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The
Female Revolution and the Expendable Male read more ===============================================================================
Benjamin Washburn feels technology shaped the brain, not the other way around. *our pre?human ancestors used tools. it was after the invention of these devices that our brains began to grow, tripling in size. *if technological revolutions can reshape the brain, it is not surprising that they can reshape thought. (Beyond the Information Given, c.p. 326?7) 63b "there's a synergy between technology and the mind. the mind feeds CR technology" and technology reshapes the mind. *in 1838, the Germans installed their first railroad line. Heinrich Heine said the new device had changed "the color and form of life", altering the imagination, shaking concepts of space and time. (A History of Prussia, p. 222) 72a "biology balances the flywheels [guidance system] that control the motion of the social slug...and technology can alter biology" "baby bottle...lactation" "women were a separate subspecies" "Victorian ...New Guinean males..." women a different species "lactating alters" "dishwasher, frozen food... freed middle class women" "wrists and your ankles were chained" 2b "wife tried walking...to the park, without a bra" had to slow down [see "baby bottle...lactation" 2b] *New Guineans regard the casuary as their sister, but women as a different species *"ancient Greece, a similar attitude" Plato wrote of females as another species men and women felt so far apart because, having different tasks, they shared no experience bible??men and women are product of separate creations 19th century biologists' view of women latin languages divide universe into male and female since 1964, we regard difference between male and female as insignificant??an innovation what could be responsible for it? the bra??the pain of a hunter's bouncing genitals is nothing compared to the pain of bouncing breasts ??>division of labor the pill helped free women from staying home to nurse junior 6a 19th century scientists were sure women were closer to apes than men, and measured female skulls to prove it. The change in that view was triggered by the pill, bottle feeding. babies could stay home and be bottle fed, so women could go to the factories in the IInd WW. 15b contraceptive put control of birth in hands of men. the pill put control of fertility in hands of women. hence the pill was a first step in the establishment of women's lib. 31a medical revolution led to women's lib. *women had to have ten children to insure that one or two would make it past 40. *with advent of modern medicine the drastically high mortality rates have declined to nothing. *a woman who makes it through one 9?month pregnancy is almost guaranteed a child who'll make it to 40 and beyond. *1 or 2 babies are enough to insure that a woman's genes will make it over the "generational hump" instead of being tied down having and caring for a small army of children, a woman can leave her tiny brood with the babysitter or day care center and march off to work 26b Puritan girls "began giving birth as teenagers" *every birth could kill them. every baby was likely to die in its first years of life. *so women often had six to eight babies, saw four of them die, and died themselves by 28. (Intimate Matters, p. 24) *they had very little control over their own lives, so it's not surprising that they embraced a passive resignation to Providence. *the vigorous attitude of women in our century may well spring from the fact that they now control their own fertility, can fend off death, and don't have to fear the death of their children. 82b as the chances a child would live went up, the number of children women had went down. it dropped "50%" from 1800 to 1900. (Intimate Matters, p. 170) women with husbands in the professions were actually having just one or two children. all this was happening despite the hysterical crusades to suppress information on birth control. (p. 174) the decline in the birth rate actually impelled Anglo?Saxon chauvinists to warn that the white race was committing suicide. (c.p. 172) 82b "physiological differences in today's women" "lactating" "bottle feeding" "two things worked in common..." to free women from motherhood *"medical science ...decreased infant mortality" dad's mother had six kids??> having 1 or 2 kids *"pill... possible to limit the size of the family without limiting sexual activity" "involved in lactation and pregnancy for a very, very tiney percentage of her adult life" "would alter...their role in society... kind of role model they present to their children... relationships with husbands...power position in society." [momism??>androgyny] women "have become more aggressive about getting out of the home and competing." at certain points, women think babies are "cute" "Women in primitive societies tend almost invariably to be rather passive" "male Sioux will go out and count coup." 3a [one effect of the newly?transformed role of women was seen in pop culture.] "once again a new audience that's been created by changing social conditions... female stars "Mothers began to assert their right to go out into the market place and work" 2b why the sudden surge of female role models in 1982?1986? Maggie Thatcher, Geraldine Ferraro, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Madonna, Cindy Lauper? the prevalence of split families where the mother is the only visible parent? 14b [the change also showed up in fashion] in the 19th century, "when women were expected to be passive," *the bustles hoops and corsets that exaggerated their buttocks and narrowed their wastes made them more helpless, tied their time up in dressing, cut off their circulation, and made it difficult to move. *in the 60s, 70s and 80s, womens fashions did the opposite. *the area of exageration, strangely, was the shoulders, making women look more like tough little men??football players. *puffed up shoulders are used by gorillas to make a male seem regal and imposing. *pantyhose and pantsuits increased mobility and cut down on the time it takes to dress. *the feminine fashions of the 1900s stressed procreative powers??which is what the hips are all about. *female fashions of the 70s and 80s framed women as competitors. 76a Sociologist Annette "Lawson" claims that since 1970, the rate of adultery among women has exceeded that among men??a reversal of the old double?standard pattern. (Psych Today, 11/88, p. 65) 51a
Carl Rogers and another psychologist on Larry King show were asked by a caller what it was in "American society that causes males to be almost exclusively the sexual abusers..." One psychologist answered that it must be the role of American media. neither pointed out that there's something inherently biologically different about males. Neither knew about sociobiology. chapter on war "should be a chapter on the expendable male and the indispensable female". One man could inseminate every woman on the planet. One male could do for the entire species. females, who can only give birth to a limited number of children, are precious commodities. "so nature takes advantage of the expendability of men, by pitting them against each other" using the competition to weed out those ill?adapted to the conditions of the moment. Impregnating a female, for a male, is an inexpensive effort. It takes minutes. For a woman, impregnation is very expensive. It ties her up for years. True for women, bears and even flowers. Female flowers guard themselves against random insemination by pollen. Sioux Indians tie the legs of their adolescent girls together at night. Sioux males cosider it a mark of valor to sneak into a tent and seduce the girl despite the rope. "Modesty and a tendency to protect one's reputation are not just Western Victorian virtues. They're fairly universal in humans and in nonhumans." So is sexual aggression in males. A male's sexual aggression is not rewarded by novels or movies filled with male propoganda, but by biology: by 20 copies of himself in the next generation. A male who's more passive may have only one or less. Within a few generations, the offspring of the sexually submissive males will be totally swamped. There are a limited number of women to go around. "the way that in Yanomamma (?) society, males succeed in getting the extra female wombs to carry all that extra semen that's going to waste, is very simple. Periodically, they go off and attempt to raid a rival village. They kill the men," they smash the babies' brains against the nearest rock, thus making the women ready for insemination once again, and they take all the women back home. **The early ancestors of the Romans, did exactly the same thing. Men had to compete to the death for the privilege of procreation. Men were expendable. Many of Britain's aristocrats are offspring of Anglo?Saxon maidens raped by the Vikings or their descendants, the Normans. animals within a few generations can be bred for aggressiveness. Within a few generations??in less than a year?? experimenters starting with one strain had bred a tribe of fierce rats and another of docile rats. *Humans have had between five million and 50 thousand years of selective breeding in which males have been bred for sexual aggressiveness. So it's no surprise that the phenomenon the listener's question dwelled on has occurred. 13a Dawkins points out that in primitive microorganisms, there is sex "without sexes." There's no male or female. Two seemingly identical creatures carrying different batches of genes hook up and couple their genetic material to start a new line of offspring. Dawkins speculates that some of these creatures may have "seen" the advantage of starting their offspring in life with a trust fund of sorts??an envelope of nutritional substances that would give them an edge over the offspring of less generous parents who started out as mere impoverished threads of genetic instructions, and had to make a living on their own. *once there were creatures with a pre?packaged pantry of food with which to snack their way to adulthood, other microbeasts came up with a strategy to take advantage of the innovation. *they evolved a small and lightweight package for their offspring equipped with an outboard propulsion device??a tail. the purpose of the high?speed add?on: to allow the infants to search for the well?provided genetic packets, to pounce, and to deposit their genetic stuff in the amply?stocked larder, so their offspring can take advantage of the pre?packed meals during their first weeks of life. *the descendants of the primitive creatures with the mini?refrigerators were females. the descendents of the vehicular specialists were males. *to this day the basic difference between male and female zygotes is that the female comes packaged in a lunchpail of material and the mail has a mobile motorcycle in which it whips around looking for lunch. 