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Category: Human animals

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What if there weren’t any other living great apes?
By Erich Vieth on October 26th, 2009

What if there weren’t any other living great apes?

During my recent visit to the St. Louis Zoo, I wondered how it would have been had humans been the only species of great ape still alive on the planet.

I suspect that there would have been quite a few preachers out there suggesting that the animals represented by the fossils of other species of great apes were not at all similar to humans. I can imagine them preaching with great confidence that there wasn’t any credible evidence that any other living animal was ever remotely similar to humans in physical appearance or facial expressions, regardless of the fossils.

Image by Erich Vieth

They would call it laughable to suggest that any other species of great ape was a tool user, or that any other species of great ape exhibited emotions akin to those displayed by humans. And they would have argued without any doubt that it was silly to suggest that communities of the other great apes would have ever exhibited such things as reconciliation, empathy and proto-morality.

Human animals • nature • photography
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By Erich Vieth on October 18th, 2009

The nasty brutish “Darwinism” concocted by I-don’t-give-a-crap free-marketers

Many conservatives have a “hate-love relation with biology.” Primatologist Frans De Waal terms this “the first great paradox of the American political landscape” in his new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. In this new book, De Waal has produced another tome of lively writing and thoughtful analysis, reminding us of our exquisite human animal roots. He is out to set the record straight on a gnawing social issue: too many people invoke “evolution” to justify treating each other in contemptuous ways. This has got to stop, because this modern version of “Social Darwinism” paints a highly selective and distorted view of the kind of animals we humans are based on a wildly inaccurate distortion of how natural selection works.

Although I am not even halfway into De Waal’s book, I can see that De Waal has launched a sustained broadside against the commonly expressed perspective that evolutionary theory equates to “social Darwinism,” an approach embraced by many conservatives. The idea of social Darwinism is that “those who make it [successfully in life] shouldn’t let themselves be dragged down by those who don’t.” The idea was championed by British political philosopher Herbert Spencer in the 19th century. Spencer “decried attempts to equalize society’s playing field,” and said of the poor that “the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.” De Waal comments that the business world fully embraces this idea and characterizes competition as a “law of biology” that will improve the human race. We thus have “the second great paradox of the American political landscape”:

Whereas the book found in most American homes and every hotel room urges us on almost every page to show compassion, social Darwinists scoff at such feelings, which only keep major from running its course. Poverty is dismissed as proof of laziness, and social justice as a weakness. Why not simply let the poor perish?

Many of these conservatives embrace the metaphor of the invisible hand, arguing that this invisible hand “will take care of society’s woes.” De Waal notes, however, “the invisible hand . . . did nothing to prevent the appalling survival-of-the-greatest scenes in New Orleans” following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

De Waal’s main message is that we are NOT condemned by nature to treat each other badly. Rather, we have also evolved to be predominantly groupish and peace-loving beings who are well-tuned to look out for each other. Not that we always look out for each other admirably, but there is plenty of reason to conclude that human animals are highly social in an empathetic way. Keep this book handy for the next time someone claims that they don’t need to care about people who are struggling to make it because nature is “dog eat dog.” That approach to life is a cop-out; it is certainly not justified by Darwin’s work.

Community • Cultural Evolution • Evolution • Featured • Good and Evil • Human animals • Meaning of Life • Social justice
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By Erich Vieth on October 17th, 2009

Shiite law and stem cell advances in Iran

While many Americans continue to try to halt embryonic stem cell research, Iranian scientists are forging ahead with this cell research with the aim of curing people suffering from real life medical conditions, especially military veterans who have suffered disabling spinal cord injuries. That is the issue brought front and center by this episode of Frontline. In the Shiite view, the soul enters the embryo only once it is viable–only after viability is can the organism growing in utero be considered a “human being.”

In the U.S., many of us continue to treat stem cells as though they are harvested from organisms that are fully human, even though these embryos lack the biological equipment necessary for any semblance of sentience. As best I can understand the dispute, many of those in the U.S. who oppose embryonic stem cell research consider an embryo to be fully human even though it has merely the potential to someday become a thinking human being. They focus on the potential rather than sentience–on what will someday be rather than what is.

The Iranians, in focusing on viability, illustrate that two versions of religious practices (conservative Muslims and conservative Christians) that both believe in supernatural “souls” and are both conservative look at the exact same thing (embryos) and come to opposite conclusions.

