Moreover, the theory argues that the females of our species led the way by favoring males for mates who would bond with them in long-term relationships in order to help ensure that their offspring would be cared for during their many years of dependency. This is explained in detail in Chapter 4. So Miller’s finding provides additional support for this part of the RD Theory. We would add that this process, according to the theory, must have happened more than two million years ago and that the women won this particular ‘arm’s race’.

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Consciousness in the Raw

Posted: October 23, 2007

In the September 15, 2007 issue of Science News is an article on consciousness by Bruce Bower, Consciousness in the Raw, sub-titled ‘The brain stem may orchestrate the basics of awareness.’ The article reinforces the distinction that the Renewed Darwinian Theory makes between higher level consciousness centered on the prefrontal cortex and lower level or ’primary’ consciousness centered in the upper brain stem, an area known as the basic ganglia.

The report focuses on the work of the Swedish neuroscientist Bjorn Merker. He has studied 1 to 5 year old children who had suffered strokes as fetuses that had destroyed most of their cortex. Merker defines primary consciousness, as “an ability to integrate sensations from the environment with one’s immediate goals and feelings in order to guide behavior. And it springs from the brain stem.”

In more detail, Merker points out that animal research has indicated that three adjacent parts of the brain stem comprise a ‘neural reality simulator’ that gives rise to a fundamental form of consciousness. Along the top of the brain stem are layers of cells that interpret the spatial layout of an animal’s surroundings relative to its body. Just below, a patch of gray tissue influences emotion-related behaviors, such as aggression, sex, defensive maneuvers, and pain reactions. Farther down the brain stem lie interconnected regions that regulate the direction of eye gaze and organize decisions about what to do next. These are the behaviors that are discussed in RD Theory terms as the basic drives to acquire (dA) and to defend (dD) that were established in the earliest animals with a nervous system: established long before the drive to comprehend (dC), and the drive to bond (dB).

Merker comments in conclusion that these ancient brain stem sources of awareness have evolved to take on a distinctly human form. Kids with hydranencephaly demonstrate that the brain stem is not simply a reptilian relic stashed in the brain’s basement.

“The human brain stem is specifically human. These children smile and laugh in the specifically human manner, which is different from that of our closest relatives among the apes.”

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