38a the Western vision of history is built on male competition, men competing bloodily to conquer new territory, protect their families, and win the right to inseminate women. 17a [and, oh, what appalling slaughters they've been] nearly 4 million Russians died in the first 10 months of WWI. 22a [our parties and celebratory holidays may still bear the instinctual remains of these violent encounters. primitive human tribes evolved a more peaceful way of accomplishing the gorilla's swap of women.] primitive tribes gather for celebrations, indulging in competitive games, giving the sexually maturing young men and women a chance to eye each other and choose mates who aren't immediate relatives. the origin of these festivals may be found among the gorillas. *one group of mountain gorillas had only elderly females. its males desperately needed young ladies if they were to reproduce. *"another group had four females of reproductive age." *the female?starved group went off to provoke an encounter. *the males of the two groups competed to show who was the strongest and most determined??strutting in parallel with hair erect, swinging through the trees, making frightening noises. *the purpose??to lure the young ladies from one group to the other. *ethologists point to a process called ritualization. hostile actions are turned into peaceful gestures that often help forge bonds. *human holidays with singing, dancing and sports seem to be ritualized versions of the gorilla encounters *they allow the swapping of women...without the bloodshed. *of course, some groups keep using the old gorilla method??the violent method. among them are the arabs and the yanomama. 32a even at Kayo Santiago, where the monkeys lived under protected circumstances, fed on Purina monkey chow, the mortality rate for males was extremely high. (Human Sociobiology, c. p. 33) 39b an army ant queen can live for over four years, but a male survives only two or three weeks. (Insect Societies, p. 65) 41a within a few days of maturation, the males fly off to find another colony's females they can woo and wed, though unfortunately they are doomed to die on the honeymoon. 41a bees and ants dispose of their males once the job of sperm transportation is over. they keep the colony as a primarily female province. *termites allow their males to function as active citizens. and they sometimes recruit them as soldiers, saving the females from this dangerous pursuit. *in this use of males for military purposes, even the termites reveal the nature of the male as the more expendable sex. (Insect Societies, p. 195) but the practice isn't universal. in some termite species, all the soldiers are female. (Insect Societies, p. 196) 41b "Competition between males is a cheap way of running the competitive games that make the social group flexible. The expendable males can be tossed against each other without risking the creatures that really count, the indispensable females." 27b "How many women have killed each other in duels over the love of a beautiful man?" 20b why do we go to war? *it seems built into our systems. we do it every generation, no matter how many preachers get up on soap boxes and eloquently show us its horrors. is it population control? 20 million were killed in the IInd WW, but that's a very tiny percentage of the billion souls alive at the time. too little for population control. *humans are composed of two different subspecies: male and female. new Guineans regard them as two different kinds of animal. female=valuable. in times of crisis, more females are born than males. one male and 20 females can produce 20 babies in nine months. one female and 20 males can produce only one. males in most species compete for the privilege of procreation. many males get left out. in monkeys [and rats] the dominant male can do 80% of the copulation in the group [see Chimpanzee Politics]. a successful elk can have 20 wives while an unsuccessful male will walk around all season with no mate... and no chance at little elkettes carrying his genetic heritage. the purpose=to provide the fittest next generation. *the cockiest, the brightest, the strongest, the best at handling the social fabric manage to procreate. war is to eliminate males. to determine which will procreate. the ones who don't come home have fewer children. among Yanoma, those who win come home with more wives...and have more kids. It's nature undergoing a quality control routine. but nature never envisioned the atom bomb. *and I object to this method of winnowing out rejects. in other species, the losers simply skulk around the outskirts of herd looking dejected. why in humans is the organism so oriented toward death? in some species, the male is disposed of immediately after procreation. drones drop dead. some spiders are eaten by their wives. so it's not just us. 19b "Did the Buddhist culture shelve its young men in monasteries as an alternative to flinging them against each other in warfare? Was religion a convenient way to establish a massive, peaceful society by eliminating excess males from the competition" 30a Marvin Harris says war is a population control device. But it's not the killing that holds down the population. It's the resultant myth that only male children count.??>killing off female infants, decreasing the number of potential mothers. Female prestige is tied to having male children, so no woman can afford to tie herself down for three years with a female child. *war oriented primitive tribes bank on the gamble that the men will go out to a neighboring tribe steal all their women and all their land or hunting territory, hence up the procreative potential. 14b invention of machine in 80s to move slabs of meat let women enter packing plants as workers. one of many inventions that turned women from a species of cattle owned by men into human beings. 21a a "elephants... females really do all the work..in a very closely knit group" it's close to Momism ??> ANDROGYNY in rock the suburban father absent as role model. Linda's "father... the dominant force in the community where she lived." and available as role model [expendability of the male] 3a [men are caught in a biological trap] We share our tendency toward "pair?bonding" with ducks and geese, who mourne outrageously over the loss of a mate. we share more promiscuous tendencies with "animal societies that are outrageously polygamous, like baboon troupes", elk, elephant seals. We seem to be built for both. some societies are monogamous, some polygamous, but even in the most monogamous some vestige of polygamy remains. *one of six buildings in Victorian London was a house of prostitution. "men just couldn't stand staying home and depositing all of their semen in just one woman." 13b "Among animals, the females are the drab ones and the males are the gaudy ones." among some humans, men are the gaudy ones. "in our society, ...men wear the drab clothing" why? "if a man uses a woman to show off his wealth, the man tends to be the source of more of the wealth in the society. Where as in certain societies... women do almost all the productive work" "males...'re expendable" *"It's as if some God??probably a female?? has said, "Men, what good are they." "among the Arabs... women did all the work" "in black culture, the men dress up... tend to be superfluous" "one man is all that's necessary to seed a good many women." "all the female elephants really use the males for is insemination" 2b males, with their viciousness and violence, sometimes seem like a sex we could live without. among mountain gorillas they serve one indispensable function??they're "the linchpin of social organization", the embodiment of the primitive precursor of the meme *gorillas Fossey studied live in tight?knit groups of four to ten that stay together for ten or twenty years *the element that gives them cohesion is their dominant male *when an old male died, the communities Fossey thought would last forever disintegrated. *females joined other bands. without the protection and adjudication of a silverback, they couldn't continue together. [but if you're a man, don't take too much comfort from this fact. In a vast variety of species, the social order is held together entirely by the female. Elephants provide a good example. The females travel together in a close?knit group, operating under the leadership of a massive Amazonian who settles disputes and protects the troop with her fiersome charges. the unfortunate male, on the other hand, is excluded during most of the year from polite society. He is forced to wander the forests, a gloomy, solitary brute, until that brief period when he is needed for sexual purposes. Then, for a short time, he and his messy tendency to battle his brethren are tolerated by the ladies...but barely.] 32a males like peacocks who develop "a lot of gaudy plumage to show off CR and attract young ladies, could only afford the luxury of CR advertising themselves as fresh meat...[if] the females really don't CR need them to help raise the young." *polygamous males can only flourish where males are expendable. *where the only thing needed from males is their sperm, females might as well fling males against each other and their environment in merciless competition *the more merciless, the more certain the females can be about the value of that one tiny male contribution??his genes. Behavioral Patterns in Ecology confirms that gaudiness only crops up where the males aren't needed to feed and tend the young. in tough environments, males are drab 28a to check re whether gaudy garb reflects expendability of male, see if peacocks are polygamous. 