Evolutionary Psychology's topics - tribe.net

interview with e.o. wilson

automatthew — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 23:29:07 GMT

an excellent interview with e.o. wilson...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4975549474851602314&q=evolutionary+psychology&ei=V0V1SMTVNJ6sqgOD_5CeCw

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 17 replies

music to thy ears....

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:06:45 GMT

I thought this was an interesting article (as per norm from BBC)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8174000/8174534.stm

as are these you tube vids

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bt9xBuGWgw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s

since the appreciation of music offers no obvious evolutionary advantage what might it's psycological benefit be?

I zuppose the starting point is us humans.. why do we make but more to the point enjoy music and would the same reasons apply to other species?

perhaps the word 'enjoy' rather loads the question since the ability to enjoy, to appreciate a thing subjectively, to see or hear beauty, to get 'fun' out of it is surely an indicator of intelligence?

similarly why should we suppose that the trait is ancient? could appreciation of music instead be a consequence of recent cognative evolution? afterall animals, and in particular apes, have been studied for a long time and one would have thought that such a trait would have been noticed before...

anyway... wat you bunch of pscho's think?

regards

GM23

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

is laziness genetic? reply, if you're not too... lazy

blue-j — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:20:18 GMT

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827106,00.html?cnn=yes

all right you bum, get off your ass and share your thoughts on laziness!

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 20 replies

Study finds Generation Y narcissism at record level

cortelyou — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:13:21 GMT

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070227/ap_on_re_us/self_centered_students

---

Luckily I'm so special this doesn't apply to me...

Interesting that they claim it affects a person's capacity for empathy.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 7 replies

Creationists declare war over the brain

Krampus — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:49:04 GMT

Creationists declare war over the brain
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/brain/mg20026793.000-creationists-declare-war-over-the-brain.html

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 5 replies

the evolution of kissing

blue-j — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 06:35:01 GMT

immunity coalitions? birdy-style foodsharing gone sweet? what are your thoughts on the evolution of kissing? some go so far as to say it's not a natural act and was invented by the romans!

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 6 replies

sexual orientation thread 2

automatthew — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:30:04 GMT

since we got so off-topic on the other sexual orientation thread i thought i'd start another one. i just ran across this fun little blog post about the possible genetic causes of male homosexuality.

http://dearscience.org/2008/06/25/wait-why-are-there-gay-men/

there's also the podcast which is a bit more detailed.

http://podcasts.thestranger.com/dear_science/

he talks about that paper you mentioned blue-j, the one that statistically supported the sexually antagonistic selection explanation.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 49 replies

burning man theme 2009: EVOLUTION!

blue-j — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:43:13 GMT

http://www.burningman.com/art_of_burningman/bm09_theme.html

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

baby talk

blue-j — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:20:50 GMT

i just wrote a blog gesturing at some possible meanings of behavior among couples related to testing for child-rearing capacities:

http://people.tribe.net/blue-j/blog/93735f4d-4a62-4cec-adf7-bd0e8bf5d1ce

what do you think of these conjectures? anyone know of research in this area to support or deny the ideas?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

The Biology of Sexual Orientation

cortelyou — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:30:29 GMT

http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/MagArticle.cfm?Article=767&PageID=0

What determines sexual orientation? What makes a person gay, bisexual, or straight? These sort of questions hold an undeniable interest to the general public and the answers are still hotly debated both by the experts in the field and by society at large. There are some powerful reasons for this universal appeal: First, the vast majority of us have experienced in the course of our lives some sort of sexual attraction toward other human beings, and this attraction in turn exerts a powerful influence in our mood, our behavior, our social interactions, and on the image that we have of ourselves. Since this plays such a key role in our lives, it is only natural that we would be interested in knowing at some point about its origins, and why we are oriented only toward people with certain characteristics and not others.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 166 replies

bisexual species: unorthodox sex in the animal kingdom

blue-j — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:56:29 GMT

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=bisexual-species

i find myself rather confused by this statement in the article: "animals may engage in same-sex couplings... to maintain fecundity when opposite-sex partners are unavailable." ummm, am i missing the meaning of the term "fecundity"? driscoll says it a couple times in the article, and i can't understand what the hell she means by it.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

Church provides hope of faithful spouses

Krampus — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 14:01:42 GMT

Church provides hope of faithful spouses

* 20 June 2008

WHY do people go to church? According to Jason Weeden at Arizona State University, Tempe, it is to go forth and multiply.

After analysing questionnaire responses from more than 22,000 mainly Christian Americans, Weeden and his colleagues found that factors related to sex showed the strongest links to churchgoing. These include marital status, number of children, preferred family size, and moral views on topics like cheating and contraception. Other variables that have often been linked to religiosity such as age, gender or conscientiousness failed to explain church attendance, after controlling for differences in sexual and family values (Evolution and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.03.004).

Weeden suggests that looking for partners within a religious community reduces the risk of adultery in couples adopting a monogamous, high-fertility mating strategy as there is a large fitness cost if the marriage fails: men risk losing substantial investment if the woman cheats; women risk being abandoned with a large brood and fewer resources to care for them.

"Religious groups make this deal more plausible to both partners," Weeden says. "You surround yourself with people who strongly believe that one of the worst things you can do is to abandon your spouse or sleep around."

For Weeden, mating preferences are at the very core of religious choices – and can even drive them.

"Hardly any of the students in our study were regular churchgoers," he says, "but those who saw themselves as having many kids in stable marriages were the ones who were anticipating regular church attendance in the future."

From issue 2661 of New Scientist magazine, 20 June 2008, page 22
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19826615.200-church-provides-hope-of-faithful-spouses.html

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

evolution of music?

lennyshirose — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:17:28 GMT

The evolution of music
Josh McDermott

In the second of a nine-part essay series, Josh McDermott explores the origins of the human urge to make and hear music.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7193/full/453287a.html

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 4 replies

Not Unique Anymore

Krampus — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:24:38 GMT

Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals
17:11 22 May 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Kate Douglas
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn13860-six-uniquely-human-traits-now-found-in-animals-.html?feedId=online-news_rss20

1. Culture
2. "Mind reading"
3. Tool use
4. Morality
5. Emotions
6. Personality

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 1 reply

group selection

blue-j — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:24:18 GMT

come on, what's the hubbub? the currency of inheritance is almost always the gene, and sometimes a gene is affected via a group all at once. what's the controversy here? big deal. the gene is the bottom-line unit of selection, but genes can be affected simultaneously among different bodies in different copies. isn't that the deal? david sloan wilson drives me a little batshit, frankly, and dawkins seems not ready to give an inch on his "the gene is the unit of selection" mantra. dawkins is right, but genes can be selected for via groups. just what in the hell is the big controversy about here? sorry to bring this up yet again. just saw sloan wilson's presentation at beyond belief 2, and was irritated.

http://thesciencenetwork.org/BeyondBelief2/watch/

his is supposedly a direct rejoinder to dennett's presentation, but really doesn't amount to one.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 2 replies

man caves

blue-j — Tue, 20 May 2008 02:23:52 GMT

this gave me a hearty laugh!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/homestyle/05/15/free.mancave/index.html

comments?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 2 replies

evolutionary psychiatry

blue-j — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:02:18 GMT

please take some time and listen to this intriguing presentation about applying evolutionary approaches to psychiatry and ideas about mental illness:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2008/2217264.htm

your thoughts?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

is caring for the poor "un-Darwinian"?

blue-j — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:07:29 GMT

"[T]here are two reasons why we need to take Darwinian natural selection seriously. Firstly, it is the most important element in the explanation for our own existence and that of all life. Secondly, natural selection is a good object lesson in how NOT to organize a society. As I have often said before, as a scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But as a citizen and a human being, I want to construct a society which is about as un-Darwinian as we can make it. I approve of looking after the poor (very un-Darwinian). I approve of universal medical care (very un-Darwinian). It is one of the classic philosophical fallacies to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'." - Dawkins, "Lying for Jesus"

http://richarddawkins.net/article,2394,Lying-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins

what do you think? are caring for the poor and universal health care "very un-Darwinian"? why is altruism of this kind being considered un-Darwinian by dawkins?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 24 replies

Human behaviour: Punisher pays

lennyshirose — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:18:29 GMT

from the latest Nature (Nature 452 (20 March 2008))

Human behaviour: Punisher pays

Manfred Milinski & Bettina Rockenbach

Abstract

The tendency of humans to punish perceived free-loaders, even at a cost to themselves, is an evolutionary puzzle: punishers perish, and those who benefit the most are those who have never punished at all.

Humans are champions of cooperation. Reciprocity — the idea that, if I help you this time, you'll help me next time1 — is a secret of our success. But how do I avoid being the sucker when someone I've helped refuses to pay me back? Social-dilemma games, which in the laboratory mimic human social interactions, have shown that the opportunity to punish is an effective curb on 'defectors', even when punishment not only hurts the punished, but also the punisher. We see that kind of behaviour outside the laboratory too: bystanders suffer personal injury intervening in altercations; environmental activists risk their lives fighting destructive acts; and so on.

On page 348 of this issue, Dreber et al. quantify who profits from this 'costly punishment'. Their findings are intriguing. Although costly punishment induces cooperation, its cost destroys all gains from increased cooperation, not just for the punisher, but for the whole group. At the end of the game, those who punished were the ultimate losers; the absolute winners had never punished. Explaining why costly punishment is used at all, if not even the group seems to benefit, becomes even more of a challenge.

