Empathy and Same-Sex Social Relationships

A couple of stories on ScienceDaily relate a bit to evolutionary psychology. First, a study finds that men are more tolerant of same-sex peers than women and that men, on average, tend to have larger same-sex social networks than women. The researchers believe that women may be more sensitive to negative input, or may weigh negative input heaver than males.

The second story is about a mouse study which shows that empathy is based partly on genes. The article states that future research must be done to determine the exact genetic differnces between the two mouse strains used, stating that the mice used in the experimental group were “genetically different…with fewer social tendencies.

How do these relate to evolutionary psychology? EP presumes that men and women will display behavioral and cognitive differences. One example is the female and male bell curves for IQ. They have the same mean but the male curve is flatter with a higher population in the outliers. That means more geniuses and more retardation.

Evolutionary psychologists also believe that genetics determine behavior. The FOXP2 gene has been implicated in language acquisition and now, after a good bit of debate, we are seeing studies that show some genetic link to empathy.

I have my issues with evolutionary psychology, but I think overall these guys are on to something. I’ll hit my criticisms in a later post.

The Darwin Illusion

In celebration of Darwin Day, Psychologist Richard Wiseman has created a Darwin Optical Illusion. Enjoy!

Darwin Day Means Evo-Psych

It’s after Midnight, which means that it’s Darwin Day. I thought that, in order to celebrate, I would write about one of my favorite subjects: evolutionary psychology.

I’m in luck. The newest issue of American Psychologist has an article by Davis Buss (and he kindly provided a copy on his website for those who don’t have access) which gives a history of the research developments in evolutionary psychology and how they related to what Darwin himself had to say about the evolution of the mind.

For those of you who don’t know, evolutionary psychology is the study, or attempted study, as some might say, of the evolution of behavior and mental processes. Evolutionary psychologists attempt to better understand the human brain and behavior by trying to determine which parts are inherited, universal among humans, and trying to determine what evolutionary advantage they convey. That last part is where most of the controversy comes from, but I will save that for another post.

Bus points to a number of human universals, many of which you may already be familiar with. For instance, the discovery of female superiority in spatial location was the direct result of a hypothesis that it would be adaptive for food gathering. Males are superior in spatial areas like mental rotation and vector integration, which solve navigational problems. We have a crosscultural landscape preference in aesthetics for savannah-like locations with lush foliage, blooming berries, and fresh water. We have evolved a fondness for fat, an adaptation against starvation (some of us more than others…). Evidence shows that we have a primitive inate concept of predator and pray, and spider-detection capabilities. We also have evidence that success in hunting and battle led to more opportunities to mate.

Buss shines in his focus area; mate selection and sexual selection. I won’t go into this section because I won’t do it justice, but you should read it. You will learn about waist-hip ratios and same-sex sabotage. Overall, I would say Buss does a good job of explaining how we got from Darwin to where we are now in the study of the evolution of behavior.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I enjoy social psychology because it holds a dirty little mirror up to humanity. Evolutionary psychology does the same thing, and some find it disturbing. I personally see it as uplifting. The fact that we’re not all killing each other now speaks to the grandeur of the human sense of morality and our ability to create complex societies with rules and laws.

Of course, don’t forget that the sense of morality is evolved as well!

David M. Buss (2009). The great struggles of life: Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary psychology. American Psychologist, 64 (2), 140-148 DOI: 10.1037/a0013207

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power

With this title, I really wanted to include a picture of Homer Simpson kicking Walt Whitman’s grave. But I couldn’t find one. Just sit back and let your mind wander. It will come to you…

I had a lazy Sunday morning. Woke up a little late, went to McDonalds to grab breakfast, picked up the Washington Post, and sat in the baby’s room while he played and read the paper. It is one of those moments where you really feel like an adult.

I came across an editorial by George F. Will, How Congress Trumps Darwin (must have free subscription to read). The piece is pretty good, and I thought I would share a bit of it. I think Will is attempting to make the point that the Environmental Protection Act attempts to trump natural selection, but I’m impressed by Will’s elloquent statements about the science of humanity. He begins with a clear statement:

An American majority resists such an annoying notion, endorsing the proposition that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.” Still, evolution is a fact, and its mechanism is natural selection: Creatures with variations especially suited to their environmental situation have more descendants than do less well-adapted creatures.

Simple: acknowledge that some people don’t believe, but state the fact. Will then makes a point about the march of science and the necessity of one man in a community of scientists:

This Thursday, the 200th anniversary of the births of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, remember that Lincoln mattered more. Without Darwin, other scientists would have discerned natural selection. Indeed, Darwin’s friend Alfred Wallace already had. Without Lincoln, the United States probably would have been sundered into at least two nations. Probably into more: Southerners, a fractious tribe, would not have played nicely together in the Confederacy for very long.

I’m not a historian, but I know a few, and I know that speculative history can be dangerous. However, I son’t think this statement is all that controversial. Aside from Wallace, consider how easy it would have been to come up with the theory of natural selection once people read Mendel.

Walt Whitman, seared by Lincoln’s war to guarantee the nation’s survival, adopted a materialist’s mysticism about the slaughter: Human immortality is in earth’s transformation of bodies into an “unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence.”

A materialist’s mysticism. I love it. The poem is Pensive on Her Dead Gazing, I Heard the Mother of All from Leaves of Grass. I want to share a bit more from the poem:

As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk’d:
Absorb them well, O my earth, she cried—I charge you, lose not my sons! lose not an atom;	5
And you streams, absorb them well, taking their dear blood;
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly,
And all you essences of soil and growth—and you, my rivers’ depths;
And you, mountain sides—and the woods where my dear children’s blood, trickling, redden’d;
And you trees, down in your roots, to bequeath to all future trees,

It really is a beautiful piece of work. It’s taken a long time for me to be able to enjoy Whitman, but I’m glad I’ve come to it.