Human animals • Science
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Regulation as a prerequisite to meaningful cooperation
By Erich Vieth on October 08th, 2009

Regulation as a prerequisite to meaningful cooperation

While I was reading up on free market fundamentalism, and I happened across an intriguing article by biologist David Sloan Wilson. As I started reading this article, I was wondering this: Even assuming that a “free market” works wonders in small societies, can societies be scaled up in size guided only by the free market, without formal regulations? D.S. Wilson argues that this is the wrong question. All societies are regulated. The only question is how they are regulated.

D.S. Wilson notes that humans are incredibly cooperative, especially in “small face-to-face groups.” In fact, we regulate each other’s conduct so easily in small groups that “we don’t even notice it.” This gives us the illusion that there is no regulation keeping things in check. All well-functioning groups, large and small, human and non-human, are highly regulated, however. Small groups often seem to work well without formal regulation, but free market fundamentalists (and others) confuse this lack of formal regulation for the total lack of regulation.

This self-organizing ability to function as cooperative groups is “so perfectly natural” because it evolved by a long process of natural selection, in humans no less than bees. By the same token, functioning as large cooperative groups is not natural. Large human groups scarcely existed until the advent of agriculture a mere 10 thousand years ago. This means that new cultural constructions are required that interface with our genetically evolved psychology for human society to function adaptively at a large scale.

Wilson’s approach makes intuitive sense. Throughout the Pleistocene (from about 2 MYA until 10,000 years ago), people lived in small groups. They lacked written language and written laws. They used unwritten techniques (presumably customs, habits, ostracism and various other informal methods of social control and punishment) to coordinate community efforts and punish cheaters. These informal methods worked well enough and long enough that we can now sit here and ponder how well they worked. But just because those ancient forms of regulations weren’t written down doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. And it doesn’t mean that ancient societies weren’t tightly regulated. Just as human households are highly regulated without formal rules, so are small societies. So are non-human societies:

These social preferences go beyond our own species. Cooperation and cheating are behavioral options for all social species, even bacteria, and cooperation survives only to the extent that it is protected against cheating. The eternal conflict between cooperation and cheating even takes place within our own bodies, in the form of genes and cell lineages that manage to game the system at the expense of the organism upon which they depend. We call them diseases, but they are really the failure of a vast system of regulations that enable us to function as organisms as well as we do . . .

What about the eusocial insects, such as ants, wasps and bees? Wilson would argue that a well-functioning hive doesn’t simply happen, and it certainly isn’t driven by something as simplistic as the “self-interest” of individual bees:

[B]ee behavior cannot be reduced to a single principle of self-interest, any more than human behavior. There are solid citizens and cheaters even among the bees, and the cheaters are held at bay only by a regulatory system called “policing” by the biologists who study them.

According to D.S. Wilson, you’ll find regulation (informal or formal) everywhere you find a well-functioning society of living organisms. Further, a human society based merely on individual selfishness can’t self-regulate because we can no longer depend on selfishness to be well-tuned or consistent thanks to Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant destruction of rational choice theory.

Regulation runs a continuum from informal to formal. It is not like regulation itself just showed up for the first time in modern human societies. D.S. Wilson argues that in all large-scale societies, “regulation is required or cooperation will disappear, like water draining from a bathtub.” Without some form of regulation, all societies become rudderless and unproductive. Therefore, there must always be some form of regulation. The question to decide is “What kind of regulation?”

Let there be no more talk of unfettered competition as a moral virtue. Cooperative social life requires regulation. Regulation comes naturally for small human groups but must be engineered for large human groups. Some forms of regulation will work well and others will work poorly. We can argue at length about smart vs. dumb regulation but the concept of no regulation should be forever laid to rest . . . We also need to change the metaphors that guide behavior in everyday life to avoid the disastrous consequences of our current metaphor-guided behaviors. That is why the metaphor of the invisible hand should be declared dead.

I would agree that the “invisible hand” is shorthand for the informal regulations that have been since prehistoric times to facilitate social coordination of small primitive societies. Rather than declaring the “invisible hand” to be dead, though, it might be more accurate to suggest that the “invisible hand” lives on in modern societies, quietly and substantially supplementing our formal regulations. Seen in this way, the “invisible hand,” used in the complete absence of consciously planned social regulations and laws, is not a method for creating or maintaining a complex functioning modern society. Rather, it is the path back to the Pleistocene.