The authors used a variant of the classic two-person 'prisoner's dilemma' game, in which players have a binary choice of cooperation or defection. If I cooperate with you, I lose one unit of money so that you gain two; if I defect, I gain one unit and you lose one. That way, if we both cooperate, each of us has a net gain of one unit. If we both defect, neither of us gains anything; so cooperation pays. But if you cooperate and I defect, I gain three units and you lose two. That makes defection tempting for most people, and cooperation generally breaks down at some point in a prisoner's dilemma game. A strategy that emerges is 'tit-for-tat'7: players begin cooperatively, and then copy their partner's last move, cooperating with cooperators and defecting with defectors — thus avoiding being the sucker.

In Dreber and colleagues' extension of this game6, participants could choose from three options in each round: cooperate, defect or punish. Punishment here means losing one money unit so that the other player loses four. There are thus two ways of expressing disapproval: the moderate way of defection, and the harsh way of costly punishment. Subjects made use of the harsher option in 7% of all choices. A single punishment act rarely re-established cooperation; indeed, it often led to mutual back-stabbing. But overall, cooperation increased from 21% in the prisoner's dilemma game, used by the authors as a control, to 52%, although the tit-for-tat strategy was an option in either case.

A success story, one might think. Not for the punishers: the more a player had used the punishment option, the lower that individual's final profit was. The final, aggregated pay-off of all participants (quantifying the benefit to society as a whole) was the same in the games with and without the punishment option.

If both punishers and the punished lose through punishment, someone must have profited. Indeed: cooperators who did not punish at all gained even more in the games where punishment was possible than the best-performing participants in the control. Thus, it would seem, winners don't punish; and punishers perish

Dreber et al. conclude that costly punishment is a 'maladaptive' behaviour in social-dilemma situations — one that is fundamentally counterproductive, because it pays off neither for the punisher nor for the group. Thus, although it frequently induces cooperation, it can't have evolved for inducing cooperation. Not even the cooperation-enhancing effect appears consistently in social-dilemma games. In some societies, not only free-loaders but also high contributors are punished, which dampens and sometimes even removes the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment.

Dreber et al. argue that punishment has evolved for another purpose, such as coercing individuals into submission, or establishing dominance hierarchies. But the fact remains that, given the choice, players of social-dilemma games have been shown to prefer an environment where punishment is possible. That preference pays off when participants, punishers as well as non-punishers, enter this environment after the initial period of high punishment is over and cooperation dominates.

If costly punishment is detrimental to personal evolutionary fitness in a certain situation, we should have evolved the ability to suppress it in that context. Evidence that we have comes from ultimatum games, in which one player decides how to split a sum of money, and the second player can either accept the offer (in which case both players receive the proposed share) or reject it (in which case neither player wins anything). Neurological tests have shown that humans have a stronger activation of brain areas related to both emotion and cognition when unfair offers in an ultimatum game come from other humans than when the same offers, and monetary consequences, come from a computer9. Similarly, in experiments where subjects could choose between costly punishment of the free-loaders and helping cooperative players to gain, costly punishment was reduced to a third; the few remaining punishing acts were concentrated on the worst defectors. In our view, this ability to reduce the use of costly punishment makes it unlikely that it is just an unavoidable by-product of something else, such as an inability to control anger.

To provide punishers with an overall net benefit, costly punishment must be greatly rewarded in another context. Perhaps punishers gain a special kind of reputation that is advantageous elsewhere. But so far, there has been no conclusive evidence for such a delayed pay-off, and so costly punishment remains one of the most thorny puzzles in human social dilemmas. Dreber and colleagues' results make it plain that we are still a long way from understanding the dark side of human sociality.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 3 replies

suicide bombers -- termites, ants, and humans

blue-j — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:00:44 GMT

"....[M]any termite workers defecate so violently that they eviscerate or their guts literally explode, spewing out noxious materials onto their enemies. This phenomenon is called dehiscence, and some termites have especially enlarged abdomens, full of nasty chemicals, ready to dehisce. The termite, of course, dies some time afterwards. Autothysis is a similar strategy, but in this case frontal glands in the head or thorax are enlarged and erupt explosively, releasing noxious chemicals in a similar way."
http://cronodon.com/BioTech/Insect_Society.html

here's the best citation i could find about it:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/m727aywa4mdf04ln/

C. Bordereau, A. Robert, V. Van Tuyen & A. Peppuy (1997). Suicidal defensive behavior by frontal gland dehiscence in Globitermes sulphureus Haviland soldiers (Isoptera). Insectes Sociaux 44 (3): 289–297.

also, in ants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camponotus_saundersi

"Camponotus saundersi is a species of ant found in Malaysia.
It has a defensive behavior of self-destructing. Two oversized, poison-filled mandibular glands run the entire length of the ant's body. When combat takes a turn for the worse, the ant violently contracts its abdominal muscles to rupture its body and spray poison in all directions."

The Chemistry of Exploding Ants, Camponotus SPP. (Cylindricus COMPLEX)
T. H. Jones, D. A. Clark, A. A. Edwards, D. W. Davidson, T. F. Spande and R. R. Snelling
Journal of Chemical Ecology , Volume 30, Number 8 / August, 2004

i'm going to seek these articles, and begin consideration of the pressures and relationships that have lead to the evolution of this strategy. i suppose it's not really all that perplexing, but fascinating nonetheless.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

war and peace

blue-j — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 04:38:24 GMT

is war an outmoded modality borne of EEA desperation? is it a sensible behavior that should remain an option? is the global information economy going to make it obsolete? why do other species do war? why do we?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 39 replies

enron vs. google: EP and corporate culture

blue-j — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:59:49 GMT

i just read an interesting article by michael shermer that has me interested in his new book:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=do-all-companies-have-to-be-evil

http://www.michaelshermer.com/the-mind-of-the-market/

the article is a quick read, if you'd like to give it a try and talk about it!

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

Scientists and Personal Belief Management

Krampus — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:11:15 GMT

Soon in my Intro. to Phil class I will be teaching C.S. Lewis's essay "On Obstinacy in Belief". In it he argues that scientists at home do not employ the same epistemic standards as they do as scientists at work; specifically, scientists at home do not proportion their beliefs to the evidence at hand. Lewis is primarily speaking here in the context of human relationships. My question to the group: Is this true, in general? I ask this here because some of you are practicing scientists.

Note of interest: Two of the CalSci Math professors depicted in the show Numb3rs do, explicitly, apply the scientist at work standards to their personal lives. They are using decision theory to determine if they should live together.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 10 replies

you lying piece of shit!

blue-j — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 04:58:25 GMT

lies lies lies. we lie so much we don't even call them lies anymore; only the really obvious ones are "lies."

you're projecting, jeff! not me, i strive to be honest! what are you trying to say?

robert trivers, biologist extraordinaire, introduced the notion of the evolution of deception and self-deception in the first introduction to dawkins' "selfish gene."

If deceit, he wrote, ''is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray-by the subtle signs of self-knowledge-the deception being practiced.'' Thus, the idea that the brain evolved to produce ''ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naive view of mental evolution.'' We've evolved, in other words, to delude ourselves so as better to fool others-all in the service of the great game of propagating our genes.

what say you of these claims? can you answer honestly?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 25 replies

Are there such things as "genetic errors"?

Jonathan — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:49:17 GMT

And should we try to fix them? Or is that "playing God"? Disrespecting those people with such a genome?

I'm reminded of the congenitally deaf couple who *deliberately* had a child with congenital deafness.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1916462.stm

Was this child abuse?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 28 replies

postmodern critical theory vs. evolutionary psychology

automatthew — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 04:55:20 GMT

hey all,

i just wrote this paper about a conversation between a feminist critical theorist and an evolutionary psychologist and thought i would share. and i thought it might spark a discussion about the relationship between an evolutionary perspective on human behavior and cognition and the larger intellectual projects of a social science pre-occupied with subjectivity.

Matthew: Hello everyone! Welcome to our show. As you know every week we invite two scholars who hold opposing viewpoints on a particular issue to come on the show and enlighten us with their discussion. This week we have David Buss, professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and Sandra Bartky, professor emeritus of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Buss is a prominent voice in the growing field of evolutionary psychology, an approach to psychology that tries to understand behavior and cognition through the lens of evolved solutions to particular adaptive problems. Professor Bartky is a prominent voice in the field of feminist philosophy and has made great contributions to feminist thought in her critique of “femininity” through a post-structuralist approach to the problem of “feminine” embodiment. Today we will be discussing the bodily practices that women go through to shape their bodies according to standards of beauty. I’d like to start off with a general discussion of how you both think one should approach this issue. Professor Bartky, why don’t we start with you?

Bartky: Well, I think that Foucault provides us with a very effective access point to understand what’s going on here. According to Foucault, we are living in a society that has been profoundly shaped by a historical trend toward an ever-greater scrutiny and disciplining of the body. In particular, through social institutions like schools, hospitals, prisons, and factories bodies entered into this great machinery of power that dominated them, penetrated them, and coerced them into docility. What is historically novel about the period that we’re living in now is that this power has entered into our bodies, shaping not just the product of our labor or enforcing deference but how we live in and experience our bodies. What Foucault does not do is distinguish between the way that these structures of power have penetrated and shaped the bodies of men and women differently. I think that this issue of women shaping their bodies according to an unattainable physical ideal is really an example of this, the particular way that this process of bodily discipline is directed at women.