20b "In a polygamous society, women will compete to be the favorite female... to have the favorite child... to get his father's resources" "It also behooves a woman to compete for the most fit man" 3a [but females do more than provoke violence among males. they engage in subtle forms of it themselves.] *female primates can be equally savage. *mountain gorilla females form rival cliques and compete??like rival groups of harem wives or Livia in I Claudius??"to place their children in a" position of privilege, where they'll get the most food, protection, and probability of inheriting their father's power. *females socially on the outs are the most likely to find that their children suffer an untimely death. *one female dragged into the group was shunned as a newcomer, never able to fight her way into the center. *when the group encountered an enemy band, the one child killed was hers. 32a "gorilla band is set up" like Arab family. "one dominant male monopolizes" sex. younger males can stick around only until adulthood. dominant male acquires as many females as he can. the first mate he brings in lords it over the newer wives. the wives the dominant male brings in years later are nervous, picked on, and cower on the fringes of the group. infants of dominant female become the aristocrats. 32a [F. Scott Fitzgerald" CONTENT1.SOC] 2 aspects to sex??the competitive and the reproductive. *moth catches the scent of a virgin female from six miles away. *catching scent is easy. accomplishing the sexual act is tough. *arrives only to find an army of suitors. the competition begins. *the competition insures that only the best males fling their genes into the next generation. a way the complex dynamical system multiplies the best new information. *Ed Meese reads a report to the nation which says sexual material encourages violence. *he's in the grip of the k circuit, which tells society to decrease the reproductive aspect of sex and increase the competitive. makes the completion of the sexual act as difficult as it is for the moths. WalMart takes rock mags off shelves, PMRC rails, young women fearful of AIDs abstain from sex. the struggle for the few remaining sexual opportunities becomes more intense. mechanism encourages genetic learning. 25a a ["F. Scott Fitzgerald"] "how many times do men dance with men?" war dance. war relates to the sexual mechanism. "women fall in love with warriors and heroes" Labid's protagonist driven to murder and camel robbery to capture the attention of his woman Crusaders marching off to war with a virgin's favor in helmet, only to roast Christian babies in a case of mistaken identity 2b [some animals are less subtle about the connection between their sexual and violent impulses] *Sudanese antelope attacking each other with their long horns get a clear sexual joy from the experience. long erections. 28b {"sexual frustration and aggression...stallion" used for stud was vicious until he was placed among females [insert story of rimbum tree??Marvin Harris] scarcity??> population control mechanisms??>sexual deprivation "parents don't want their girls to marry...boys who can't make a living" "unemployed person..." doesn't exude self?confident sex appeal "would help explain the rhythm of war" "sexual inactivity can...lead to agggression or to passivity" "offer a whiff of hope...violence" "rats...frustration...and aggression" "recession...can't get the goods...accustomed to getting" "50 to 70 year economic cycle" and war 3b most Yanomamo fights are over "sexual issues"??scrapping over women. (Science 2/26/88, p. 986) 53a As a young man, Stalin believed a true revolutionary must be ascetic. 21a relationship of sexual frustration [possibly caused by K factor at work] and war? do men increasingly desperate over sexual frustration look for someone??internally or externally??to take it out on? *the Japanese raped women in the streets of Singapore in 1939. blood lust and sexual avoidance have risen hand in hand in America in the 80s, where the sexual counter?revolution is accompanied by the success of films like Starwars, Rambo. In the early, depression 30's, how much sex were Germans getting? Hitler promised unlimited sex??to produce the master race. *set up locations for sexual liaisons. wouldn't it be ironic if the sexual repression the PMRC preached in 1986 were a major cause of world violence. New Guineans go to war when quarrels at home get intense??>sexual deprivation. Medieval Europe disinfranchised sons went off to war??for new territory and new women. [according to Davidson's African history, the same thing happened with Africans, who wandered off in warrior bands, conquered and took local wives] with no land to their names, they couldn't get girls at home. 19b centers for sex and violence are located in same place in brain: hypothalamus. 19b [Am I really trying to say that bloodshed is wired into the human brain? How outrageous. Surely violence is not biological. It has got to be the creation of a twisted society, obsessed with giving its children toy tanks for Christmas and missile launchers for their birthdays.] *"chimpanzees of the Gombe...war" "On Aggression...species ...equipped... to do battle with other members of their own species" [expendable male] "Harris...said witch hunters were mad... to blame... dropsy ...on witches. ...picked out other human beings to attack." [blame] "a landlord, a capitalist, a king...could not have possibly caused dropsy" "Edinborough...sea the vikings traversed." "what could attract the vikings?...[the desire] to struggle with other human beings" [insert the tale of The Battle of Maldoon] "vikings had an over?population problem...son...sent off to start his own colony " 3b Benvenuto Cellini was an exquisitely artistic man in an exquisitely sophisticated city in one of the most exquisitely developed periods of western civilization. but killing other humans was never far from his mind. in Florence, according to his memoirs you could be attacked by armed men at any minute. "you had to be constantly armed yourself and you couldn't be a klutz at self?defense, you had to be ready to kill if necessary." 16a
"What a beast man is." Sterne (Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds, p. 467) 68a nature builds "extremely powerful memories" and predetermined patterns of behavior into genes. *a generation of monarch butterflies born in the mountains of Mexico is seized by a strange urge to head north, seeking out an alien territory thousand of miles away, *landing in a place that for mysterious reasons feels right??the home from which their parents set out a generation ago. *the brain of the butterfly is miniscule, yet it contains the memory of locations it has never seen and full instructions on how to navigate the difficult route back and forth. *all this data is woven into the tangled strands of DNA on whose blueprints the brain was built. (The Self Organizing Universe, p. 146) 83a we may be impressed when finches use "cactus spines to flush out insects" we should be twice as impressed when a creature too small to have a brain, or even a single nerve cell, pulls off a trick of far greater subtlety. *a microorganism infects the neural system of an ant with such precision that it can drive the ant like a truck, convincing it to climb to the top of a blade of grass where it is inhaled by a sheep, thus depositing the microorganism in its ideal home??the sheep's innards. *this is instinct, or at least pre?programmed behavior, at work on the most primitive biological level. *it competes for sophistication with the built?in programming that allows a monaarch butterfly to navigate from Buffalo, New York, to a specific mountain forest in Mexico generation after generation, *or that allows baby turtles newly hatched in the sand to head unerringly for something they've never seen before??the sea. 70b we also "come into this world" knowing things that we have never learned. *one experimenter snapped a toy cricket next to a girl three minutes after she'd been born. her eyes, devices she'd never been able to use before, moved in the direction of the click 18 out of 22 times. (Sensation and Perception, p. 378) 63b "William James" proposed the theory of instinct at the turn of the century. it was popularized in the '20s by MacDougal. then it was derided in the '30s and relegated to the status of scientific outcast (Meaning and Void, p. 68) 84b "in the 1920's, the behaviorists" created the impression that there is no such thing as instinct in human behavior. *in fact, they turned the concept of human instinct into a scientific heresy, grounds for expulsion from the psychological community. (Margaret Mead In Samoa, p. 54) 85b [their intolerance was dogmatic and rigid, but contorted the facts.] it's "easy to argue the human fear of snakes is simply a cultural" artifact but the argument becomes a little less credible when you realize that adult chimps who've never heard the tale of Adam and Eve respond to snakes with full?scale terror. (Meaning and Void, p. 71) 84b *"under the thin skin of human nature is a set of machinery that CR determines far more of our behavior than we'd like to imagine"??the instincts left us by our animal ancestors. *in the 60s pop ethologists like Desmond Morris stirred interest in these instinctual mechanisms. *then that interest faded, ethologists went back to their animals, sociologists returned to toying with abstract and conceptual formulae, and psychologists dismissed the world of the animal. *the potential for analysis of animal insincts in the human mind remained untapped. *but it offers the promise of creating a revolution in the way we solve problems thrown in our path by the uncontrollable impulses that often rule our lives. 