American Culture • Cultural Evolution • Economy • Featured • Human animals • Psychology Cognition
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David Sloan Wilson suggests truth and reconciliation process for the group selection combatants
By Erich Vieth on October 07th, 2009

David Sloan Wilson suggests truth and reconciliation process for the group selection combatants

I’ve repeatedly posted on the concept of “group selection.” One of the biggest proponents of group selection,” David Sloan Wilson, doesn’t believe the concept has had a fair hearing by biologists. He’s got a point. Many of the discussions of group selection theory have been marked by name-calling rather than calm scientific discussion. D.S. Wilson has now taken the unusual step of publishing his defense of group selection in a series of posts at Huffington Post. In the first installment (published December 27, 2008), D.S. Wilson advocates for a “truth and reconciliation” process.

It is precisely because I am such an idealist about science that I am calling for a truth and reconciliation process for group selection. Something has to change. The controversy didn’t need to drag on for decades and it will continue for decades more unless something deliberate is done. The goal is to be constructive–to heal rather than aggravate old wounds. Yet, even healing can be painful, for scientific conflict no less than political conflict. Another reason to initiate a truth and reconciliation process is because group selection is arguably the single most important concept for understanding the nature of politics from an evolutionary perspective.

I learned of D.S.Wilson’s Huffpo series today while attending a lecture by Mark Borello, a historian of science who was giving a talk at Washington University. The title to his talk says it all: “Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection from Darwin to E.O. Wilson.” In the post-talk discussion, a general consensus was reached that the pro- and anti- group selection contingents have been talking past each other for decades, yet it is difficult to sort out why they argue so passionately. Don’t both groups have access to the same facts? The philosophers at today’s talk suspect that the problem is that the different camps come to the debate armed with different conceptions of causation. That seems correct to me too, but . . . still . . . why can’t we see eye to eye? Or, at least, why can’t we agree on what it is we disagree about?

What is the main difficulty with group selection? D.S.Wilson presents it in his second installment at Huffpo:

[C]onsider some standard examples of social adaptations: the good Samaritan, the soldier who heroically dies in battle, the honest person who cannot tell a lie. We admire these virtues and call them social adaptations because they are good for others and for society as a whole–but they are not locally advantageous. Charitable, heroic, and honest individuals do not necessarily survive and reproduce better than their immediate neighbors who are stingy, cowardly, and deceptive.

Do you see the problem? The individuals who exhibit altruism often don’t pass on their genes to the next generation. Their good works, which undoubtedly improve the prospects of the others in their group, often fail to benefit the altruistic individual, evolutionarily speaking.

Most behaviors that we call prosocial require time, energy, and risk on the part of the prosocial individual. Most behaviors that we call antisocial deliver an immediate benefit to the antisocial individual. If most antisocial behaviors are locally advantageous and most prosocial behaviors are locally disadvantageous, then we have an enormous problem explaining the nature of prosociality, including the nature of human morality, from an evolutionary perspective.

The above paragraphs are the background of group selection in a nutshell. The contentiousness of the issue suggests why D.S.Wilson is suggesting a “truth and reconciliation process” rather than a calm review of scientific facts. He has already published 14 installments at Huffpo (you can see the list of links here). Or, if you want to get a big dose all at once, consider reading “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology,” by D.S. Wilson and E.O.Wilson (no relation). It was published in December 2007 by the Quarterly Review of Biology and it can be found online here. BTW, D.S. Wilson’s co-author, eminent entomologist E.O.Wilson, now 80-years old, has made a recent dramatic conversion to group selection, after being a group selection skeptic most of his life. Here is what E.O. Wilson said in an interview published by Discover Magazine:

EOW: I’m taking the idea of kin selection, and I’ve critiqued it. Kin selection is the idea that cooperation arises, especially in the eusocial insects—bees, wasps, ants, termites—because of individuals favoring collateral kin: not just Mom and Dad or your offspring but, just as important, brother, sister, cousin, and so on.

D: So you cooperate with close kin because it helps get some of your shared genetic heritage into future generations.

