The shocking same-ness of human behavior

As a general rule, simple questions, especially simple questions with purportedly obvious answers, are the most interesting questions.

While I attended a wedding this weekend, I noticed all of the sex partners seated together, you know . . . husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends (and a few gay couples).

Why do sex partners sit together at public rituals, I wondered.   The obvious answer is that it’s because most sex partners live together, right?  Other people thus see sex partners as couples and feel that they should be invited to important rituals together, especially to important rites of passage, such as weddings.  But why do so many sex partners live together (and hence get invited to prominent social events as couplets)?  After all, instead of living with her sex partner, maybe a woman would rather live with (and then potentially be invited to go to weddings with) a non-sex partner friend or neighbor, or perhaps even her non-sex-partner plumber or accountant.  Or maybe she’d rather attend public gatherings by herself, so that she could freely mingle.  The norm, however, is obvious to anyone who bothers to scan the crowd at a wedding:  the great majority of people who attend such gatherings attend them as sexually-paired couples.

Someone who followed the SSSM model might say that this behavior (of attending prominent rituals with your spouse) is simply learned, or that it is “social convention” or that it “feels right.”   There is a compelling story that can be told about paternity …

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Check out who’s living in “your” body

You are sitting there smugly thinking that you are in charge of your own body, and that you should be, because it is after all your body.  Well, you’re wrong.

The June 2007 Special Issue of Discover Magazine contains an article called “Your body is a planet.”  This article, written by Josie Glausiusz, recognizes that the average human body has 100 trillion cells. (Remember how much one trillion is?). I would have provided the link for this Discover article, but I did not see it anywhere at the Discover site.

Here’s the money question:  what percentage of those 100 trillion cells contain your DNA?  The answer is only 10%.  The other 90% of the cells in your body belong to “aliens”: bacteria, fungi and other microbes.

Most of the time we share our bodies harmoniously within 90 trillion or so microbes.  But sometimes the arrangement turns contentious, as when bloodsucking bedbugs, fleas and lives in beta, or when herpes simplex or human papillomaviruses cause surface membranes to erupt in nasty pustules or warts.

These “visitors” include athletes foot fungi, Streptococcus sanguis (that resides in dental plaque), vaginal flora, the chickenpox virus that lies dormant (for the most part) near our spinal cords and the one trillion bacteria that live in the average human’s skin.

It is commonly known that helpful bacteria live in the human gut.  Did you know, however, that the average human carries around 3.3 pounds of bacteria in the gut?

I also learned about demodex …

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If you want me to appreciate my ancestors, it’s going to take some time.

My wife and I attended the wedding of a good friend today.  A thoughtful and sometimes light-hearted rabbi presided over the ceremony. 

This ceremony was quite a change of pace from most of the religious weddings I’ve attended.  There was no somber talk about the heavy guilt we bear for being human or how small and pathetically helpless we are, or how we are at the mercy of a God who could crush us for no reason if He wanted.  Instead, the ceremony focused on the interrelationships of the people attending the ceremony.  We were all there to celebrate and support the new marriage as a newly bonded community.  I was really getting into the ceremony, which is unusual for me (I generally prefer empty churches).

Toward the end of the ceremony, the rabbi invited each of us to take a moment to appreciate the sacrifices of our ancestors, to consider all those things our ancestors had done to enable each of us to be standing there today.  Like most people, I started considering the sacrifices made by my parents and grandparents, but that got me thinking about the overwhelming odds that I shouldn’t actually exist at all. 

I shouldn’t exist?  Why would I think that?  Because if my mother had not met my father at the right point in time, and if they had not been amorous at the right time of the right day, the sperm and the egg that became “me” would never have met …

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Gift giving and fashion statements from the viewpoint of human evolution

In his new book, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption (2007), Gad Saad serves as a tour guide, draws connections from human biology to the purchasing decisions of human consumers.  He strongly advocates that no explanation of consumer behavior is complete unless that explanation considers human evolution–we always need to consider “ultimate” explanations as well as “proximate” explanations.  Saad has me sold, and I’m only halfway through his book.  I don’t buy $40 books every day, but this book delves into a topic that fascinates me.  Also, I must’ve felt deep in my bones that buying this book would make me more attractive to potential mates (or something like that). Bottom line: I bought the book, I’m reading every word of it and I’m marking up the margins ferociously.  It is a terrific collection of ideas, collected and presented by Saad, who is a talented writer and thinker.

One section of the book is titled “Gift giving As a Means of Creating and/or Solidifying Bonds.”  I wanted to share some of the ideas from that chapter.

Saad begins by recognizing that the “economic repercussions of the giftgiving ritual are enormous.”  That people are so willing to participate in store sponsored events (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, secretary of state, etc.) “is a testament to our innate drive to engage in a reciprocal exchanges.”  Very few gifts are given without an expectation that something will be coming back in return, someday, courtesy of today’s beneficiary.  Saad gives the example of friends who treat …

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Eating Cakes That Can’t Be Kept

I sometimes shake my head at the futility of debating the dedicated faithful.  By that I do not mean those who are serious about their religion and think it through, but those who attached themselves, limpet-like, to a movement and then abandon all introspection and attack all dissent aimed at…

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