Buss: Well, obviously I disagree. In trying to understand human behavior and cognition I start from the point of view that human beings are organisms that are the way that they are because they have evolved to solve adaptive problems. Indeed, every animal, including humans, that is alive today is alive because every single one of its ancestors was successful at solving the adaptive problem of passing on their genetic material before they died, and all the host of problems that needed to be solved to get to that point. This series of successes has shaped the human organism to be successful, i.e. to solve adaptive problems. Behavior and cognition cannot be separated from this organizing principle of traits that have evolved to solve adaptive problems. Indeed, any complex characteristic of any organism must exist because it has evolved to solve an adaptive problem. That’s because the selection of traits that are adaptive is the only way that complexity can arise in organisms. The chance that something as complex as a hand or an eye could come together by random mutations is infinitesimal. The only process that exists, or at least that we are aware of, that is capable of organizing a complex set of traits into something that performs a function is the natural selection of adaptive traits. And the mind is certainly both surpassingly complex and very functional. Moreover, the mind could not have evolved to be a general-purpose learning device that would function as a tabula rasa upon which culture can be arbitrarily inscribed. In terms of the computational power that it would take to do all the numerous things that humans do, to solve the numerous adaptive problems that humans have to solve to function, a general-purpose learning device simply could not perform. In order to perform the way that the mind demonstrably performs it must be composed of a set of psychological mechanisms that solve particular adaptive problems. These psychological mechanisms are themselves highly complex aspects of our brains that must have been individually selected for. I think that much of the behavior that we are talking about in terms of women shaping themselves toward an ideal is the result of psychological mechanisms designed for mate attraction. What could be more central to reproductive fitness then mate attraction?

Matthew: Thank you both for that introduction to your theoretical commitments. Let’s get down to the specifics of the practices that we’re talking about here. Professor Bartky, why don’t you start off by responding to Professor Buss’ statement?

Bartky: Well, that doesn’t really make sense to me David; it seems to me that the practices that we are looking at are not universal but culturally and temporally specific. As I said above, there really does seem to be a difference between the way that bodies are being shaped by power in the past two hundred years or so and the way that they were shaped five hundred or a thousand years ago, much less in pre-historical societies fifty or a hundred thousand years ago. If an explanation based on evolved propensities for behavior really has the explanatory power that you say that it does then where is this shift coming from and why does it fit so well with the particularities of the way that women’s bodily practices are shaped by this feminine ideal? Also, not only the way that women’s bodied are disciplined to conform to the ideal but the ideal itself has changed. Previously in western culture massiveness and abundance was valued in women’s bodies, large breasts and round hips defined the feminine. Today the fashion in women’s bodies is small, lithe, small-breasted, taut, and narrow hipped. There seems to have been a shift toward an almost pubescent and infantilized ideal of femininity away from a more adult, mature, and realistic ideal. In general, styles of the female figure seem to vary across time and cultures; they reflect cultural obsessions and preoccupations in a way that we do not fully understand. But on one level these obsessions and preoccupations seem inherently arbitrary and not subject to an overarching logic, they are historically and contextually specific.

Buss: Well, I don’t know that there has been as much variability as you’re suggesting Sandra. Many aspects of such complex cultural practices might have changed, the details of traditions and images and symbols across cultures are certainly highly variable. But nevertheless I think it’s pretty clear that there are certain basic foundational aspects of behavior associated with mate attraction that are not particularly variable, but are rather transcultural and very ancient, not limited to a particular culture or period. In particular, emulating youth has remained a constant practice throughout history and across cultures and is clearly linked to male selection of fitness for bearing children and raising them to independence. In an ancient hunter-gatherer environment where extreme hazards are common, protection from the environment is minimal, and medical care is essentially non-existent life spans were very short by modern standards and accidental mortality was very high. Moreover, girls become fertile at a very early age relative to our current cultural norms of adolescence and late childhood and certainly became pregnant at an early age in the environment where such an early pubescence evolved. In this kind of environment a young person is hugely more likely to be able to survive not only bearing a child but also living long enough to ensure it survives to an age where it can pass on its genes. That fact would create a powerful selective force for men to try to impregnate younger women as their genetic material would thus have a much higher chance of being passed on. These are powerful reasons for believing that men have an innate drive toward women who are younger. And thus women, who are also shaped by the likelihood of their genes being passed on, would be shaped by the need to solve the adaptive problem created by men’s preference for younger women. A woman who appears to be younger would have a higher chance of attracting a mate and thus passing on their genes. Despite the variability in the details of feminine ideals across cultures and periods there does seem to be an overarching emphasis on youth that fits in very well with this perspective.

Matthew: Perhaps it would be helpful if we moved this discussion toward an analysis of specific examples? It would be helpful if you could give an example of what exactly you mean by a bodily practice Professor Bartky.

Bartky: Well, one example of the depths to which this discipline has penetrated women’s bodies and bodily practices is the advice of M.J. Saffron, an “international beauty expert,” on facial exercises that are meant to eliminate wrinkles, erase frown lines, smooth the forehead, raise hollow cheeks, banish crow’s feet, and tighten the muscles under the skin. Thus the normal and expressive contours of a woman’s face subvert the disciplinary project of bodily perfection and come under disciplinary control. This really shows what Foucault is talking about when he describes the penetration of bodies by disciplinary practices, the way that bodies are petitioned and divided and the way that women live in and experience their bodies.

Buss: But isn’t this yet another example of attempting to shape your features to appear more young and thus more effectively attract males that have been genetically driven to be attracted to youth? What could be more specifically related to youth then lines associated with a lifetime of facial expressions? This is not the result of a historically specific disciplinary practice but part of an evolved strategy to appear youthful. Are not all cosmetics geared toward the concealment of signs of aging? And are not cosmetics an ancient practice that many cultures share? And while these facial exercises might not be effective, the general strategy of appearing more youthful than one really is does in fact seem to be effective in attracting a sexual partner, which is certainly a goal of women going through these practices.

Matthew: Perhaps we could take a moment to shift the discussion a bit. Professor Bartky, your notion that women and men’s bodies have been shaped and penetrated differently struck me as central. Could we talk about that?

Bartky: Certainly. While Foucault laid out a general pattern for understanding the modernization of power and the embodiments that the disciplinary practices of power create he treated the body as though it were one. He spoke of humanity as a whole, as if the place that women and men occupied within structures of power were equivalent and as if women and men had an equivalent relationship to social institutions characteristic of modern life, and in particular as if women and men’s bodily experiences were the same. Certainly women as well as men are subject to many of the same disciplinary practices. But this focus renders Foucault blind to those disciplines that produce embodiments that are peculiarly feminine. While both women and men’s bodies have been rendered docile by disciplinary practices it seems obvious from a feminist perspective that women’s bodies have been rendered docile in a way that far exceeds the docility of men’s bodies. From a feminist perspective this silence about women’s bodies perpetuates the powerlessness and subjugation of women that these disciplinary practices have imposed. I argue that it is precisely the disciplinary practices that Foucault is talking about that produce gendered bodies in the first place. People are born male or female but they are not born masculine or feminine. Uniquely feminine characteristics come from disciplinary practices that produce bodies that are recognizably either feminine or masculine. The disciplinary practices by which women’s bodies are shaped according to an ideal are only one way in which this femininity is constructed. Femininity is also designed and enforced in terms of the very movements that a feminine body is rendered capable of and the construction of the feminine body as a surface for ornamentation and objectification. For example, women are far more likely than men to be concerned with their looks and in particular with fat. In a survey taken at UCLA 27.3% of women said that they were “terrified” of getting fat compared with only 5.8% of men.

Buss: While I agree that there are obvious differences in the way that women and men experience their bodies and the way that cultures think about men and women’s bodies I also think that many of these differences can be explained in evolutionary terms. From an evolutionary perspective it is not at all surprising that women and men would have developed different strategies of behavior. This is because women and men, having different roles in reproduction, face very different adaptive problems in passing on their genes effectively. The primary difference is of course that a woman necessarily invests far more of her time and energy into the development of a child then a man does as a result of the fact that a woman has to carry a child in her body. Because of this commitment of energy, and indeed a large disadvantage in terms of individual survival that would be in itself a significant selective disadvantage, it is vital to a woman’s genetic interests that the single child that she is able to bear live long enough to pass on her genetic material. A woman thus faces two distinct adaptive problems; the first one is that a woman must attract a mate in the first place to be able to pass on her genetic material at all, the second one is that a woman has to find a mate who, also being invested in the survival of his genetic material, would contribute to caring for the baby and thus increasing the chances that her genetic material will survive to reproduce. Unlike women, a man does not have to invest a large amount of time and energy into the production of a baby in order to pass on his genetic material. With millions of sperm produced with every ejaculation a man is able to attempt to maximize his chances of passing on his genetic material by impregnating multiple females with no time delay in between. Though this selective force is balanced by the fact that once the child is born it is also in the male’s genetic best interests that it survives. These very different adaptive problems would necessarily result in the evolution of very different adaptive solutions in terms of drives. A great deal of evidence has been gathered that ancestral women desired high-status in men, high-status being an indicator of a man’s ability to ensure her child’s survival. Conversely, a great deal of evidence has been gathered that ancestral men desired youth in women, young women being far more likely to survive childbirth and live long enough to raise a child to reproductive maturity. Beyond that, the evolution of these different drives in each sex further alters the adaptive environment. Each sex would then have to adapt to deal with the adaptive problems imposed by the drives of the other sex in order to acquire a mate. It is because of this that women and men have such different strategies and concerns in making themselves more attractive to a potential mate.