EOW: I found myself moving away from the position I’d taken 30 years ago, which has become the standard theory. What I’ve done is to say that maybe collateral kin selection is not so important. These ants and termites in the early stages of evolution—they can’t recognize kin like that. There’s very little evidence that they’re determining who’s a brother, a sister, a cousin, and so on. They’re not acting to favor collateral kin. The new view that I’m proposing is that it was group selection all along, an idea first roughly formulated by Darwin.

D: The notion of group selection is heresy, is it not, in the current thinking about evolution?

EOW: Yes. I’m being provocative again, because this is a radical departure.

To jump ahead, the general solution (according to D.S.Wilson and E.O.Wilson) was anticipated by Darwin, and it consists of a

return to the simplicity of the original problem and Darwin’s solution. As Ed Wilson and I put it in our recent review article titled “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology”: Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

This battle over the viability of group selection theory is heating up, just as it has been heating up for decades. This is a fascinating topic for the reasons D.S.Wilson suggests: group selection theory is potentially a powerful tool for understanding those two perenially hot topics: religion and politics.

I’ll be working my way through D.S.Wilson’s Huffpo articles and posting on them from time to time. From my reading of D.S. Wilson’s prior works (including Darwin’s Cathedral), he is a terrific writer and thinker. Even if he can’t hit the grand slam, I’m hoping that he can put his finger on exactly why the opposing camps disagree. That would be a good start, indeed.

Evolution • Featured • Human animals
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Meet Ardipithecus: the newest/oldest member of our family
By Erich Vieth on October 02nd, 2009

Meet Ardipithecus: the newest/oldest member of our family

The current issue of Science introduces us to our oldest known ancestor: Ardipithecus. Coming only after fifteen years of meticulous research by Tim White and his team, this announcement is a cause for celebration for those of us who treasure hard-earned evidence-based knowledge. At Daily Dish, though, Andrew Sullivan introduces Ardipithecus with a disclaimer: “If by any chance you are a fundamentalist Christian, skip this post. You can’t handle the truth.”

I haven’t yet received the issue of Science featuring Ardipithecus, but I am very much on the lookout. In the meantime, Karl Zimmer of The Loom offers a highly readable overview of the newly released findings:

Ardipithecus’s feet were mosaics too. The four little toes were adapted for walking on the ground. Yet the big toe was still opposable, much like our thumbs. This sort of big toe helped Ardipithecus move through the trees much more adeptly than Lucy. But Ardipithecus could not climb through trees as well as, say, chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have lots of adaptations in their arms and shoulders to let them hang from branches and climb vertically up trees with incredible speed. Ardipithecus had hands were not stiffened enough to let them move like chimpanzees. Ardipithecus probably moved carefully through the trees, using its hands and feet all at once to grip branches.

It’s not every day that we push back one-million years further regarding our understanding of our ancestry. This is an extraordinary discovery by Tim White (who was also part of the time who uncovered “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis) in the early 1970’s.

Today, I will revel in the thought that, more than four million years ago, our tree-crawling ancestors were living valiantly and carefully enough to pass on their genes so that we modern house-dwelling (and car-dwelling) humans could scientifically contemplate their way of life. It is all so very bracing . . .

Evolution • Featured • Human animals
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Daniel Dennet discusses “The Computational Perspective” to evolution
By Erich Vieth on September 30th, 2009

Daniel Dennet discusses “The Computational Perspective” to evolution

Edge.org recently posted Daniel Dennett’s discussion of “The Computational Perspective.” At the linked site, you’ll find the video of Dennett’s lecture, along with Dennett’s PowerPoint slides. Dennett’s focus was whether things that are more complex can result from less complex things. Dennett assures us that the answer is yes, and that this is exactly what Darwin demonstrated. darwin-insight-we-dont-need-to-know-how-to-make-machines This same principle was demonstrated by Alan Turing: turing-insight The net result is “competency without comprehension.” For the second half of his talk, Dennett applied this same principle to the magnificent aspects of human culture, including the words of our languages, which have “tremendous replicative power.” culture Dennet concludes that humans are the effect of the purposes of life, not the causes. We tend to project our views back onto nature, and we have the capacity to “discover the reasons everywhere in the tree of life.” Looking forward, we are also “the first intelligent designers of the Tree of Life.” At the this same page at Edge.org, you can also view 45-minute lectures regarding evolution by Alvaro Fischer, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Helena Cronin, Nicholas Humhrey, Ian McEwan.

