Goosebumps: Another Vestigial Feature from our Former Furry Pre-Human Selves

Why do humans have goosebumps? The question was answered by an article titled, "Why Do People Get Goosebumps" at Discovery Magazine. Short answer: Our goosebumps are a vestigial feature. Some humans have vestigial tails and some have vestigial gills. All humans are filled with evidence from our fish ancestors as well as our reptilian ancestors.  Neil Shubin explored many of these features in his book, Your Inner Fish (also made into a documentary).

The goosebumps pop up to lift the fur that no longer covers us. Why would our furry ancestors survive better with fur that lifted up? "Hair-raising goosebumps are also a response to threats, which would have made our ancestors appear larger and scarier. Just imagine a cat or dog when the fur is about to fly. Their puffed up hair is an indication that they’re ticked off and are in fight-or-flight mode."

That’s why you might get chills from pretty innocuous stuff, like going to a concert. A screaming crowd alone is enough trigger our goosebump reaction.

“Your emotional brain … is like a tiny, scared rabbit in the forest. It expects death around every corner. So a crowd screaming will sound just like that — something that we should be scared of,” Colver said.

And often, it’s the music itself that gives us the chills. According to Colver, certain instruments, tempos and pitches are known to cause these skin orgasms. An unexpected or particularly resonant sound can initiate our fight-or-flight response.

“Loud noises, or piercing noises (like a sustained high note played on a violin) get interpreted as really threatening,” he said.

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Zoofari at the St. Louis Zoo

Lions have often been spotted only a few miles from my house.

I live in St. Louis, Missouri, where we have a rather excellent zoo that offers free admission to everyone. Today my daughter and I took our cameras to the St. Louis Zoo, which is only about four miles from my home. Here's one of the lions that is often spotted:

We also enjoyed watching apes interacting with sea lions:

Here are some of my chimpanzee pics. Whenever I see the chimps grooming, I think of Robin Dunbar's (persuasive) arguments that human gossip serves the same purpose as chimpanzee grooming.

If you click on the title, you will be taken to the full post, where you can view a gallery of these and other photos from today, Zoofari.

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Parents, Plants and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

Life has been too good to me recently, filling me with more upbeat energy than usual. That type of good fortune can make it difficult to sit still and concentrate on my work, so yesterday I took my monkey-mind for a brisk walk to the Missouri Botanical Garden. I then meditated while sitting on a park bench in front of a huge tree. I didn’t know that this big tree would trigger vivid thoughts about my parents and my attraction to dangerous ideas.

My dad was an engineer who designed weapons of war for McDonnell-Douglas. Now deceased, he was proud of his ability to analyze problems and to come up with answers, even when he was considering life’s heaviest mysteries. He also embraced many of the pat answers offered by his religion and repeatedly tried to shame me into accepting them, which led to the extremely strained relationship I had with him.

My mom is very much alive and, at age 87, she still lives independently. She did not work outside of the home, was not hardened by the outside world, and was not comfortable challenging the arguments and lectures my dad launched from his seat at the family kitchen table. Far from those dinnertime arguments between her husband and her teenage son, however, she allowed her mind to freely explore ideas based on a rather unfettered sense of curiosity. My mom often asked me simple questions around the house, not realizing that simple questions would be the ones most likely to challenge my comforting inner narratives and presumptions. Simple questions can even be dangerous.

Friedrich Nietzsche recognized that truth is dangerous and that it took courage to determine what is true. Are you willing to question your most basic beliefs? For Nietzsche, real philosophizing was a demanding and dangerous endeavor that many people simply cannot endure.

From her perspective, my mom simply asked questions about things that seemed interesting, like “What is time?” Or “Is more always better?” Or “What if the beliefs of Buddhism are correct?” To this day, she looks puzzled whenever I thank her for being such a free-thinker (which she was, well before that term became popular). Regardless, her dangerous questions took root in me and they prepared me to appreciate many of the extraordinary aspects of life’s “ordinary” things. Her questions were probably a big reason why I majored in philosophy and psychology and, ultimately, created my website, Dangerous Intersection. [More . . . ]

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Stinky Farts, Stinky Thoughts

The impeachment hearings offer daily fodder to those who struggle to understand how the human mind works. Many people keep expressing frustration about the lies being told by the politicians. That raises the question: Did the brain evolve as a truth-seeking organ? What if the brain's main function is survival, not truth? What if the brain's main function centers on the "Four F's": Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting and Reproduction?  What if Truth is only a fragile, occasional, happenstance by-product of the brain's main evolved function?