Host: Thank you for that discussion of the specific aspects of mate attraction that you’re talking about. I would like to shift the discussion now to a consideration of the general nature of each other’s arguments. What do you think that the problems with each other’s assumptions are?

Buss: Well, the real issue that I have with the post-structuralist line of argument is an assumption of causality that doesn’t really seem to consider other factors like evolved psychological mechanisms. Why is it that you can look at a pattern of behavior and assume that it is because of a cultural construction?

Bartky: Well, I think that causality is pretty obvious as we can see the coercive power of these institutionalized ideals. We can trace the way that women are surrounded by messages about what femininity is in the media. We can see that women are bombarded by these messages constantly through the media. And more than that we can see that women pay attention to these messages, they consume this media tirelessly. Not only that but they criticize and judge one another and themselves constantly according to these impossible standards of beauty. Is that not coercive? How could that level of coercive power not cause changes and shape patterns of behavior?

Buss: But what then is the origin of these institutionalized ideals? Where do they come from? What causes them? It seems to me that something like a “power structure,” or a “myth,” or an “ideal” cannot have causative force; only individuals who wield power can actually cause something. And in understanding what individuals do the structure of their mind cannot be ignored. Ultimately it is minds that create the complexities of social structures and variability, and minds are evolved physical objects that have characteristics that have been shaped by the evolution that created them.

Bartky: I think that you’re misinterpreting what I mean by a power structure causing something. Of course ultimately it is people that take action, but that is the nature of structures of power. Structures of power are composed of people; they are systems of people interacting with one another. But as a system they have properties that are not reducible to the properties of the individuals of which they are composed. They are composed of relationships of power between people, and the vast and complex system that is created through all of those relationships can be described and talked about and shapes the people that are set within it. When people act, or “wield power” as you say, they do so within that system. The system does not “cause” a woman to go to a jazzercise class or tape up her forehead to prevent excessive expression in a simple sense, rather the system circumscribes the space within which women can move, limits the range of the actions that can be performed, or even conceived.

Matthew: Well, unfortunately that’s all the time we have left for today. But I would ask, are these views really incompatible? Does one have to deny the significance of structures of power and cultural constructions of femininity in shaping our bodies and minds to appreciate how our bodies add to the complexity of the phenomena through drives and instincts shaped by evolution? Is a totalizing explanation for such a complicated phenomena reaching across many different disciplinary focuses really necessary or even desirable? In particular given how little we know about the nature of, as Professor Bartky says, cultural “obsessions and preoccupations” and how little we really understand about neurobiology and the specific structure of the human mind can we really begin to talk about causality in more than suggestive terms? Personally, I think that both of these perspectives are working toward a sophisticated and appropriately complex understanding of an important part of our world. Thank you Professor Bartky and Professor Buss, and thank you to our audience for joining us. Have a good night.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 104 replies

Wha happened to this tribe?

bearsky — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 02:38:20 GMT

Here, let me help - this should be like kicking sand into someone's face on the beach.
I believe in group selection!
Old woman in the tribe is exceptionally intelligent, happens to posses 98 percent recall, happens to exceptionally nurturing and a naturally gifted teacher. Her fellow tribesmen, mostly related to her at some level, treat her with respect and follow her advice - call her the medicine woman. Even if this amazing woman does not procreate at all, wouldn't she contribute to a greater number of offspring in enough directly related individuals to increase their numbers of surviving offspring into the following generations to a very significant degree? Also, with language and her innate teaching ability she may contribute yet after death. Isn't this group selection?
On another level - where would any of us be if not for Newton?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 14 replies

artiicial life and intelligence

blue-j — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 04:41:32 GMT

so, are the machines going to become living or intelligent? sentient? should we mimic evolutionary dynamics in trying to make AI, even though we don't have 3.5 billion years?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 7 replies

meaning of power

blue-j — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:34:33 GMT

so, on what justification can we say that one sex has more power than another in any species? or one species over another? what does power mean evolutionarily/ethologically? i've always defined power as "the ability to influence situations to align with your interests." if you like that definition, let's use it to discuss this question.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

peer-reviewed open access EP journal

blue-j — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:09:28 GMT

http://www.epjournal.net/

cool.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

teleology in biology

blue-j — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 01:40:36 GMT

there is nothing wrong with saying that a biological part has a function or purpose, "to do such and such," EXCEPT for the undesirable conflation of assuming intentionality in the design. things that have no conscious designer with intentions and a purpose for its creation have a different flavor than those that arise out of a selection process.

for example, lifeforms are often quite ridiculously designed from an engineering standpoint. use the same hole to eat, drink, speak, kiss? sounds like a recipe for choking or infection to me. evolution is constrained by materials it has to work with, and mutation processes that are weeded out by proofreading mechanisms and the like all the time. tiny, incremental additions to already existing materials is the general rule, and no one is in charge. something adaptive to one environment will be an outdated piece of crap a generation later. engineers and conscious designers have no such constraints, at least not exactly. you can scrap something almost entirely for version 2.0, and delineate purposes with extra clarity and little overlap (unless desired).

that's why i prefer to avoid the hole concept of design with lifeforms. it begs the question, who's the designer? and it also indicates at least to some people that there is some direction it is all headed that is really cool and planned out or something.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 36 replies

do you feel more evolved?

blue-j — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:26:57 GMT

wanna see a clusterfuck of science, journalism, and poor rhetoric? check this one out!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071210.wevolve1210/EmailBNStory/Science/home

(my canadian friends may have already seen this one.)

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

entropy and evolutionary psychology

blue-j — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:28:38 GMT

anyone familiar with la cerra and bingham's work, "the origin of minds"? they argue of negentropy's absolutely central role in the evolution of human mind.

check this summary article out:

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/lacerra.pdf

i would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this! it is intriguing.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 15 replies

the meaning of intelligence

blue-j — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 06:45:29 GMT

all this talk of race, geography, selective pressures for intelligence and the like has inspired me to reconsider the concept of "intelligence" even further. what do we mean by "intelligence" ethologically? what kind of methodological and conceptual assumptions should we make in order to carry out comparative interspecies and intraspecies analyses of intelligence?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 4 replies

koinophilia and the average beauty

blue-j — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:20:57 GMT

ah, how i love coins, they are so shiny and flat. i want to.... NO! koinophilia is actually a term denoting biological tendencies in mating to want to hook up with someone with average or usual features.

some research on beauty has illustrated this tendency. think about female beauty in particular... supermodels often have very symmetrical faces that are easy to forget for some reason, they lack distinction and character often. a bit like... an averaged face???!?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koinophilia
http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/index.htm

any thoughts? i find this tendency intriguing, and scan my own mind for it. i think i find "averaged" faces more "objectively pretty," but am attracted to more distinction and personality. you? why? if my self-characterization is true, does that mean one signal is coming from one area of the brain, and one from another? thoughts?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 5 replies

aggression and gossip among women

blue-j — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:57:37 GMT

http://itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de/~hagen/papers/Info_warfare.pdf

I haven't read this yet, but it's intriguing and comes from a source that is at least quite knowledgeable about evolutionary psychology. if anyone cares to read it with me over the next couple days, please go ahead and we can discuss it when we're done!

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 80 replies

Men want hot women, study confirms

cortelyou — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 20:57:10 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Science is confirming what most women know: When given the choice for a mate, men go for good looks.

In the dating game, men know what they want. And guys won't be surprised to learn that women are much choosier about partners than they are.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/09/04/dating.mating.ap/index.html

---

lol @ the title of this article.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 16 replies

Human mating strategies and preferences

cortelyou — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 07:04:32 GMT

http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Human_mating_strategies_and_sexual_preferences

I was reading about psychology of human sexual selection. There is an evowiki that pull together some studies and their findings on the subject.

What is very surprising, is that there isn't a strong consensus on why female breast size carries such importance in male psychology. The theories given seem relatively unconvincing.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 52 replies

For prospective grad students

Wendy — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:33:17 GMT

Passing along some info for those of you interested in grad school.
-------------------------------
Hello friends and colleagues,

As most of you know, this summer I started as an Asst. Professor in
Psych at CU Boulder. Being new and conducting research in a narrow
subfield of behavioral genetics, I thought I would recruit your help
in finding grad students next year. I'm on the lookout for promising
students who are interested in evolution, genetics, and human behavior
and who will be applying to graduate school this fall. If those
qualities apply to anyone you know, have them contact me.

I hope this finds everyone doing well. All the best,

Matt

--
Matthew C Keller
Assistant Professor, Psychology
University of Colorado, Boulder

http://www.matthewckeller.com

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

I thought this was interesting...

saddha — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 15:14:44 GMT

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-anything-good-about-men-and-other-tricky-questions/index.html?hp

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

tribe thought police threat to terminate membership

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:51:09 GMT

dear all,

some of you may have enjoyed some of my posts, as I have yours, in this and other tribes. Unfortunately the thought police on tribe have determined that my right to refute an accusation of being a Nazi in cognitive science and my subsequent posting of deleted replies from that tribe in my blog has led to a threat to have my membership terminated. There are many things one can call me however a Nazi is not one and I will always refute such claims regardless of the consequences, just as I will always stand against fascism.

Unfortunately I cannot therefore bow to such demands, demands that in my opinion breach my right to reply and defend myself, and I suspect undermine the very constitution that America prides itself upon . The posting of my original remarks into my blog was as a consequence of the moderator on the tribe in question refusing to remove the original accusation after removing my replies from the thread.