86a you can see the instincts welling up in a baby in its first minutes of life. no one has to teach it to cry, "to search for a" nipple, to suck on it, or to grasp. infants come from the womb with all this knowledge built in. *you can see instinct at work in a red squirrel as he buries nuts??a business more complicated than it seems. *raise the squirrel in a cage where it never sees soil, feed it a liquid diet so it never sees an acorn, and let it loose in a natural setting as a adult and it will begin burying nuts almost instantly. no previous training required. (Primates, p. 480) 70a laughing and smiling isn't something we learn. it also comes built in. "blind and deaf" children who've never heard a laugh or seen a smile smile just like you and I do. the motor pattern comes pre?wired within us. (Primates, p. 483) 70b "joy, fear, anger" and sorrow show up in babies in all cultures. (Emotions in Health And Illness, p. 16) 79a at an early stage, a baby has a few built?in gestures. what it wants it pulls toward it. what it doesn't want, it pushes away. put a toy under a table with a curtain attached to the table top, and the baby won't move the curtain aside to see it, it will try to pull the curtain toward it??a hopeless maneuver. it'll take time before the baby goes past its primitive techniques for handling "disgust and desire" (Beyond the Information Given, c.p. 276? 280) 63b "tiny infants" already see their world in categories. sudden, loud, shrill sounds make them cry. deep, quiet sounds which arise only slowly get them to open their eyes "and look alert." in other words, the baby puts the sound of the firecracker and that of its mother singing a lullaby in radically different categories and responds to them with very different emotions. (Unstable Ideas, Kagan, p. 134) 66b California ground squirrels who've never seen a snake before and whose parents have never seen one have a built?in protective instinct. if a rattler approaches, they "rear back on their hind legs," flash their tails and throw sand at the snake." snakes who've been isolated in rattler?free territories for up to 80,000 years still have the old anti?snake reaction sitting in their brains just waiting for the first bellycrawler to come slithering along. they've lost their immunity to snake venom, but not the elaborate anti?snake defensive ritual. *the moral of the story? built?in behaviors hangaround a long time, which is why we still carry reactions so long after their "initial purpose has been obscured." (Natural History 5/89, p. 30) 70a Darwin noticed that in every culture humans express disgust by "some equivalent of "ptui"??spitting things out, the equivalent of pushing away, both instinctual responses with which babies seem to come equipped. 63b *four week old babies are so hooked on looking at things that if you set up a slide projector and attach the focussing device to a nipple so the baby can control it by sucking, *then show a picture out of focus, the baby will suck until he brings the picture into focus, and keep "sucking" to keep it there. *the baby is already an avid sightseer. (Beyond the Information Given, p. 289) 63b frustration leads to rage. and rage leads to destructive violence. report on 20/20 on a 2 year old who??every time his parents left him alone in his room, cried and shrieked. *child psychologist installed a video camera in the bedroom. when the parents left the baby for 15 minutes, the child went into a fit of destruction, throwing toys and tearing things off the walls *indicates the destructive impulse isn't the result of social training, but of some innate mechanism. 35a *Ashley Montague would disagree. He says no child has ever been born with hostile impulses. we learn them. 35a [do humans, in fact, have instincts? do they come completely equipped at birth with a kind of neural handbook of lessons from the primordial past? Jung, with his concept of the collective unconscious, felt they do. And, in fact, the scientific evidence has proven unequivocally that he is right.] babies one or two days old are fully equipped with the ability to understand a kind of primitive precursor of language. Johns Hopkins' Dr. Elliott Glass, studying one or two day?old babies, found that a shh sound will quiet the baby down??even if it's not made by a human being but by a tape recorder. a click sound will make the baby stop what it's doing and pay attention. "Dr. Glass consulted a curator of mammalian behavior at the Smithsonian Institute" and discovered that the click is a universal attention getter in all mammals. so when we shush the people next to us in a movie theater, we're not doing something uniquely human. "we're plugging into a primordial instinct." relates to bark, chirp and growl. (8/14/87 Science) 35a "Eibl?Eibesfeldt" found expressions that showed up wherever he performed his studies??Indonesia, Africa, Europe. two year olds kicked, bit and fought. embarassed adults hid their faces. disappointed humans of all ages pouted. when people met they greeted each other with an "eyebrow flash" when they looked down on each other, they kept their eyebrows raised. (Melvin Konner, The Sciences, Nov/Dec 88, p. 7) 51a eibl?eibesfeldt discovered that "the way people greet, flirt and CR pray tend to be the same no matter what the culture." (Primates, p. 483) girls in Samoa, France, the Nilohamitic region or Japan flirt by turning their face toward the man whom they wish to charm, raising their eyebrows, then turning away or hiding their face, occasionally adding a giggle. (Primates. 483?4) 70b "Judith L. Rappapport," chief of child psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health, feels research on obsessive?compulsive behavior shows ritualistic behavior is hard?wired into us just like it is in animals. *a boy who drops out of school so he can wash himself all his waking hours "is in the grip of one of these ritualistic CR circuits gone haywire." *having to go back to the house and check that the doors are locked or the gas stove is off are leftovers from our days of ritual preening and territorial patrol. *Rappaport believes the circuits responsible are in the basal ganglia. (Scientific American, 3/89, p. 83?89) 63b but is it valid to compare the mental machinery of men and animals? *aren't they so vastly different that our brains are engines of a different kind? *the human segments of the brain are a thin overlay on a solid animal core. *so similar are our brains that we can often understand each other without a translator. *Clever Hans was able to read the body language of eminent scientists. *his owner claimed this 19th century circus horse had an encyclopedic knowledge of human affairs. and every demonstration seemed to prove the owner right. *finally, researchers figured out than Hans had no knowledge of calculus, geography, geometry, or the myriad other subjects on which he unerringly answered questions. *but he COULD read human signs so subtle they eluded the professors??slight changes in posture, shifting from one leg to another, the movement of a man leaning forward, then leaning back when the horse hit the right answer. *yet perhaps Hans ability to read the movements of scientists was simply a matter of training. perhaps it doesn't demonstrate an understanding of the human psyche. (Newsweek, issue on animal intelligence) perhaps we and animals have no mental apparatus in common at all. *Diane Fossey watched one lady ape, part of a larger harem, who was spurned by her mate, shunted to the edge of the group, and had become the brunt of the petty hostilities of others in the tribe. *when she was attacked, her consort did nothing to protect her. *she sat at the group's edge, her baby in her arms, stared longingly at the male who was spurning her, "heaved an enormous sigh, looked" quickly down at the ground, and went into a dejection so profound that her lip quivered. *she hadn't read in novels that this was the appropriate response, she hadn't learned it from soap operas. yet the softball sized collection of tissue that sits at the heart of her brain and ours was putting her through the same emotional display as if she'd been a human. (Diane Fossey, tape #5) 43b we share 50% of our DNA with fruitflies, and 98% "with gorillas and apes." (Mindwaves, p. 107) so it's reasonable to suppose that when it comes to behavior, we share a great deal in common. 80a Janos Szentogothai, chairman of Anatomy at the "Semmelweis University" Medical school in Budapest says "all animals are built of the same matter and on the same CR structural, functional, genetic and metabolic processes." So there's no reason to doubt that they share numerous qualities with us, even if they're as radically different from us as an amoeba. (Mindwaves, p. 324) mind, says Szentogothai, is present in all beings who have a nervous system 80a *"do we really carry within us instincts" leftover from our animal ancestry? *when you're walking through the woods, the person ahead of you brushes aside a branch, and it comes back like a whip toward your face, you automatically throw your hands up in front of your eyes to protect yourself. *a chimp does exactly tthe same thing. (Primates, p. 327) *when you're thinking about confronting someone who's always intimidated you, and you absent mindedly begin scratching yourself. *again, you're behaving exactly like a chimp. (p. 329) *you're four years old and your mother has gone off leaving you behind, or isn't doing what you want her to do. *you fling yourself to the ground and begin pounding everything in sight, glancing in her direction from time to time to make sure she's paying attention. *more chimp behavior. (p. 331?2) *your boss has just told you you're doing a lousy job and threatened to fire you. *you go back to your office, call in your secretary, and ball her out. *an additional bit of nastiness from the repertoire of the chimp. (p. 332) *you've gone down to the local bar and spotted a girl you'd like to impress. suddenly, you stop walking normally. you pull yourself up to your full height and begin to swagger. more chimpishness. (p. 336) *we usually think we got these helpful or obnoxious habits from our toxic parents or our crude tv. *but the chimps Jane Goodall watched at Gombe "didn't have your parents" and haven't had a chance to be corrupted by your culture, much less watch your favorite television shows. *they possess the same built?in biological repertoire that makes you swagger or go into a tantrum. *these quirks are "evidence of the animal past still" tucked inside us. 70a *Says Jane Goodall, the startling number of "gestures common to both man and chimpanzee" almost certainly came to both of them from a common relative further down the family tree. (Primates, p. 374) 70a an adult chimp who wants to play with a youngster "approaches with a funny walk," rounds its back, bends its head down, and takes strange little steps, swaying from side to side. then it tickles the chimpanzee toddler. (Primates, p. 369) 70a *female primates go as "crazy over babies as we do." *when a baby langur is born, every female in the group wants to hold it. (Primates, p. 437) 70a how does a dominant male calm down a subordinate female chimp who's screaming her head off? *he pats her "on the chin," the cheek, the head. *why is she screaming? often because the male now trying to calm her down attacked her. (Primates, p. 354) 70a sneering, said Darwin, "is the human equivalent CR to bearing the canines." (They Studied Man, p. 22) 66a "why is the question of instincts relevant?" *for much of this century, psychology was dominated by the behaviorists, who felt we came into this world a tabula rasa, *and all our thoughts, feelings and mannerisms were dictated by our subsequent experience. *behaviorism has faded, but the idea that social structure and family experience make us what we are still hangs on. *Marxist academicians say that all our flaws are caused by capitalism, materialism or consumerism, and can be solved by socialism. 