Cultural Evolution • Evolution • Human animals • Science
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Religious rituals are adaptive BECAUSE they are onerous
By Erich Vieth on September 22nd, 2009

Religious rituals are adaptive BECAUSE they are onerous

As evidenced by various posts at this site, I have long been intrigued by the idea that religious rituals are adaptive in that they constitute expensive displays of group loyalty. I recently found a 2004 article by anthropologist Richard Sosis, who has come to this same conclusion. His article, which was published in 2004 by American Scientist (Volume 92), is entitled “The Adaptive Value of Religious Ritual.” Sosis holds that “rituals promote group cohesion by requiring members to engage in behavior that is too costly to fake.” He thus argues that religious rituals are adaptive in an evolutionary sense.

Sosis begins his article by surveying various tedious or grueling religious rituals. His examples include ultraorthodox Jews who wear stiflingly hot clothing in the hot summer, but it also includes Moonies who shave their heads and “Jain monks of India [who] wear contraptions on their heads and feet to avoid killing insects.” The list also includes various types of surgical alteration including circumcision and Native American religious rituals that include icy baths, and one ritual that requires the person to lie motionless while being bitten by hordes of ants.

The questions raised by these rituals include A) why do people engage in such practices? and B) Is it “rational” to do such things to one’s self? Sosis relies upon the research done by “a new generation of anthropologists” in concluding that

The strangeness of religious practices and their inherent costs are actually the critical features that contribute to the success of religion as a universal cultural strategy . . . To understand this unexpected benefit we need to recognize the adaptive problem that ritual behavior solves.

Culture • Evolution • Featured • Human animals • Religion
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Snoring: The Upshot
By Zoevinly on September 14th, 2009

Snoring: The Upshot

Google “snoring” and you’ll get a flood of how-to advice on how not to, and a lot of reasons to stop. Not surprisingly, the majority of links recalled were advertisements for devices, medications, surgical maneuvers, and their purveyors. In today’s pharm-centered universe, the vibration caused by air traveling through our airways has been pathologized and vilified as the destroyer of otherwise sound relationships.

Not only is it bad for your love life. Snoring is deadly!

According to snoring alarmists, snorers who have the audacity to continue sleeping noisily can look forward to myriad cardiovascular disorders including heart attacks, atherosclerosis, and stroke, marital and erectile dysfunction (chicken-or-the-egg?), drowsiness, lack of focus and…Zzzzzzzzz.

Admittedly, I’m no doctor, but let me suggest that there are some positive effects of snoring (besides the possibility that it keeps you healthy by means of temporary asphyxiation). It’s a much cheaper and more effective method of subjecting those around you to intense jealousy (”Please, please, make him stop so I can lose consciousness ASAP”) than, say, buying a pair of Jimmy Choos. Then again, I don’t usually begrudge those masochists the pain of walking around…

But I digress. If you would rather not invest in a medical solution, you could try banishing the banshee by learning a new instrument. You guessed it: the Didgideroo!

Ah, it’s time for bed. Maybe the lumbering Saint Bernard downstairs will give it a rest so I can, too.

American Culture • Culture • Entertainment • Featured • Health • Human animals • Humor • Medicine • Whimsy
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By Erich Vieth on September 06th, 2009

Intelligence as a display of healthy sperm

Psychologists found a strong correlation between high IQ and healthy sperm, as reported by the U.K. Telegraph:

The research, by the evolutionary psychologist Professor Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, centred around a study of 400 Vietnam War veterans who were put through extensive mental tests and were also asked to provide sperm samples. According to the test results, it was found that men who scored high on a battery of intelligence tests boasted high counts of healthy sperm. Whereas, low scorers tended to have fewer and more sickly sperm.

Miller points out that intelligence is sexually attractive to both sexes, and that intelligence co-evolved with sperm quality to advertise good genes.

Evolution • Human animals • Psychology Cognition
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By Erich Vieth on September 05th, 2009

David Attenborough illustrates the tree of life in six minutes

In this six minute Youtube video, David Attenborough illustrates this deep truth: All Life is Related. This is an especially elegant story these days, where so many people are looking for so many ways to divide humans from the other animals, and to divide many groups of human animals from other groups of human animals.