As my position shall remain, that the original accusation must be removed if I am to be denied a right to reply, then it is likely that tribe may forcible terminate my membership. This is regrettable but free speech is worth defending

As many of you are Americans, and whilst I appreciate that you may not share my views, I believe that many of you believe in the right to Free Speech. My breach if any (and I refute such) is minor compared to many remarks made on tribe, as I'm sure many of you will agree. Therefore this threat is extreme and to defend the rights of us all must be resisted,

Please defend the right of all tribers to respond to accusations and please take the time to read through all the communication that exists in my blog. Should the comments and my membership disappear then please mail me on mj_mcewen@hotmail.com

Hopefully some of you will support me in this and together we can let tribe know that such bias is not acceptable in a free society.

with regards as always

Greenman23 (aka malcolm)

--
the fool and the wiseman do the same thing. One because he not know it's importance the other because he knows it to be unimportant

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 23 replies

outside hate

Fifi — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 17:15:11 GMT

I thought this was pretty interesting in terms of group dynamics, and self and group identity. And relevant for an evolutionary psychology tribe :)

You Don't Have To Hate Other Groups To Love Your Own, Psychologist Says

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070818180311.htm

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 24 replies

dsylexia and higher thinking

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:08:43 GMT

I' ve been playing around with an idea for a few months now and before I work on it further I thought I'd throw it into the 'mosh-pit' that is evo-psycho

A few years ago I saw a program on early development of shape recognition in infants where it was shown that if you show an infant an image (the example I use is a pen held horizontally) it takes an interest but when nothing happens it becomes bored and its attention moves elsewhere. If you then rotate the pen (so it is vertical) the child's interest is stimulated again. This is the situation up until about 3/4 months old by which time the child realizes that the second image is just a rotation of the first; prior to this it treated the change in angle as the appearance of something completely new. In other words the child needs to learn to recognize the same shape from different perspectives...

anyway whilst in Pakistan I began to notice a specific set of characters that were frequently included in Arabic and Urdu writing. On inquiry (as Arabic and Urdu are just squiggly lines to me) I leaned that the characters were actually the word for Allah.

What had actually drawn me to these characters was their strong similarity with another symbol; that being the Hindu symbol Aum (Om)

So I set about playing around with the characters and discovered that if one reverses the Arabic for Allah and then rotates the central 'Lah' (looks like a W) the image is converted from Allah to Aum. What makes this more intriguing is that a very similar symbol always appears in the 'foot print' of Buddha....

Now ordinarily I wouldn't take this as meaning too much but in all three cases these are the symbols of the religions.. they are the best way to encapsulate each faith in a single word/symbol and are the most important to the respective followers...

I enjoy rewording John's statement in the New Testament to this effect " In the begining was the Logos (symbol for Aum) and the Logos was with G-d (Arabic for Allah)

Apart from the obvious glee that a "new-age mystic hippy' like me gains from this (Proof! We are one!, not that I need any anyway)

I wondered if in developing written language we had inadvertently retained the infants inability to recognize a shape after it had been rotated. The obvious shape in this respect would be the W.. rotate 90 degrees and its 3, another and its M and one more it's E.

If this was the case could one argue that rather than being a handicap/disorder dyslexia is in fact an expression of proper spatial awareness. After all imagine how difficult it would be to recognize the world around us if it's orientation was significant... A single leaf falling from a tree would appear to morph into different things as it fell to the ground. Even if it was stationary 2 people looking at it from different directions would not see the same thing.....

you follow my 'logic'?

regards

GM23

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 2 replies

Culture's value of unhealth ideals

cortelyou — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 05:53:09 GMT

In Mauritania, to make a girl big and plump, 'gavage' — a borrowed French word from the practice of fattening of geese for foie gras — starts early. Obesity has long been the ideal of beauty, signaling a family's wealth in a land repeatedly wracked by drought.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/04/16/international/i124359D85.DTL

---

I find it interesting that cultural ideals override optimal healthy choices.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 10 replies

female vs. male fertility windows

blue-j — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:37:44 GMT

it's intriguing to me that men are fertile quite a bit longer than women, though this is exaggerated often, since abnormalities of spermatogenesis are much more common in later life. i'm curious what pressures of facts undergird this phenomenon. it certainly seems to rest a bit around the fact that women are born with a set number of eggs and do not make new ones, and that would probably amount to these eggs being more vulnerable over time. also, the physical cost of pregnancy obviously takes a greater toll than the cost of intercourse and ejaculation! i'm sure there's a biological algebra for the set of pressures that help determine fertility windows, but i don't understand it. can anyone help me here?

i'm also careful to avoid adaptationism, the latest fad in isms, and steer clear of jumping to any conclusions that the differing time periods might be adaptive.

and since we're in the EP tribe, why not talk about what this all means psychologically?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 7 replies

the psycological relevence of cack-handedness

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 03:39:39 GMT

hi, new to tribe..... but blame jeff... (becareful what you wish for jeff... it may come true!)

anyway I remember hearing/reading some time ago about left-handedness and its evolutionary purpose....

supposedly us left handers are more prone to certain things........ apparently the incidence of left-handedness goes up (increases in ration above national average) in specific situations... the ones I remember are

universities (apparently it more than doubles.... old smarty pants us eh??) and as a side not I once shared a house with four other students only to discover that all five of us were left handed...

artists.... apparently left handedness in art circles is higher (creative little buggers we are)

lunatic asylums... (think this ones down to bad science... can't be true.. nuts me? never)

there is clearly no real evolutionary advantage from a physical sense (bogies taste the same regardless of what finger you pick them with) but is there one from a psychological perspective?

regards

GM23

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 25 replies

the evolution of sleep

blue-j — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 08:09:37 GMT

i've always been interested in our night lives, so this conference on the evolution and functions of sleep -- along with interspecies comparisons -- should prove to be a worthy use of my time:

http://www.tsntv.org/Events/Waking%20Up%20To%20Sleep%202006/

maybe you might like to check it out too? i'm going to give it a try next week.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

Dolphin Cognition

Krampus — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 18:58:14 GMT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/jul/03/research.science
(Excerpt follows)

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

At a dolphinarium, a person standing by the pool's window noticed that a dolphin calf was watching him. When he released a puff of smoke from his cigarette, the dolphin immediately swam off to her mother, returned and released a mouthful of milk, causing a similar effect to the cigarette smoke. Another dolphin mimicked the scraping of the pool's observation window by a diver, even copying the sound of the air-demand valve of the scuba gear while releasing a stream of bubbles from his blowhole.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons and Counting

cortelyou — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:08:55 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/science/31tier.html

After asking nearly 2,000 people why they’d had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from “I wanted to feel closer to God” to “I was drunk.” They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child.

The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

Study suggests obesity is 'contagious'

cortelyou — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:06:48 GMT

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/07/26/MNG9AR6TEA1.DTL

People whose friends become obese have a greater chance of also getting too fat, a finding that suggests that obesity is "socially contagious," spreading from one person to another like a disease, according to a new study released Wednesday.

---

I not sure this explicitly related to evolutionary psychology but it does give some food for thought. No pun intended. Ok, maybe a little bit.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 3 replies

The Gregarious Brain

cortelyou — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 21:42:20 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/magazine/08sociability-t.html

If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition.

Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA’s double helix is divided into two separate strands, each strand then becoming the genetic material in egg or sperm. Normally the two strands part cleanly, like a zipper’s two halves. But in Williams, about 25 teeth in one of the zippers — 25 genes out of 30,000 in egg or sperm — are torn loose during this parting. When that strand joins another from the other parent to eventually form an embryo, the segment of the DNA missing those 25 genes can’t do its work.

---

Small changes in genes leads to radically different personality type.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

darwinian revolution?

blue-j — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 20:36:33 GMT

i have some quotes from various evolutionists that i'd love to get comments on, all having to do with optimal social arrangements. let's begin!

"Applied evolutionary psychology should revolutionise life in three ways by 2056.

Darwinian critiques of runaway consumer capitalism should undermine the social and sexual appeal of conspicuous consumption. absurdly wasteful displays will become less popular once people comprehend its origins in sexual selection, and its pathetic unreliability as a signal of individual merit or virtue." - geoff miller, new scientist, 18 nov 2996, o. 59

let's discuss this one, and then i'll share geoff's other two and then peter singer's thoughts!

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 9 replies

the incest taboo: schoolgirls, sugar daddies and relation ships

blue-j — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 03:21:17 GMT

wouldn't it make evolutionary sense that we would be attracted to our parents or siblings, not mate with them, but choose partners who exhibit some signs of genetic similarity? this seems to me to result in a likely greater replication of our genes, while avoiding the problems associated with genetic homogeneity.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 13 replies

conservative family values vs. liberal freaks

blue-j — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:57:54 GMT

let's assume our brains are modular (not in pinker's sense, but physiologically) and that our limbic systems are less situationally flexible and shower the brain with signals that are rather basic. it's up to the cerebral cortex to fine-tune impulse expression, to consider the relevance of autonomic responses, etc.

perhaps rigid gender roles and a division of labor based more on the role of pregnancy and child-rearing made more sense in the EEA than now, for example. is it conceivable that these more ancient propensities are instantiated in the hind- and mid-brain more so? if so, is it conceivable that it takes active cerebral cortex activity to override, to decide whether such autonomous systems are still relevant?

is this not the stuff of feminism? is this why sexist men are considered "cave men"? hahaha

now for the most controversial claim: do conservative values come from an underactive cerebral cortex, wherein the legitimacy of archaic social patterns is still held to be relevant? are conservative brains different from liberal ones? is there a genetic component?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 25 replies

Why do animals grieve?

cortelyou — Thu, 10 May 2007 05:33:47 GMT

Why do animals like dogs, primates, elephants appear to grieve the loss of close kin?