70a chimp infants can be spoiled. [and they can cheat and deceive] *a mother meticulously groomed her daughter, then turned her back so her daughter could return the favor. *the daughter parted her mother's fur with one hand to give the impression she was grooming, but instead of searching for parasites, stared off into the distance. *eventually, the mother, convinced that she'd been well treated by her child, turned again and went back to grooming her seemingly well?mannered girl. (Chimps of Kibale, c.p. 153) 51a [many of the subtle behaviors portrayed in the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of Jane Austen may seem incontestably human, but they are really just the holdovers of our animal past dressed up in fancy clothes] heroic deeds sound lofty, but each is "a bit of vicious" CR animal behavior disguised in human costume it's goal??to allow one social group to attack another. 38a *a baby wasp hatches in utter isolation, sealed off in a confinement more total than that to which any monk has ever subjected himself. *when it crawls out of its birthing chamber, it has never seen another creature of its kind. *yet it knows how to "walk, fly, eat, find a mate" and find prey. *it even knows the intricacies of waspish romance. (Evolution of Culture in Animals, p. 40) 50b learned behavior is built on a template of instinct. one cuttlefish, for example, feeds itself by hiding its long appendages, approaching to just arm's length from its victim, then stopping to give the impression that it's too far away to constitute a danger. then, suddenly, the cuttlefish lashes out with its hidden tentacles and grabs the unsuspecting victim. baby cuttlefish have this instinctual trick built in. but because it runs robot?like within them, it's unflexible. the babies can only catch one kind of meal??a shrimp of a very specific size, and that's it. adults, however, have learned to adapt the pre?wired pattern to the circumstances at hand. they are able to pull off variations that allow them to catch a wide variety of passersby, even the dangerous and difficult crab. between youth and maturity, the cuttlefish's brain grows, opening up more space for learning and memory. (Evolution of Culture in Animals, p. 149) *like the cuttlefish, we come into the world replete with an instinctual repertoire, and we build on these through learning and culture 50a "from 1955 to 1965", the amount of research on primate behavior quadrupled. (Social Communication Among Primates, c.p. xi) 44a [and in the decades since, the field of primate research has seen the completeion of studies whose results have often turned old visions of animal psychology on their head. one result??in the last generation it's been possible to see the animal holdovers in your own psychological makeup with a precision that was never possible before] [instinct may even provide the kernel of one of our most fundamentally human traits??our search for truth] *are "children obsessed with the question" why because some circuitry has kicked in that demands causality? *is there a neural imperative pushing humans to string together the random elements of their experience like tinker toys, using teleology and causality as the connecting rods? 88a Hitler and Yurok both were obsessed with purification. In Hitler's case, it involved killing off subcultures 10a Lenny Rifenstall's film of Hitler's utopian vision. all would be sunny, perfect, ruled by reason Hitler's "prescription for the achievement of that vision" kill the impure, take away their shops, their paintings??the witch hunt by removing the pollutants in society, we'll heal our society "How many of the visions that have galvanized entire societies into motion are simply visions based on that simple idea of genocide?" the sociobiologica logic behind this??over the horizon are humans who've found resources. If we exterminate them and take what they've got, there will be twice as much for each of us. *"that is precisely the paradise into which murder catapulted the Arabs of the seventh and eighth centuries" murder gave them gardens, concubines, palaces, and overflowing treasure houses 10a "Moses apparently offered the promised land to the Hebrews under the same conditions Hitler postulated (?) for the achievement of utopia." Americans also gained their land of wide open spaces by slaughtering the original inhabitants, who had been slaughtering each other in the name of greater glory before the white man came "in the case of the Crow or the Sioux, being the heroic status conferred on he who was able to kill the greatest number of enemy, steal the greatest number of enemy horses, cart home the greatest number of enemy goods and women." "Christians, Nazis and I'm sure if we look hard enough, even saints have managed to see the extermination of other human beings as an appendage of all that is noble and holy." eg Peter the Hermit and the Crusades "Allah dictated to them through Mohammed that warfare to the death was the noblest aspiration of the truly devout." 10a *much later, the English were appalled that the Englishmen who'd been given chunks of Irish land began dressing in Irish fashion and Irishised their names. blurring the lines between us and them. Irish were still keeping track of their genes rather than their memes. people were in love with tales that related to their geneologies. 21b Irish still lived in quickly dissassembled huts that bore the stamp of their Celtic ancestors who's roamed Europe long before Christ. wolf population was growing. there were no roads large enough for a coach. [it was a complex of memes the English brought to Ireland] 21b [in his own way, Cromwell sensed his actions as a part of a complex dynamical system, a system in which competing forces battle to impose their form of organization on the world of men and matter] *he saw strife as "part of an inevitable, deeply disturbing, deeply exciting process, by which the way of the lord had to be fought out in order to be discovered" god's favor would be found in the cannon's mouth. the outcome of battle would reveal god's attitude toward each side. [God, in this case, is the invisible hand of the complex dynamical system, pitting memes against each other, awarding resources to the winners] *God speaks through carnage, the collective consciousness making up its mind. winners win the right to shape society's consciousness, its collective hypotheses English civil war pitted two forms of organization, two memes, against each other??monarchy and its rigid, authoritarian society; and Puritanism, which gave men the power to act as independent individuals, their own authorities. when Cromwell won, society changed its mind and adopted the Puritan views. God, the collective consciousness, had shifted thoughts through butchery 21b [Scots shared the same view] when they lost to Cromwell in 1649 [or 50], they switched to k response. felt it was God's judgement on their hidden sins. fasted and underwent humiliations. felt god must disagree with their attempt to establish Presbyterian faith throughout Scotland and England. 21b TE Lawrence reports on one French military philosopher who described "modern war, absolute war"??a state where two societies with incompatible ideas would put them to the test by bloodshed. [the memes doing battle] 22a [even]Cromwell's wife acknowledged her role as a part of a larger superorganism. She said she had to submit herself to the "larger providence" that took her husband away on military campaigns. 21b Cromwell=Antonia Fraser 21b "religious fanaticism is associated with reapportioning power, prestige and goods in society"...[it is society's equivalent to adrenaline: the chemical that courses through the bloodstream preparing the system for a fight. In this case the fight is for one simple purpose??to claw to a higher place in the pecking order of groups.] the primary aim of Mossedegh's nationalist movement in Iran in the early 50's was the nationalization of oil. that oil had been controlled by the British. both the Americans and the Russians had been hoping to get their hands on it. 17b three feminists on Donahue breathed hatred against "the system" for creating something they saw as an artificial imposition on human nature: the fact that people strive for power over others, and some in the competition are humiliated by losing. the system, of course, was built by men. if women took over, all striving for power, all humiliation, would disappear [contrast with the behavior of female baboons outlined in Science 86??they compete brutally and humiliate each other constantly] *the feminists were using this myth, ironically, to compete for power with men??to hopefully strip men of power and humiliate @UN[them]. *the classic ideological device for taking things from someone is to claim he's abused you. to use blame. to find a scapegoat for whatever makes you uncomfortable.=classic device for beating someone else down on the hierarchical ladder. if the feminists are right, some clever group of male chimps must have sat around contriving "a system" to trap and humiliate females. For chimps compete and humiliate each other, jump up and down on each other, pick another up and splatter it against a wall. *but chimps, fortunately, lack the weapon of ideology, the weapon of blame. ideology=a tool for racheting your way up the hierarchical ladder. 