BTW, for anyone who hasn’t yet viewed any of David Attenborough’s nature DVD’s they are all thought-provoking and beautifully filmed. They aren’t just spectacular videos of animals in the wild; they also contain Attenborough’s elegant descriptions and explanations of what you are viewing. One of Attenborough’s more recent efforts is Planet Earth (a STEAL for $36). I have just ordered, but have not yet viewed his most recent series, Nature’s Most Amazing Events.

Evolution • Human animals • nature
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By Brynn Jacobs on September 03rd, 2009

Guess this author

The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems. See if you can guess who authored this quotation on capitalism vs. socialism: (all emphases are mine)

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals. For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist.

American Culture • Campaign Finance Reform • Consumerism • Cultural Evolution • Current Events • Economy • Education • History • Human animals • Politics • Quotes • Social justice
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Creative denial of mortality as an evolutionary adaptation?
By Erich Vieth on August 26th, 2009

Creative denial of mortality as an evolutionary adaptation?

The August 6, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers) includes a fascinating letter by Ajit Varki, a Professor of Medicine and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at the University of California San Diego, La Jolla.

Varki begins his letter by recognizing some of the unique features of human animals, such as theory of mind, “which enables inter-subjectivity.” These impressive human cognitive abilities might have been positively selected by evolution “because of their benefits to interpersonal communication, cooperative reading, language and other critical human activities.”

Varki then describes his conversations with a geneticist named Danny Brower (now deceased), who was fascinated with the question of why theory of mind emerged only recently, despite millions of years of apparent opportunity. Brower offered Varki a tantalizing explanation for this delay:

[Brower] explained that with the full self-awareness and inter-subjectivity would also come awareness of death and mortality. Thus, far from being useful, the resulting overwhelming fear would be a dead end evolutionary barrier, curbing activities and cognitive functions necessary for survival and reproductive fitness. . . . in his view, the only way these properties could become positively selected was if they emerged simultaneously with neural mechanisms for denying mortality.

In other words, self-awareness is a double-edged sword that tends to kill off (through terror-induced paralysis) those who become too readily self-aware. Therefore, self-awareness evolved together with denial of death–Brower was suggesting that those who became too clearly self-aware would become incapacitated by something of which chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants remain blissfully ignorant: the fact that they will inevitably die.

[caption id="attachment_8722" align="alignright" width="225" caption="Image by Puroticorico at Flickr"]Image by Puroticorico at Flickr[/caption]

Varki suggests that Brower’s idea would not only add to ongoing discussions of the origins of human uniqueness, but it could shed light on many puzzling aspects of human psychology and culture:

[I]t could also steer discussions of other uniquely human “universals,” such as the ability to hold false beliefs, existential context, theories of afterlife, religiosity, severity of grieving, importance of death rituals, risk-taking behavior, panic attacks, suicide and martyrdom.

Perhaps we are simply incapable of viewing life “objectively,” in that evolution has rigged us up with equipment that protects us by deluding us. It seems, then, that the co-evolution of delusion and awareness (if this is the case) dovetails quite well with Terror Management Theory (TMT), which I summarized in a post entitled “We are gods with anuses: another look at “terror management theory”:

The problem is that the evolution of our powerful ability to be conscious made us aware that we are mortal beings and that all of us are heading toward inevitable death. The “solution” is also offered by our highly developed cognitive abilities: we have developed the ability to wall off our cognitively toxic fear of death by “objectifying” our existences and living idealized lives free from fear of death.

Brower and Varki thus suggest that the ability of humans to be extraordinarily aware and curious is too dangerous to be dispensed by evolution in its pure form. Too much knowledge can might be too dangerous. To safely allow the continuation of the species, human awareness might need to be deluded and distorted in ways that account for some of the most baffling “cultural” aspects of what it means to be human.

[caption id="attachment_8721" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Image by Latvian at Flickr (creative commons)"]Image by Latvian at Flickr (creative commons)[/caption]

This approach sounds promising to me, though it also raises many other questions, such as this one: Why are some of us apparently immune from these delusions? Why are some of us much more able to disbelieve claims of gods and afterlives?

Culture • Current Events • Evolution • Featured • Human animals • Neuroscience • Psychology Cognition • Religion
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