What is the benefit of grief in animals?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 7 replies

The psychology and genes of being overweight

cortelyou — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:37:49 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/health/08fat.html

Genes determine in 70% of cases whether a person can lose significant weight and maintain it.

A very interesting article in the New York Times. I recommend it for everyone. I'm a relatively thin individual but we need to be aware of our societal "fat" biases.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

where does liberation come from?

blue-j — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 06:53:38 GMT

oftentimes in one's study of evolutionary psychology, you might get a sense that what is prevalent among humans is a natural consequence of selective vectors. some of the rhetoric, in simply describing how things probably came to be, end up sounding prescriptive. i know we're careful to say "'what is' is not the same as 'what ought to be'," but why?

many of you are determinists. if so, how does one explain social change? i'm beginning to think that what we consider to be feminism and queer liberation and civil rights and other "movements" are indeed a natural determined consequence of a multitude of vectors interacting, not things motivated by minds operating in some causeless ether.

you may think these two paragraphs are not related at first, but i think they are inextricably intertwined. i'm not sure we're choosing our paths in the manner many of us seem to experience anymore.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 20 replies

do blondes have more fun?

blue-j — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 17:35:50 GMT

i just read in the article "the evolutionary psychology of physical attractiveness" (barber 1995) that the common attraction toward blondes may be based on attraction toward youthfulness:

"....In our culture, flaxen hair fits in with a stereotype of childish cuteness while blonde hair is associated with sexual attractiveness, particularly for women (Guthrie 1976). The relevance of these phenomena to sexual selection for a neotenous trait is that children born with fair hair tend to become darker with age (Darwin 1871; Guthrie 1976; Van Den Berghe and Frost 1986)."

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=safari&q=cache:FnFyi0WBRzcJ:www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/lkellner/Research%2520Methods/The%2520evolutionary%2520psychology%2520of%2520physical%2520attractiveness-%2520Sexual%2520selection%2520and%2520human%2520morphology.pdf+author:%22Barber%22+intitle:%22The+evolutionary+psychology+of+physical+attractiveness:+...%22+

what say you? what is it about blondes?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 6 replies

poo, pee, period blood, and farts, oh my!

blue-j — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 05:52:45 GMT

on an uncomfortable note, it seems rather instinctive for animals to examine their own poo, pee, menstrual blood, and farts and other discharges to monitor their health; we humans seem to have rather automated programs of evaluation for these things. not sure if anything has been written on this -- sorry lenny, you seem to be our primary conduit to academic info; i don't have easy access at all -- but it would be interesting to note, both across species and among humans.

on a related topic, dogs have a weird habit of eating shit, but i would guess that their GI tract and bacterial setup accounts for this, and probably gets some nutrition out of the second pass. do other creatures chow on feces? why? wow, what an exciting post i've made here!

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 33 replies

the superbowl

blue-j — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 06:56:52 GMT

let's talk about football and evolutionary psych. just watching the superbowl today, noticing the cheerleaders, the padded men, the "get the ball into the endzone"... it all added up for me a bit. anyone care to share conjectures on the psychology of it all?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 38 replies

Intersexuality

call_me_coffee — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:06:50 GMT

Two things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

I am curious as to why medical correction is deemed so incredibly neccassary, also as to what role if any (other than random noise) intersex development plays evolutionarily - 1.7 (the highest percentage I saw) is actually a pretty large number.

Also:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6498215.stm

I just thought it was interesting.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 16 replies

body odor

blue-j — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:02:37 GMT

the way many people speak about body odor is that we have a natural scent, and we "cover it up" with deodorants, perfumes, colognes, etc. i get it, but i prefer this model: that technologies extend our phenotype and expand our capacities for signaling. i don't like how this opens up new ways to deceive, but it also opens new ways to express.

what do you all think? how does body odor management figure in your lives? how might it effect social relations? how might our approaches to it have evolved?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 22 replies

Monogamy pt. II

kage — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:31:18 GMT

so in the savage love du jour:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove (look for the issue titled "chocolate city" if a week has passed - they offer no permalink)

they reference a book called "i'd rather eat chocolate"

http://www.amazon.com/Id-Rather-Eat-Chocolate-Learning/dp/0767922670

which i guess defends as normal the vast differences in male and female libido that sometimes crops up in marriages. there are some arguments floating around in there that testosterone is responsible for sexual interest, and that men have more of it than women, ergo the obvious. savage offers should women choose to demand monogamy of their mates, they should either willingly take care of business for him, or allow him to sort himself out elsewhere - but that doing neither is unjustifiable. what say yall?

here's a question more topical to this tribe: if this is true, i.e. if it is true that after a while in a relationship, or after a certain age, or whatever, that men have sky-high libidos and women have something rather less, and it is true that human beings are somehow naturally predisposed toward monogamy, then how did evolution pull off the trick of making this a tenably stable situation? i simply can't imagine it! again - what say you?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 87 replies

Monogamy

Amber — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:16:44 GMT

Taking off on a thread Blue-j posted in the Evolution tribe--http://bioevolution.tribe.net/thread/a2bf9958-9b1c-4e52-ae83-d9eac3ba540b

This is an interesting subject and I have a few questions, I'm not really interested in value judgments but swing away I suppose.

1. There seems to be an idea that monogamy is a purely social construct that does not have an evolutionary basis. Yes, no, maybe, why?
2. Do you see monogamy as a result of or a continuation of a battle of the genders? It seems that most women prefer monogamy for some obvious reasons and some other reasons?
3. Traditionally polygamy is most detrimental for men as a group, as particularly "fit" men could and would monopolize many women. Yes, no, maybe, why?

(I have some interesting links I will post later, as I don't have much time now)

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 147 replies

Audio: Steven Pinker - Evolutionary Psychology and Human Nature

cortelyou — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 20:34:49 GMT

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?p=98

In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, Pinker explores what science tells us about human nature, explains the implications of and recent advances in evolutionary psychology, and talks about atheism and its relationship to the scientific outlook.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

some poly resources

blue-j — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:43:55 GMT

http://www.lovemore.com/

http://polyamorysociety.org/

http://www.lovewithoutlimits.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ethical_Slut

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 1 reply

NYT: Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior

cortelyou — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:51:22 GMT

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/science/20moral.html

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 5 replies

knock knock...the evolutionary significance of humour

Fri, 12 Jan 2007 00:55:23 GMT

just for a laugh and because i've been having a nice humourous day I thought I see what we could come up with on the serious subject of why we laugh and why it evolved.

there are of cause several different types of humour and I'm fairly sure that it is not just a human trait; horses, parrots, monkeys and dolphins are all claimed to exhibit the ability to laugh.

medically humour is suppose to be beneficial (unless you just had a triple by pass) and people who laugh a lot are I suspect generally happier.

so any thoughts on why we laugh and the benefits of different types of humour?

regards

GM23

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 11 replies

Naturally Selecting God

Krampus — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:24:22 GMT

The following is Slate's synopsis of a NY Times Magazine cover story about the evolutionary basis of theism. I cannot get to an electronic version of the story; if anyone has access to an electronic version, please post. I intend to pick-up a print copy today:

http://www.slate.com/id/2160616/?nav=fix

New York Times Magazine, March 4
The cover piece examines religion as a product of evolution. Some scientists see religion as an adaptation, like an opposable thumb. For example, "agent detection"—the survivalist assumption that if a leaf rustles, it's because an agent caused it to—may have evolved into a belief in God. But not all evolutionary theorists are religious skeptics: "Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that she does?" argues Christian psychologist Justin Barrett. … A piece looks at the recent spate of college erotica, in which students riff on sexual themes and, sometimes, pose nude. What was once a career-ending decision is now routine for some students: ''A body is a body is a body, and I'm proud of my body, and why not show my body? It's not going to keep me from having a job," says the founder of one Boston University publication.—C.B.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 7 replies

Study: Familiarity Can Muddle Communication

Mon, 05 Mar 2007 13:36:21 GMT

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Sun Mar 4, 10:15 AM ET

Familiarity breeds more than contempt. It can also lead to communication snafus.

Close-knit ties, thought to help communication as speakers share a common context, actually ups the chances for crossed wires compared with talk between strangers in some cases, a new study suggests.

Because close colleagues and friends already share so much common knowledge, they often use short, ambiguous messages. The vague and sometimes jargon-loaded talk can create misunderstandings.

"People are so used to talking with those with whom they already share a great deal of information, that when they have something really new to share, they often present it in a way that assumes the person already knows it," said study team member Boaz Keysar, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.

Communication games

Keysar and his graduate student Shali Wu trained 40 pairs of undergraduate students to memorize made-up names and descriptions for odd shapes. In each pair, a “director” had to communicate the identity of one of 24 shapes. The “addressee” had to use the information to choose the correct shape from a set of three images on a computer monitor.

Half of the addressees studied only the first six figures, while the others learned the first 18 shapes. The directors, who memorized all shapes, were aware of their partners’ knowledge levels.