19b [blame] *"French and the English" fought until the British found new land across the ocean why did the British and French make up so easily? Why did we make up so easily with the Japanese? 3b [Humans are a genocidal species.] *final episode of Life On Earth, an African plain strewn with primitive tools and the skulls of baboons "whose heads have obviously been split open" why is it not strewn with bones of gazelles or mammoths? [see "other people are our competitors, animals aren't" 5b??perhaps put it here] *we portray monsters as having human form in horror movies Frankenstein, Mr. Hyde, King Kong even goo from outer space becomes scary by taking over the body of a human being infants fear strange faces before they can handle language *"there's an excellent chance that Autrolopithicines" aren't around today because we wiped them out human groups identify themselves as "the people" and others as animals to be exterminated [**from "final episode" to here belongs someplace else??perhaps Dale Carnegie should be followed by treasure and Norman Rockwell, then by this {"final episode" through here} section and the expendability of the male?] 6a "Dirty Laundry" and death??we loathe it but are fascinated by it rat's attitude "Within his group he loathes the idea of another one of his fellow rats dying. But outside of his group, he loathes the idea of other groups living." 7b In Paths of Glory, the filmmakers are more explicit about that feeling of grandness. It comes from pitching ourselves against some enemy. *We are human and good. The enemy is inhuman and evil. Unfortunately, if we sat down for dinner with the enemy, we'd discover he's very much like us. "What makes us distinctly human is our ability to imagine that our group is good and right and just and that the other group is awful and grizzly and grim and horrible. That we are angels and they are Huns, no matter who they are." "what makes us feel grand is the feeling that in opposition to this other group, we can all be welded together into some giant force larger than each of us"??like the slime mold coalescing from a group of individuals into the semblance of a single stalk. 14a *Vikings may have started pillaging because they ran out of land or crops, but they ended up doing it for pleasure. "they enjoyed the sheer pleasure of slaughter." veterans of WWII and the Korean War reported a basic pleasure in killing "your fellow human beings" *also came home with gold to show the girls. they didn't bring home food, housing, clothes, just all the gold they could carry. you couldn't make it into plows, tools or pots and pans, just status symbols so when it comes to war, prestige is probably more important than necessities. It's not the frustration of starvation but the frustration of humiliation that makes for war. 12a "It is well that war is so terrible...", said Robert E. Lee, "or we should grow too fond of it." 13b You "measure pleasure centers in the brain" by the excitement they produce. men who've made war say they never felt so alive in their lives 12a *according to Ortega Y Gassett, the sight of blood has a strange effect on humans. if you see someone you know with blood on his face, he no longer looks human to you. the sight excites a frenzy confirmed by DH Lawrence, who describes the reality behind "blood lust" when humans see limbs flying and blood spurting, some want more, and can't stop themselves until the slaughter is "incredible." Cromwell's armies massacred civilian populations of cities before they could check their animal passions, despite Cromwell's orders to treat the citizenry well. 23a blood lust affects a pack of hounds on a fox hunt. it also hits human beings when they see the blood of enemies or friends. they lose control "over themselves" and fling themselves into a mindless orgy of killing. it's like a "feeding frenzy"??and may come from the mechanism that says if you don't get some meat now, you won't get to eat at all. tear a chunk off as rapidly as you can when British "under Cromwell brok in into Irish cities," they were hit with blood lust and carved every man, woman and child to bits. *Crusaders taking Jerusalem did the same, even butchering inhabitants who had sued for peace and given all their earthly possessions as ransom. they hacked and carved until their arms were numb. 25b the blood pressure of most phobics goes up when they're confronted with the source of their fears. for blood phobics, it's the opposite. their blood pressure goes down. they feel "like fainting." (Sources Digest, 11/88, p. 3) 55b [but isn't all this carnage hideously unnatural? Isn't it just the product of our love for technology, our obsession with progress, our insistence on competition? If we all simply settled down to a simple life with nature, wouldn't all of this bloodshed go away? I'm afraid not. Slaughter seems to be one of mother nature's favorite sports. Well, let's not be flippant. Murder is more like one of her favorite kitchen utensils, a handy device for cooking up new evolutionary creations.] New York Times article re what makes us human says nature is benevolent. when wolves kill a deer, murder's taking place, and nature has shaped the wolves to enjoy it... it's fun. But the deer is still alive as its hindquarters are chewed off. That is not benevolent. 12a Loren Isley says humans evolved very fast. We went from upright creatures with small brains to upright creatures with big brains fast. "humans got that last spurt when they became ultra aggressive killers of each other." "every little advantage was encouraged dramatically. Every little disadvantage was wiped out" 10a *we live amid violence. while we sit at lunch thousands are being murdered over ideology, politics or revenge. *you can't spend a week with your girlfriend without a fight, no matter how good, kind and sensitive you are. *from all this comes creation. *"new societies are born in the blood of the societies they swallow" *lives advance toward their goals through pain nature uses torment to create 26b [the battle between societies is just another device nature uses for research and development??for cooking up new forms of order, bigger and better ideas, breakthroughs in the harnessing of the masses. and as in all her complex dynamical systems, to the victor go the spoils.] we always hear comments on the irony that people would throttle someone who strangled a puppy, but applaud human murder Lorenz' explanation: every species feels benevolent toward animals of other kinds, but is ready to fight tooth and claw with its own 20b [goes with expendibility of males??violence and genocide]
men more than women are obsessed with technology??cars, "video games" some say it's their upbringing. but the passion behind the obsession seems too great for that. "look at all the things... we attempt to incorporate into people via societal training that just don't take in the least." eg virtue, generosity, humility, peace gadget lust makes men salivate relationship between male interest in sports and interest in gadgetry "almost every culture has a game that involves a ball and a stick" monkeys will ward off lions with sticks and thrown stones "One of the behavioral adaptations that helped us surpass the chimp was probably our obsession" with throwing. they do it casually. We love to play at it. obsessed with aim. chimps are suprised when they hit the object. "one of the earliest and most ...useful forms of the use of objects" the first techno?lust gives us a diet far richer in meat than the chimps little boys whose mothers tell them it's bad to kill can't repress the urge to run around empty lots braining frogs or squirrels with stones...something they've never been conditioned to do "groups who could fashion handles for their sticks and stones, would have every advantage over those groups who only used sticks and stones."=the groups with techno lust "would be able to pulverize the hell out of" competitors [Discover Magazine, Sept 86, a letter from John Cotton notes that Cotton spoke with a Samoan whose cheek had been broken by a rock hurled by another Samoan from a distance of 75 yards. throwing is an important skill among the Samoans] 9a [humans are built to eat meat. the craving for it is wired so deeply into our system that there is one hormone designed to quiet the appetite that the digestive refuses to send to the brain until fats and proteins move from the stomach into the intestines. In other words, this hormone helps keep you hungry until you've swallowed some meat. {see Time or Newsweek cover story on hormones for name of hormone}] *if men are like chimps, we started off as herbivores miserable about our vegatarian diet. *the clumsy males lumbering around on all fours might occasionally run across a crippled rabbit, smash it with a rock and drag the carcass home for a feast. *chimps who get to kill for meat are absolutely delighted. we got luckier than the chimps. we stood on two legs so we could see farther. *we developed a throwing arm and a good aim. *but having started as slow and clumsy creatures, getting meat took cunning, clverness, daring and practice. meat was still not easy to come by for us 23a supposing a member of a group of men who haven't invented tools comes up with an idea. Instead of picking up a stick and pounding the ground like a chimp to frighten a predator, he'll throw the stick with all his might at the beast. having knocked out the predator, he tries it on an antelope and opens a whole new meat locker as the man who brings home the bacon, he goes to the top of the hierarchical ladder in chimps, the whole groups comes crawling to the killer of meat when you're on top, your ideas hold sway, you shape the meme all the young men would soon be out practicing throwing sticks, dreaming of being the chief who all the girls want to fling their bodies at men didn't evolve throwing genetically, someone invented it some men would not be born physically equipped as hurlers. In the competition for girls, they'd be left out. Their genes would die out. in a few generations, you've got a tribe of first?rate rock pitchers. when they go against a tribe that hasn't gotten the knack of tossing, they win. the ancestors of the great baseball players of the future come out on top. the winner kills the babies of the losing tribe, kills