After Copernicus dislodged humanity from the center of the universe, Marx asserted that false consciousness — we do not really “make up our minds” — blinds us to the fact that we are in the grip of an implacable dialectic of impersonal forces. Darwin placed humanity in a continuum of all protoplasm. Then Freud declared that the individual’s “self” or personhood is actually a sort of unruly committee. All this dented humanity’s self-esteem.

I really like this bit. I like it because, in their own way, Marx, Darwin, and Freud (and by extention, Nietzsche) were all right about some things and wrong about others. They were great thinkers who, if you will allow me to br dramatic, were strangled by the limitations of their time and their respective field. I would say Darwin was most successful, although it took genetics to really push the point home. But we have some grand facts here: We are not the center of the universe, we are not as mindful of the social processes of production and consumption, we are not singular in the world but are evolved from other things, and are minds are a complex of various decision-making modules. We also experinence phenomena which arise from complexity, which we cannot fully understand because it cannot be reduced. We truly all small.

All in all, I like this piece. I’ll end this with the last paragraph from the Origin of the Species, included in Will’s article:

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

 

Translating the Blogs: What they’re really saying

This section of the blog will deal with looking at other blog posts and trying to show you, the reader, what is really being said. All changed from the original material will be [bracketed].

Blog: Evolution News and Views

Author: Casey Luskin

Post: Darwin Defenders get Ben Stein Expelled from University of Vermont’s Commencement Address

It also seems highly unlikely that Stein’s withdrawal was completely voluntary—after all, Dan Fogel, the President of the UVM, has been making it patently clear that supporters of [magic] deserve second-class treatment at his school. Fogel has been all but parroting PZ’s rhetoric that “it’s a real slap in the face for the university to drag in this disgrace who has been a figurehead for a movement that is trying to replace science with superstition,” as Fogel stated::

”This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view. Ben Stein spoke here last spring to great acclaim,” UVM President Dan Fogel said. “It’s an issue about the appropriateness of awarding an honorary degree to someone whose views in many ways ignore or affront the fundamental values of scientific inquiry and I greatly regret that I was not attuned to those issues.”

Like many [scientists who accept natural selection as an adequate explanation for the mechanism of evolution], Fogel is so blind to his own intolerance that he doesn’t see the contradictions in his own argument: He claims this isn’t about [teachers lying to their students about scientific controversy], but he’s refusing to give an honorary degree to Stein simply because Stein supports [magic].

 

But does Fogel’s view support [teachers lying to their students about scientific controversy]? Fogel’s pretext is the usual one used to discriminate against [magic] proponents—he claims that Stein’s “views in many ways ignore or affront the fundamental values of scientific inquiry”—but this is just plain old intolerance for those scientists and scholars who think that [magic] is an idea worth taking seriously. Thus Fogel’s argument is self-refuting: the fact that he won’t give honorary degrees to someone simply because they support [magic] demonstrates the lack of academic freedom for [magic] proponents in the academy.

Fogel makes the same mistake in this non-credible denial that academic freedom is the issue:

“But I have to say, the issue here, and this is important, is not freedom of expression. Ben Stein has come to our campus to speak, and some of the faculty that are colleagues here wrote to me to say that they have no objection to him coming here to speak. It was the legitimate concern among members of the community regarding the implications of granting an honorary degree to someone whose ideas fundamentally ignore the basics of scientific inquiry.”

Again, Fogel’s denial that this bears upon [teachers lying to their students about scientific controversy] has a huge credibility gap: Fogel claims this isn’t about freedom of expression, but it seems clear that scholars aren’t free to express support for [magic] or they are charged with “ignor[ing] the basics of scientific inquiry.”

And thus ends our exploration. Head over to PZ Myers blog (posts here, here and here) for the backstory.

Mutation without Selection

I am by no means an expert in genetics, so I’m reading through an article on PLOS Biology (Referred by ScienceDaily, credit where credit is due) which reports some interesting findings. Apparently there are geners that are evolving at a faster rate than normal with AT-to-GC biased substitutions. Apparently a number of the mutations are actually harmful. The authors are calling this Biased-Gene Conversion. The article states that they don’t expect this BGC bias only in human exons, and they expect different exons to be affected in different species.

I don’t know what all of this means as far as the big picture goes. Anyone out there with sufficient knowledge to explain it?

The Evolution/ID Debate

Yahoo News has a story about the recent evolution/creation/Intelligent Design issues coming out of Texas and Louisiana. It does a pretty good job of laying down the basics for those who haven’t been paying attention.

I want to say this: I’m not a Darwinist. I presume that “Darwinist” means “one who follows Darwin,” similar to Christian or Marxist being one who follows Christ or Marx, respectively. I know thay groups like The Discovery Institute would like everyone to believe that those who accept evolution have the dogmatic faith of Christianity or the idological singlemindedness of a Marxist. No, I’m not a Darwinist because Darwin lived a long time ago, and did not have the scientific knowledge that would come later to validate his theory.

I’m a psychology student. Darwin wrote before the advent of psychotherapy.

The fact is, I don’t believe in Natural Selection because I choose to, I believe it because the evidence supports it. And quite frankly, it is irresponsible for any of these groups to try to push this whole “teach the controversy” campaign. With science scores in the US somewhere south of Latvia, the ID people and the creationists want to put their stamp on the education system by wasting teachers’ and students’ time. You want to talk about gaps in the evolutionary theory, how about the gaps in ID and creationism (like the complete lack of any scientific validation whatsoever?) 

They invent the word “Darwinist” to disparage us, why don’t we come up with a word to disparage them? I’m in favor of “wizard.” Or “child.” They are the first two groups of people who come to mind that believe in magic.