In pairs with the most shared knowledge, directors were more likely to rattle off shape names compared with pairs having little knowledge overlap, in which directors described the actual shapes.

The use of esoteric labels led to confusion and slowed communication since partners didn’t always recognize the names. Participants with more shared knowledge were twice as likely to ask for clarification as those with less overlap of information.

Language limitations

Language in and of itself can be confusing. “The reason all this is happening at all is that language in general is inherently ambiguous,” Keysar told LiveScience.

He recalls an ambiguous billboard near a stadium holding a Rolling Stones concert that night. The billboard read, “Avoid LSD tonight.”

Hmmm? “They’re talking about Lake Shore Drive, and I’m sure that the writer of this sign didn’t realize this is completely ambiguous,” Keysar said.

Even though miscommunication has professional consequences like missed meetings or deadlines, people are unaware of their fuzzy language, Keysar said. “We don’t realize we say things that are ambiguous," he said, "and that’s a problem.”

The study is detailed in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 1 reply

Why do no women post in the Evolutionary Psychology tribe?

albe — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 03:53:57 GMT

Why it just men posting here?

Some divergence in the evolution path of women's psychological makeup such that they are unlikely to post here?

Should the tribe name be changed to "Evolutionary Psychology and Shopping" to become more inclusive?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 13 replies

Hunting chimps may change view of human evolution

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:59:19 GMT

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
Thu Feb 22, 12:50 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chimpanzees have been seen using spears to hunt bush babies, U.S. researchers said on Thursday in a study that demonstrates a whole new level of tool use and planning by our closest living relatives.

Perhaps even more intriguing, it was only the females who fashioned and used the wooden spears, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani of Iowa State University reported.

Bertolani saw an adolescent female chimp use a spear to stab a bush baby as it slept in a tree hollow, pull it out and eat it.

Pruetz and Bertolani, now at Cambridge University in Britain, had been watching the Fongoli community of savanna-dwelling chimpanzees in southeastern Senegal.

The chimps apparently had to invent new ways to gather food because they live in an unusual area for their species, the researchers report in the journal Current Biology.

"This is just an innovative way of having to make up for a pretty harsh environment," Pruetz said in a telephone interview. The chimps must come down from trees to gather food and rest in dry caves during the hot season.

"It is similar to what we say about early hominids that lived maybe 6 million years ago and were basically the precursors to humans."

Chimpanzees are genetically the closest living relatives to human beings, sharing more than 98 percent of our DNA. Scientists believe the precursors to chimps and humans split off from a common ancestor about 7 million years ago.

Chimps are known to use tools to crack open nuts and fish for termites. Some birds use tools, as do other animals such as gorillas, orangutans and even naked mole rats.

But the sophisticated use of a tool to hunt with had never been seen.

Pruetz thought it was a fluke when Bertolani saw the adolescent female hunt and kill the bush baby, a tiny nocturnal primate.

But then she saw almost the same thing. "I saw the behavior over the course of 19 days almost daily," she said.

PLANNING AND FORESIGHT

The chimps choose a branch, strip it of leaves and twigs, trim it down to a stable size and then chew the ends to a point. Then they use it to stab into holes where bush babies might be sleeping.

It is not a highly successful method of hunting. They only ever saw one chimpanzee succeed in getting a bush baby once. The apes mostly eat fruit, bark and legumes.

Part of the problem is this group of chimps is shy of humans, and the females, who seem to do most of this type of hunting, are especially wary. "I am willing to bet the females do it even more than we have seen," she said.

Pruetz noted that male chimps never used the spears. She believes the males use their greater strength and size to grab food and kill prey more easily, so the females must come up with other methods.

"That to me was just as intriguing if not even more so," Pruetz said.

The spear-hunting occurred when the group was foraging together, again unchimplike behavior that might produce more competition between males and females, she said.

Maybe females invented weapons for hunting, Pruetz said.

"The observation that individuals hunting with tools include females and immature chimpanzees suggests that we should rethink traditional explanations for the evolution of such behavior in our own lineage," she concluded in her paper.

"The multiple steps taken by Fongoli chimpanzees in making tools to dispatch mammalian prey involve the kind of foresight and intellectual complexity that most likely typified early human relatives."

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 1 reply

Inhibition in potentially sexually advantageous situations

cortelyou — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:03:55 GMT

Why is it that men and women usually become more inhibited when they encounter extremely attractive (displaying good genetic fitness) potential sexual partner? Given that these type of encounters are somewhat rare yet seemingly quite advantageous for a person's gene survival.

** An example would be in a social situation at the party. One is introduced to an extremely physically attractive man or women of the opposite sex. Is seems common that the person will become more self-conscious and even a bit tongue tied compared to a more advantageous posture of being relaxed, clear thinking and open. This behavior seemingly more times than not acts as a deterrent for a sexual interaction.

This behavior normally does not happen when introduced to someone of normal or below normal level of attractiveness of the opposite sex. I understand that not everyone experiences these situations in this way but these individuals appear to be a minority.

Why is this instinctual behavior so common? What would be the selective pressure to produce such an instinctual behavior?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 4 replies

the impossibility of human contentment

blue-j — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 06:03:32 GMT

an animal who is content and does not continue to make efforts to insure survival may croak. is it possible that contentment has been selected against? people have different theories about why we find it hard to sit still. blackmore has stated that it's because out brains are constantly flooded with memes vying for longevity.

now of course, one could achieve metacontentment, that is, contentness about not being content, a kind of buddha positioning.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 19 replies

warrior lovers: erotic fiction, evolution and female sexuality

blue-j — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:24:59 GMT

it's a book by catherine salmon and donald symons (yes the female orgasm guy) and it's short and it looks cool. it's part of the "darwinism today" series, of which i am very fond, having picked up every single title in the series! they're cheap! if anyone wants to read it with me, i'm game.

http://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Lovers-Fiction-Evolution-Sexuality/dp/0300093543/sr=1-1/qid=1171351439/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-3260274-5292064?ie=UTF8&s=books

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/002-3260274-5292064?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=darwinism+today&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 3 replies

Internet Flaming

cortelyou — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 06:46:29 GMT

Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/health/psychology/20essa.html

In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

---

Here ya go you fucking idiots!

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 2 replies

great site about the brain

blue-j — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 06:12:53 GMT

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d_05_cr_her.html

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

Hot or Not test

cortelyou — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 05:25:28 GMT

http://flickr.com/photos/40702206@N00/146532556

These women do not exist. They each are a composite of about 30 faces that I created to find out the current standard of good looks on the Internet.
On the popular Hot or Not web site, people rate others’ attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. An average score based on hundreds or even thousands of individual ratings takes only a few days to emerge.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

decentralization, hierarchy and nature

blue-j — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:53:30 GMT

i was about to provide a link to amazon.com for stanovich's book, when it struck me... doesn't amazon.com have enough money? i don't think i want the owners of that web site to have an inordinate degree of influence in this world based on such an accomplishment. so, since money equates to influence at least in some important ways, i think i should stop buying shit from them. maybe being more patient to own things would help.

is money a replicator? a meme? freud thought it was shit, our first gift to our guardians or parents, our first proud accomplishment. wow, that man was freaky, and deep at times.

is the centralization of power a necessary consequence of human nature, or an inevitable consequence of game theoretical interactions, or do we make it happen? if we make it happen, then why?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

keith stanovich's model of freedom

blue-j — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:43:02 GMT

of course stanovich doesn't have a goddamn copyright on this model, but keith's thinking inspires me a lot. he wrote "The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin," and his thinking in that book is right in line with our existentialism discussion, so i thought i'd bring it up to see if any of you were already familiar with this book or might want to comment on my flashes from it:

he uses social psychological studies of rationality and spending behavior, memetics, genetic replicative algorithms, game theory, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience -- as well as some field called choice theory which i know nothing about -- to talk about a process of awakening to experience where you subject a suspicious eye over functions likely to be connected to 1) the project of replicating genes as well as 2) projects where your imitative capacities have been hijacked by a kind of cultural replicator you imported because it appealed to other needs or happened automatically.

with conscious deliberation and a kind of mental self-defense, you can see if these replicative interests coincide with your individual interests in lived experience. if they don't, you can choose to ignore it and try to polish a life where you act in your own interests, with self-honesty. rational self-determination. (he does not of course comment on whether this entire project is determined, but i don't think i care! i'll take the experience of freedom if i know it's true over some bizarre fantasy of material detachment and acausality.)

my favorite image from the book is where he admits that there is no objective place to stand from which to evaluate our own memes. he calls it neurath's boat, after some other philosopher cat. so this image is of a person being in a boat at sea, which has a steady leak going through an aged board. you have to repair it, but you can't go to shore. so, you step from plank to plank, hoping not to step through a rotten board, repairing the one next to you. i think this is a bit how decision-making happens in consciousess, where we hop from construct to construct, trying to find problems in the adjacent board, but nowhere being able to get on dry land. or is this wrong? is there some geometry of metarepresentation i don't understand that could somehow equate to getting out?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

existentialism and evolution

blue-j — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 18:15:48 GMT

here's my take on existentialism from an evolutionary perspective:

life is a subset of matter that wraps around a replicating molecular structure, and over time has accumulated structures that occur that coincide with more successful replication. this includes consciousness. of course not everything is about replication, but it is the bottleneck of life across generations.

living beings have on more inherent purpose or meaning than a rock, but because the ones that stick around are good at surviving and reproducing, an internal sense of making efforts to survive will quickly evolve. and when you're aiming to survive and reproduce, you have a purpose, and that sense of purposefulness can be applied and misapplied.

so yes, there is no meaning or purpose to life, aside from the evolved senses of survival and reproduction, but even these were not designed with a purpose by any designer.

so the evolutionist and existentialist land in the same place: meaning and purpose are made up by the individual. and since we all die, our efforts to survive are doomed to eventual failure, and the meaning of reproduction wears thin, as we sense ourselves as more than simple vehicles for making more vehicles for making more vehicles, ad infinitum, with purpose never quite making it to an actual life... this is existential angst. the only solution is to embrace existence in its meaningless beauty and walk toward death with a wild heart.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 25 replies

2 American scientists win prize (Trivers and Broecker)

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 20:55:18 GMT

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences on Thursday named American scientist Robert Trivers the winner of the 2007 Craaford prize in biosciences, while his countryman Wallace S. Broecker won the 2006 prize in geosciences.