the men, and makes off with the women. they have a feast, hump like crazy, eat a lot of antelope, and spread good pitchers across the face of the planet *chimps had dreamed of eating meat for years, but never managed it on a regular basis until throwing entered their lives any wolf will tell you that it also takes good social organization to hunt, especially if you want to go after bigger game than what succumbs to a hurled rock the mastodon was the first pre?packaged frozen meat deal guaranteed to feed a family for weeks a group with one more bright idea is necessary, the idea of getting together and chasing the mastodon into the swamp, then throwing rocks at it until it dies the guys who can't understand the idea will be thrown off the team and won't get the girls unlike wolves, competing groups of humans fight to the death. And in war, the group with the better organizational idea will win. Result: evolution in men will race along at a clip it never achieved in wolves animals adapt to changes in the evironment, humans change the environment around learning to hurl a rock turns animals into meat who are just uncatchable parts of the scenery to your competitors other species kill each other, but we seem to be the only ones who will travel hundreds of miles just to have that pleasure 10a At the end of the 19th century, biologist J. M. Baldwin enunciated the Baldwin Effect, which observed that when a species learns a useful new skill, the addition to its behavioral repertoire will reshape its biology. Over time, says Baldwin, natural selection will bless the members of ensuing generations whose limbs and brains are suited to the maneuver, and cull out those whose anatomy is ill-suited to the innovative gambit. (Steven Levy, Artificial Life, New York, Vintage Books, 1993, p. 265.) 91a *"There's a good chance that human beings have been genetically reshaped in just the last 6,000 years." "nomadic conquerors and the empire builders had something in common. A thirst for the extermination of their fellow men." Sumerians, Egyptians, Alexander "today, genocide continues." South American tribes being wiped out Angles and Saxons wiped out Picts and Jutes "The bulk of the humans on today's earth, are descended, not from the... exterminated peoples" the exterminators may have different behavioral heritage??aggressive, tendency to large scale organization most courageous among the conquered probably didn't survive??suicides in Judea. we may have two legacies: of the conquered and conquerors 5b
[But why do humans insist on killing each other?] "forms of insanity and forms of entertainment ...provide a...clue to our built in behavioral wiring" "forms of exercise for the brain... dreaming... play... entertainment... provide... clues to the nature of the prewired circuitry" 2a hormones trigger behavioral patterns like electrical currents shifting "electricity from one printed circuit board to another" "a male bird... thinking of... food" "sees a female bird and a hormone kicks into motion" hormones shift from courtship to copulation to parenting we also shift from itching to a fight to sluggishly wishing for peace 8a "Our sense that 'oh wow, this is delicious stuff' is what moves us toward" what's generally good for us "If we were some other kind of machine, we might do a quick chemical analysis of potential food like chocolate chip cookies, discover that it's filled with glucose and a little screen might light up saying; 'glucose, highly concentrated energy source, consume as much as possible as rapidly as possible in order to store as much fuel, in case we run into a future shortage.' our equivalent is "oh, yum" "sexual attraction is one of these prime, built in motivational mechanisms" *imagine that we're machines who need another machine like us to construct our replacement. We'd analyze every potential partner that passes, assessing its value as a co?worker on the replacement process 9b *"every behavioral mechanism...prewired into the human brain needs...exercise" diving ducks and ocelots why 17th century critics defined entertainment as pity and terror why humans watch horror films. horror is prewired. pity is a social response the screaming monkey infant is eaten. We only pity when we identify with someone as part of our group. pity achieved in a plot by getting us to identify with the person "If you analyzed the standard elements of plot as defined by Aristotle, you can find a separate exercise, or an exercise for a separate behavioral circuit in each of the elements." identification and bonding with good guy bad guy doesn't look or act like us revenge circuit is tweaked into overdrive crisis raises fear, puzzle solving pity knits a social group together in the face of danger violence courtship a good cry *the tale of the rats clearing land as an Aristotelian plot "financially successful...know how to exercise the emotions the most" Spielberg and E.T. "He's as good at working out the emotions as Jane Fonda is at showing you how to work out the body, so the man's films, by 1982, had grossed 250 million dollars." 4a *"revenge is one of those little motivations that's built so deeply into us that it comes welling out of us, no matter how much that we think that it's undignified, inhuman, uncivilized." Why? we don't admit it when someone drives across our path and we feel like tearing him limb from limb. other cultures aren't so reticent. The Montagues and Capulets, the Agamemnon trilogy are testaments to revenge that leapfrogged down the generations. among the Bedouins, your manliness depends on revenge. what's the logic? *there's a good chance you'll end up dead in the process. you're not going to undo the damage done against you. but think of our cats, tiny things easily crushed by the dogs, who spit and claw to keep the dogs from trampling them. But the cats seldom actually draw blood. [see the story of the snake and the swami in Carol Tavris' Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion] revenge doesn't protect the individual who goes out and risks death. it protects the social group. people get into a vengeful mood when somebody close to them is hurt. *Speilberg gives Luke Skywalker motivation by having his family killed. That justifies mass killing. revenge is like the poison in plants. It doesn't save the individual who's eaten, but it saves the other plants in the bunch, for it teaches the hungry creature who ate the first one not to touch a plant like that again. If you let a sleight go by, you're marked as an easy target. If three members of the clan go out to seek vengeance, it protects the other 47. a Bedouin saying??"He who is not willing to defend his home with extreme violence has no right to a home." [genes vs. ideas] 15a revenge is part of the machinery that makes us disposable parts of a larger group the more a Yanomamo tribe can establish "a reputation for" ferocity and swift retaliation, the safer it is from attack. (Science 2/26/88 p. 986) 53a "Plot construction, seems designed to exercise a primitive circuit designed for vengeance." beginning establishes a villain??he does something dastardly, an attack on a character we identify with. eg Star Wars, villains kill hero's family??>we are boiling for revenge, and we get it. Porkies, bad guy takes the heroes' money, humiliates them and beats one of them up several times. 17b
when your instincts can't work on the reality they were designed to confront, they gnaw at you in strange ways, wasting energy, confusing you about the real world. tit mice have a circuit to protect them from predatory birds??they crouch when one passes overhead. *tit mice raised where there are no predatory birds crouch every time a harmless bird passes overhead. tit mice who grow up where there ARE predators learn the difference between predators and non?predators and only crouch when a predator passes overhead, thus saving "a lot of time and energy." we humans are built with vast bundles of instincts that are never quite appropriate for the world in which we live. 27b despite "the
pill and...the computer," we have "irrational behavioral circuitry.
Circuitry whose original purpose we do not understand, but that insists
on exerting it's influence on us. We still will have gross irrationalities
in the way that we behave" eg anti abortion movement (which increases
population) ironically springs from the k impulse, from the sexually
repressive elements in society who don't realize their reaction is built
into them as biologically as the kneejerk reflex or the circuitry for
breathing 8b hb: absolutely and
vigorously agreed. Lord how hard it is for the emotional self and the
talking self to get to know each other. It's taken 35,000 years of collective
effort just to get the two to send each other an occasional message.
And even then, what comes from the emotions to the consciousness is
usually confused, obscure, and oracular. It's stuff only an expert can
make out. And it's stuff that even the experts are baffled by. Meanwhile
the messages going from the speaking self to the emotional self may
be utter lies, parades, disguises, and confused charades. We tell ourselves
the opposite of what we want. We do not know what feels the best and
what we really want. When we're alone, we swim in a sea made murky by
uncertainty. When we're with others, who knows what will take over our
tongue--the speaking consciousness that's rehearsed its lines or the
emotional puppeteer that often asks for the very opposite of what it
craves...that often says that a rose in its hand that's clearly red
is white. That often says what's clearly wrong is right. js: It is as
if he is shy of openly making present to me his feelings for contact
so he minimally states them -- so silently that it is almost as if he
has not said them. This would fit his character: I spoke several people
on the retreat about him and they observe that though he was organizing
the practical side of the retreat he was somehow invisible. On the first
day he talked to the group about practical matters. But he did so in
a way I cannot recall nor anyone else I spoke to. [I only know he did
because he complained he felt no one took any notice of him at the retreat
-- he expected people to ask questions back and no one did]. He was
supposed to give a short talk on himself at the end but chickened out.
