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. Image by Puroticorico at Flickr 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. Image by Latvian at Flickr (creative commons) 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?

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Just A Question Or Three

Just a couple of what seem to me like obvious questions. (I know, I've been writing a bit on the health care debate, and I'll try to do some other things after this, don't want to bore anyone, especially myself.) I see a lot of protesters waving signs that contain something like this: HEALTHCARE REFORM YES, GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER NO. TORT REFORM NOW! Something about that doesn't quite add up. If health care is to be reformed, who is going to do it? The industry isn't, not without a threat. Which means there will have to be something outside the industry doing the threatening. What might that be? Hmm. The government? And the nature of the reform, if it isn't to be entirely self-serving on the part of the industry, will have to be devised by a somewhat disinterested party. Who might that be? The government? And tort law...well, that's, as it says, Law. Which is legislation. Which is---wait for it!--- the government! So what is being asked for here? That the government enact reforms that do not involve the government, do not make use of government authority, do not engage government offices, and will not grant the government any power to enforce. So how will that work exactly? Or is there some third party out there we haven't been told about capable of doing all this reforming? Oh, the market! Which basically is consumers, which is, well, all of us. The people. But wait...isn't the government supposed to be the duly elected voice of the people? So if the people are demanding reform, how are the people supposed to both express such a desire and then implement said reforms? I guess, through their duly elected voice---the government. But if the government is not to be trusted, I guess that means the people aren't to be trusted. The people don't know what they want, what is good for them, or how to go about managing the reforms they've demanded and, somehow, achieved. So there will have to be an appointed body of presumed experts who do know how to manage all this to act on the people's behalf... Who might that be? The industry? Hmm. Well, since it's the industry that needs reforming and the people who have demanded reform, handing management of the reform over to the very thing that needs the reform would seem, well, not to put to fine a point on it, stupid. So I guess we'd have to elect a representative body to manage the reforms. Oh, wait, don't we already have such a body? Yeah, it's the government. So by demanding reform of an industry, it would seem reasonable that we not trust the industry (that already doesn't do what we want it to do) to reform itself. It would be silly to create a whole other body to oversee all this when one already exists that has over two centuries of expertise in doing exactly this sort of thing. So how is anything is going to change otherwise? Just wondering, you know, because some of the demands sort of don't make any sense.

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Stop Discriminating against Sick People!

Stop Discriminating against Sick People! Jonathon Alter was a guest on "the Ed Show" tonight on MSNBC. In a noisy debate with Ed, he said that the goal of healthcare reform should be "to end discrimination against sick people". He said that the path to reform was largely irrelevant. That whether or not there was a public option was largely irrelevant. That healthcare reform is a civil rights issue, and that reform had nothing to do with the mechanics of that reform. To be clear, Mr Alter stated that he was personally very much for a public option. But he was also very clear that regardless of the public option, this reform needed to pass. I agree with Jonathon. Discrimination against sick people must stop. Discrimination against people with 'pre-conditions' must stop. Discrimination against people, must stop. It's time to act. Call your congressman. Enact healthcare reform.

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Hitler and the Dining Room Table

I like Barney Frank. He says what he feels, usually in a way that makes his argument better. But it's almost a no-brainer to do a comeback on the idiocy with which he was faced in Dartmouth, Massachussetts this past week. I mean, what do you say to someone who thinks it's a valid statement to compare Obama to Hitler? A woman carrying a poster with Obama's image modified with a Hitlerian mustache stepped up to the microphone to ask why Frank supports a Nazi policy. There are so many things wrong with this it boggles the mind where to begin. Frank's response was probably the most effective. "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" he asked. Then: "Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table." He then commented that her freedom to carry that poster and make such lamebrained statements was a tribute to the First Amendment and Freedom of Speech. I salute his restraint. To compare any president of the United States to Hitler is a stretch, even with the likes of Obama's predecessor. (I might consider it for Cheney, but even he does not match the level of malignancy achieved by Adolph, nor does our system allow for such people to act with unrestrained impunity, hard as that might be for some to accept.) But to compare Barack Obama to the man man of the 20th Century is such a profoundly ignorant mischaracterization that it is tempting to write off this whole experiment in potential civilization as a failure. Where does this shit come from? The Republican Party, what is left of it, is grasping at straws, sinking in the quicksand of its own inanity. We must take care to not be pulled into the quagmire in some misguided attempt to rescue it through well-intentioned but doomed bipartisan sentiments. The Republican Party has devolved into a nasty cadre of ideologues, a shrinking room of hydrophobic screechers who claw and scratch at anyone who tries to do this country a service by bringing it back to some semblance of decency. They have fed on their own conspiracy-fevered viscera for so long that they cannot even hear the words much less the sentences of opposing viewpoints. We should perhaps let them sink and drown. It would be a kindness. The fear-mongering is reminiscent of everything we've seen since 2000. Rachel Maddow, who is one of the most able of contemporary analysts on television, shows the process and the connections here. Shouting, screaming, inane blather---noise filling the spaces in which rational discourse might take place if only the decibel level could be reduced. Platitudes, sloganeering, slander, and lies are flooding these so-called town hall meetings and shoving aside reason and discovery and thought. These are not people who are interested in understanding anything, they are people bent on stopping something they've been told---been told---they should not allow.

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People bringing guns to locations of Obama speeches. NRA: no comment

The AP reports that increasing numbers of people are bringing guns to locations of Obama speeches. These well-armed citizens include several with assault-type weapons. The article ends with the reporters note that the National Rifle Association offered "no comment." I'm just amazed that it is legal to hang around near a high-profile political event with a gun. Next thing you know, the Supreme Court is going to declare bearing weapons as a form of speech.

Continue ReadingPeople bringing guns to locations of Obama speeches. NRA: no comment