The two scientists will receive the annual $500,000 prize from Sweden's Queen Silvia at an April ceremony in Lund, in southern Sweden.

Broecker, a professor at Columbia University in Palisades, New York, was honored for his research into the processes of climate changes and the interaction between the atmosphere, the ocean ice and living organisms. Trivers, a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, won for his work in explaining the social behavioral patterns of animals.

The academy said it chose Broecker, 75, because of his "innovative and pioneering research" in explaining how the ocean, atmosphere and biosphere interact with the climate.

The academy cited Trivers, 63, "for his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation" among animals, which it said laid the foundation for modern sociobiology.

The award is named after Holger Crafoord, the Swede who designed the first artificial kidney. It has been given annually since 1982 for scientific research in areas not covered by the Nobel Prizes, including mathematics, astronomy and biosciences.

___

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 2 replies

How Women Pick Mates vs. Flings

Krampus — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:50:44 GMT

Women seem to judge potential mates by how masculine their features are, new research shows. Men with square jaws and well-defined brow ridges are seen as good short-term partners, while those with more feminine traits such as a rounder face and fuller lips are perceived as better long-term mates.

In the study, 854 male and female subjects viewed a series of male head shots that had been digitally altered to exaggerate or minimize masculine traits. The participants then answered questions about how they expected the men in the photos to behave.

Overwhelmingly, participants said those with more masculine features were likely to be risky and competitive and also more apt to fight, challenge bosses, cheat on spouses and put less effort into parenting. Those with more feminine faces were seen as good parents and husbands, hard workers and emotionally supportive mates.

Despite all the negative attributes, when asked who they would choose for a short-term relationship, women still selected the more masculine looking men. Brad and George then would be picks for a brief romance, if not the long haul.

Makes sense

The study, detailed in the December issue of the journal Personal Relationships, reached conclusions similar to research published earlier last year in Britain.

The new study's author, Daniel Kruger at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, said that from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense women would view more masculine-looking men as potential flings and less masculine-looking ones as long-term partners.

The key, he said, is testosterone, the hormone responsible for development of masculine facial features and other secondary sexual characteristics.

Testosterone is necessary for development, but can also have detrimental health effects. It has been shown, for example, to interfere with the body's immune response, so men who are able to maintain high levels of the hormone are typically strong and healthy—traits women would want to pass on to their progeny.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070102/sc_livescience/howwomenpickmatesvsflings

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 6 replies

Anandamahi Ma

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:39:31 GMT

I once saw a documentary on this woman, and thought "how does she get off doing that!". Then it hit me: maybe this is a phenomenon from gigantopithecus days. And if so, perhaps more in India than elsewhere. Any thoughts on this, twisted or otherwise?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 3 replies

Why Hawks Win

cortelyou — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 08:39:03 GMT

Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. A look at why the tough guys win more than they should.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3660

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 12 replies

choosing where you sit!

Santas-Blonde-Baby — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 11:25:04 GMT

People, when walking into a large restaurant, if it was empty & you had your choice of where to be seated, would you pick a table in the center of the room, or along the periphery? And once at that table how would you position yourself...ladies answer too!

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 2 replies

Seeking New Moderator for this Tribe

barnaby — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 23:07:48 GMT

Hi folks

I heard back from the good people at Tribe.net, and they confirm our moderator has not logged in for some time. I am officially calling for an election for a new moderator.

I've been through this process a number of times, and it's pretty easy. The first step is we take a few days adding nominees to this thread. If you'd like to moderate this tribe, please throw your hat in, and say a brief word about your philosophy, et cetera.

I am willing to be moderator, so I'm officially throwing my name in. I have moderated several tribes, some of them quite large (e.g. cognitive psychology), and know the ropes. My moderating philosophy is to encourage discussion, discourage abuse, and try to keep people on topic. In tribes like this, my experience has been that this sometimes means asking people not to cross-post little metaphysical haiku or whatever to 15 tribes including this one. My basic parameter would be that this is a science tribe, and the topic of any thread should have some bearing on evolutionary psychology, generally speaking.

I'd like to propose that we accept nominations for a three days, then put it to a vote.

regards,
Barnaby

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 33 replies

unabridged psychology textbook

prometheusPAN — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:54:34 GMT

http://tribes.tribe.net/omnipedia/thread/048585db-f70e-4dec-8d03-9a4bf8cd6aa7

I am interested in writing a collaborative and cooperative unabridged textbook on psychology. Minus propaganda, minus psychology history, minus psychology personalities,
and minus the usual ego bickering that is usually presented.

Anybody here interested in that?

What would you list as major chapters?

Any thoughts on how to write a better textbook?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 12 replies

waist to hip ratio

Santas-Blonde-Baby — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 11:29:00 GMT

Hetero Gentlemen, hypothetically speaking....you are looking at women purely for pleasure...whether it be porn, or watching scantily clad women at the beach, etc.

what body type do you enjoy visually?

the hourglass? the pear? The inverted triangle? an apple shaped woman?

do not intellectualize, just go w/ your INSTINCT...

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 6 replies

Dr. Helen Fisher

Santas-Blonde-Baby — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 10:29:48 GMT

Why hasn't SHE been mentioned here? Is her .7 waist to hip ratio a bit daunting? ;0)

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 7 replies

hummm

paulajean — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 02:27:02 GMT

so what does it say about the people who would start or join a tribe called "Evolutionary Psycology" that there are ABSOLUTELY no posts??

Well, I'll start with a question: what sets evolutionary psychology apart from sociology? I'm just a layman, so humor me please...

Thanks, Paula

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 19 replies

Buller's "Adapting Minds"

blue-j — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 04:00:27 GMT

MIT Press has just recently published David Buller's "Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature." Buller is a philosopher of science from Northern Illinois U. who appears to raise some interesting challenges to some prevailing tenets of evolutionary psych. Has anyone read it? It intrigues me.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10471

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 10 replies

Debate between Steven Pinker and Steven Rose

blue-j — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 17:54:53 GMT

This is an intriguing debate that happened in 1998 between Steven Pinker and Steven Rose about evolutionary psychology.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_rose/pinker_rose_p1.html

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

Pinker vs. Spelke at Harvard

blue-j — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 07:55:53 GMT

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

Here's the entire video at the Harvard site:

http://mbb.harvard.edu/The_Science_of_Gender_and_Science.av

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 4 replies

Senescence and EP

blue-j — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 02:23:33 GMT

I just finished Clark's "Sex and the Origins of Death," and was blown away. Clark is Professor of Immunology at UCLA and is a truly gifted writer. Has anyone else read this? The argument is familiar and comes from other sources as well: that senescence, or specifically death from aging, was non-existent in the first billion years of evolution and arose as sexual reproduction evolved along with cellular specialization. Basically, somatic cells became the mortal vehicle to protect and carry our immortal germ cells, which developed sexual reproduction as a means to correct copying errors in DNA resulting from radiation exposure and other factors.

I thought it an interesting starting point for discussion. Though Clark deals almost exclusively with this on a cellular level, it has obvious ramifications on the realm of psychology and our lived experience. Any thoughts on this?

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 1 reply

"The Science of Gender and Science" debate between Pinker and Spelke at Harvard

blue-j — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 07:50:30 GMT

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

Here's the entire video at the Harvard site:

http://mbb.harvard.edu/The_Science_of_Gender_and_Science.avi

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 0 replies

Pinker Video Interviews Online

blue-j — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 01:36:32 GMT

I just found this resource and thought I'd share it with everyone. Enjoy!

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/pinker.html

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 1 reply

Isms and schisms....

blue-j — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 20:12:33 GMT

Do you think that evolutionary psychology starts to point at optimum organizations of government? For example, I've heard that humans are only capable of tracking trust with around 150 people as individuals... past that, people are abstractions. Does that mean we should govern ourselves in local affilliations of 150 and less? Maybe less abstraction of people at higher levels of government would be a good thing? Just a thought to get the discussion rolling!

Does anyone know of any evolutionary psychologists really talking about communism, capitalism, socialism, anarchism, in terms of evolution? Risky territory, I know. I know Peter Singer wrote a small book about Darwinism and the Left, but I haven't read it...

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 5 replies

Why Men Won't Dance

Wed, 18 May 2005 14:47:58 GMT

An essay at http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/nikolas.lloyd/evolve/menwont.html discusses an evolutionary pyschological explanation for the great gender imbalance on most dance floors.

It's a behavioral/observational theory and has no neuropsych elements to it, but it is an example of how one applies evolutionary thought to questions of psychology.

posted in Evolutionary Psychology - 3 replies