I did not notice him until I sat next to him at breakfast and felt I
should feel an empty space and started talking to him. hb: oh, my god,
he's in hiding and he doesn't entirely know it. he needs someone to
sense him in there, come and find him, and bring him out. that someone
may be you. saving someone who is lost in the forest of him self is
a noble mission...and a bonding one. js: So now the painful thing: waiting,
and waiting and waiting. I trust he will call before the end of the
week. I would like to feel he does so today. It is painful -- as you
noted because there is so much uncertainty. hb: and it's lonely. Isolation
is another killer that's ofen uncertainty's companion. Howard Their new term expands on the concept of the ecological trap, which describes why species bypass better habitats to live in less suitable ones. Animals go to those poorer sites because they are led astray by environmental cues that no longer help in an environment altered by humans. More than 20 years ago, two ecologists described an ecological trap that appears in forests fragmented into patches by activities like logging, road-building, agriculture, and development. Birds from 21 species were putting nests near forest edges, even though predators frequently ate their eggs and their nestlings there. The researchers suggested that the birds had evolved to prefer sites with a variety of vegetation types because, in the past, that had meant better foraging and good protection against predators. But the cue -- heterogeneous plant life -- no longer indicated a better habitat, because fragmentation had produced more forest edges with such a variety, and an accompanying surge in the number of predators there. Scientists have discovered many other ecological traps since then. For example, some grassland birds choose to nest in pastures, based on an evolutionary preference for low vegetation. But when the pastures are mown, young chicks are unable to fly away to escape. Mammals, too, fall into ecological traps. In the past 50 years, manatees have been found farther north in Florida's waters, because of warm water discharged from power plants. But whenever a plant is turned off, for maintenance or other reasons, the manatees encounter water too cold for them. The concept of ecological traps has always applied to habitat choice. But now Mr. Sherman, Martin A. Schlaepfer, and Michael C. Runge point out that changes in the environment can cause formerly positive behavior to be harmful in other ways, interfering with breeding, migration, and feeding, for example. Mr. Sherman began thinking about that broader possibility when he was studying wood ducks. Normally the ducks, Aix sponsa, nest in cavities of dead trees, laying 10 to 12 eggs at a time. For about 50 years, wildlife managers have erected nesting boxes for wood ducks to help them reproduce. Strangely, though, the boxes often caused more harm than good. The Cornell professor studied the birds for about 15 years to figure out why. Female wood ducks have adapted to a dearth of appropriate nest sites by trying to follow other ducks to their nest cavities to lay an egg or two there, or even take over the cavity. The nesting boxes were simply too conspicuous -- ducks were laying 30 to 50 eggs in a single box. That's too many eggs for one duck to incubate; many nests were then abandoned. Making the boxes easy to find was an attempt to assist the ducks, Mr. Sherman says. But it also helped female ducks to locate others' nests rather than find their own. "The solution is a real simple one," he says. "Hide the boxes back in the woods." Mr. Sherman also saw hints of a trap in the behavior of a rodent that has "just about winked out from the earth," in the words of Mr. Runge, an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Service's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, in Maryland. Perhaps as few as 350 individuals remain of the northern Idaho ground squirrel, Spermophilus brunneus brunneus. Mr. Sherman has studied one population in Adams County, Idaho, where from 1987 to 1999 the squirrels' numbers declined from 272 to 10. He and other scientists wanted to know why. The answer may be as simple as not having enough food. The squirrels' habitat has been transformed because people have prevented fires from occurring, allowing pine trees to invade what used to be open meadows. Shrubs have elbowed out the grasses and herbs that the squirrels feed on. But Mr. Sherman and Mr. Runge thought more might be going on. The small, short-tailed squirrels hibernate for eight months of the year. During the late spring and summer, they must eat enough to triple their body weight to survive the winter. They also must reproduce -- or not even try. Though this behavior has never been studied in northern Idaho ground squirrels, a close relative's reproductive efforts each spring are dictated by how much food is available. "That's a very smart evolutionary adaptation," says Mr. Runge. "Why have pups when you know you're not going to be able to feed them?" He and Mr. Sherman speculate in a paper due to appear in Ecology that the squirrels may be fooled by the greenery present in the altered habitat when they emerge from hibernation. Expecting food throughout the summer, they invest energy in mating. But not enough food becomes available late in the summer for them to fatten up sufficiently. "The animals have gone ahead and reproduced and put themselves in jeopardy, but there's no payback, and they starve over the winter," says Mr. Sherman. Though it hasn't been proved, the idea of an evolutionary trap threatening the squirrels is intriguing, says Eric Yensen, a professor of biology at Albertson College, in Caldwell, Idaho, who also studies the northern Idaho ground squirrel. "It gives us some things we can test. ... Somebody's going to have to do a behavioral study to figure out just what they're cueing on." In the meantime, because of limited funds and the desperately small squirrel populations, wildlife managers with Idaho's Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Forest Service have begun prescribed burns and supplemental feeding to try to save the rodents without fully understanding what is threatening them. Bruce A. Haak, a state biologist, says some of the populations are already rebounding. Wayward Lizards While Mr. Sherman and Mr. Runge contemplated trapped squirrels, Mr. Schlaep-fer, then a graduate student in natural resources at Cornell and now a postdoctoral fellow there, was thousands of miles away in Costa Rica, thinking along the same lines about reptiles. He was studying the lizard Norops polylepis, which normally lives in cool, shady areas. But the lizards had been found laying eggs in pastures that people had cleared in the forest. The problem, he found, is that the adults do not survive well in the pastures. He has not figured out why. "These lizards may never have seen a pasture in their evolutionary past," Mr. Schlaepfer says. He wondered if they had evolved to lay eggs in the sunniest areas of the forest, since those were the warmest. "They might be drawn to pastures in search of good egg-laying sites, unaware that the adults were going to be hammered." Back in Ithaca, Mr. Sherman was serving on Mr. Schlaepfer's dissertation committee. They discovered
that they and Mr. Runge had all been thinking about how animals get
trapped by their adaptive behaviors when they are in human-influenced
environments. When Mr. Schlaepfer started looking for examples of other
evolutionary traps described in the scientific literature, he found
numerous cases. In the mid-'90s, sea-turtle hatchlings born on Florida
beaches were dying because, after emerging from their eggs, they turned
inland instead of heading out to sea. Scientists discovered that hatchlings
normally rely on light on the horizon over the ocean to decide which
direction to migrate. But the light from nearby homes and hotels was
fooling them. Florida has protected the turtles by requiring building
owners either to use light of a different wavelength or to shield the
lights from the beach. Other examples came up: Because of global warming,
the insects that are fed on by great tits -- small, yellow-and-black
birds found in Europe -- appear earlier in the season than they used
to. But length of daylight, not temperature, determines when the birds
lay their eggs. So the young hatch after the bulk of their food has
come and gone. Leatherback turtles sometimes eat plastic bags, presumably
because of their similarity in appearance to a favorite food, jellyfish.
Mr. Runge says that all four animals he's currently studying -- manatees,
grassland birds, pintail ducks, and the ground squirrels -- may be stuck
in evolutionary traps. "It's just a coincidence that they're all
facing this. Or maybe it's not. It could be a ubiquitous mechanism."
Hanna Kokko, an assistant professor of ecology at the University of
Jyvaskyla, in Finland, has done theoretical work on ecological traps.
She suspects that evolutionary traps, too, are probably very common.
"I would expect that now there is a name for this phenomenon, we
might pay a lot more attention and find a lot more," she says.
Finding the problem sometimes gets you most of the way toward solving
it, as was the case with the sea turtles and the wood ducks. But too
often, conservation biologists and wildlife managers don't look to behavior
for causes of population declines, say Mr. Sherman and his colleagues.
"If we hear about a declining population, the typical response
is: We've got to buy more of its habitat and save the habitat it's living
in," he says. "With the wood ducks, we could have bought lots
more habitat and put out more nesting boxes, but that wouldn't have
solved the problem." MISLED ANIMALS Evolved behavior that helps
species survive in natural environments can harm the animals in human-altered
ones. (Erwin and Peggy Bauer, Bruce Coleman) (Joe McDonald, Bruce Coleman)
(Hans Reinhard, Bruce Coleman) (Corbis) Humans may have evolved to crave
fatty foods because they were scarce in our distant past.Fat's
easy availability in industrialized societies may be partially responsible
for obesity-related problems like diabetes and heart disease. SOURCE:
Martin A. Schlaepfer, Michael C. Runge, and Paul W. Sherman, Trends
in Ecology & Evolution, October 2002 |