That brought this Scientific American article front and center: "Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are? Do we perceive reality as it is?" Here's an excerpt:

One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one's mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or verdical, model of the world. Now a new theory . . . is garnering attention . . . Grounded in evolutionary psychology, it is called the interface theory of perception (ITP) and argues that percepts act as a species-specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and reproduction, not truth.

Lindsey Graham is now taking the position that the Impeachment is improper because not actual crimes were committed. The Democrats then carted out Graham's 1999 video where he said the opposite.  Every human being watching this drama unfold knows all of the following with a certainty:

  1. Graham meant what he said in 1999.
  2. Graham means the opposite today.
  3. Graham won't have much trouble doing some mental gymnastics to justify both positions.
  4. If a Democrat is impeached in the near future, Graham will revert to his 1999 position.

How is it possible for Graham to justify these diametrically opposite positions? The function of the human brain is well beyond my understanding, of course.  At this time, I would simply point out that one's own farts smell OK, whereas the farts of others are unpleasant. There's actually some science on why our own farts smell OK. I would simply extrapolate: Both our farts and our own dysfunctional thoughts get free passes.  Why?  Because they are our farts and our thoughts, not those of others.  And where our entire tribe farts, that's OK too, because it's our tribe and not some other tribe. Our crappy thoughts constitute our theories, meaning that the confirmation bias kicks in like a powerful optical illusion to help us ignore conflicting evidence.

Hypocrisy is an ancient problem, of course.  It goes back at least to biblical times:

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; ... You hypocrite! First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.

This hypocrisy continues to modern times:

Morality is difficult. As [psychologist Johnathan] Haidt writes on his website, "It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth. It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups. . . . Morality binds and blinds. The metaphor [Haidt] uses to describe this idea is that we are 90 percent chimp 10 percent bee. That is to say, though we are inherently selfish, human nature is also about being what he terms "groupish."

The hypocrisy we are witnessing might be a little less distressing to the extent that we can accept the fact that the brain did not evolve for truth, but rather for assimilating resources to assist survival, utilizing the power of one's tribe whenever useful. If we can wrap our heads around this scary fact that the brain is much more geared for social power than truth, the impeachment hearings are nothing extraordinary. These hearings are merely more episodes of watching people gathered in tribes fighting for evolutionary fitness.

That said, this is an enormous and distressing price to pay in exchange for understanding.  But maybe it's . . . . true.   Maybe those moments where human minds transcend daily survival pressures to seek consistent principled truth are extraordinarily precious moments that need to be noted and celebrated.  Maybe we will never have a society based on truthful principles unless we work hard together.

Nietzsche pointed that being able to see truthfully is a moral issue. He wrote that one is truthful only to the degree that one is courageous. Maybe those fragility of those moments where people work hard and self-critically to embrace truth should remind us to appreciate what we have when politicians show the moral courage to act on principle.

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My Awkward Love Letter to Plants

This morning I pretended I lived in a world without any plants.  I pretended I was an inventor.

My first client asked me to invent something she called “plants.” She was entirely concerned with function, not aesthetics. She had some very demanding requirements. Each of these living things would be rooted to one position for their entire lives. They would not be able to move. I said, “Oh, like sponges . . . ” She corrected me: “No, sponges are animals like you!” She handed me information showing how plants differ from animals, though there are many similarities too, since all plants and all animals have common eukaryote ancestors.

At first, I was relieved that my task was to design only plants, not animals, because this would save me a lot of work. There will be no need to design locomotion, vision, migration or hunting behaviors. There would not be a need for any sort of biologically expensive brain that would offer neural plasticity, the ability for an individual plants to learn. A bit more thinking made me realize that this was going to be incredibly difficult. How does one design the ability for organisms to survive day to day when they are stuck in one place? The more I thought about this project, the more daunting it seemed. [More . . . ]

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