A Billion Made-Up Conclusions

At Obsidian Wings.

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Mixed bag of recent comments, to keep track of what discussions I'm in where.

More at Dreher's Culture and the knowability of truth:

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the stupid Chris:

Shucks, my blushes. But really, you *have* to laugh -- when Copernicus did it, it was a watershed in human thought. At this point, it's a long-running gag.

the essence of the contemplative life is to banish C/certainty and A/authority as we muddle our way toward T/truth.

I think it's significant that various schemes for contemplative lives (in many traditions) all involve great discipline and stability in what you actually *do* with your time. Contemplatives may banish ontological certainty, but they generally live to very strict schedules. They still meet the basic human emotional need for stability, just not in philosophical matters.

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at Ta-Nehesi Coates' It's the Racism, Stupid:

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What was the gain from white supremacy? If not material, then what spiritual gain could people think they were getting? Something big enough to kill over, something important enough to forgo material gain in order to preserve. What?

Their place in the hierarchy.

As long as blacks were "in their place", not being "uppity", a white man -- no matter how poor and ignorant -- could not be the bottom rung. Upper-class or educated white men can afford not to be racist, because they won't fall to the very bottom just because blacks are in the hierarchy. But the further down the ladder a white man is, the more threatened he is by black equality.

I think the exact same process drives homophobia in the black community. As long as homosexuals are despised, no straight black man can be the very bottom of the social scale.

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At Plumb Lines' Are "We" Guilty of Torture?:

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our shared cultural belief that the body is different from the person

Wow, do I disagree. One would then assume that a less dualistic culture would be less prone to war crimes — the Japanese, for instance.

No, I think the reasons for both the high-level and low-level torture policiess were perfectly outlined by John Dean several years ago, in Conservatives Without Conscience: this is authoritarianism.

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At Daniel Larison's Of “Centrists” And Moderates:

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what pundits and journalists usually describe as “centrism” is capitulation to the other side on high-profile pieces of legislation by going against the grain of one’s own party in a melodramatic way and usually by backing the position that had won the approval of political establishment figures.

This is why a *lot* of us wanted you to get a Times/Post slot. Still want — surely they can swap out Krauthammer, now that he has re-defined “bottom of the moral barrel”?

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At hilzoy's Disbar them:

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I also really, *really* want to see professional sanctions against the doctors and psychiatrists. Are there any moves being made in that direction?

Book report: Baboon Metaphysics, by Cheney & Seyfarth

Book review at last! (or else InterLibrary Loan will come after me with *knives*):

Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, by Dorothy L. Cheney & Robert M. Seyfarth.

Cheney/Seyfarth and their colleagues have done exemplary work developing behavioral experiments in the field, the Okavango Delta. They have done beautiful work using recorded calls & playback experiments, and they've resisted all temptation to interfere with the baboons' lives, even during lion attacks.

The book comes with my highest recommendation -- the Amazon Reader Reviews give a very good flavor for what's in it, overall. This is a list of things *I* learned, even if there's a lot more in it that may be new to you.

1. Baboons recognize kinship. I don't mean they just recognize their own kin - that's not surprising, has been documented in all kinds of critters. I mean they recognize *other creatures' kin relationships*. Most vivid story is about Ahla, a baboon that was kept as a goat-herder by a farmer. She made great efforts to unite mother goats with their proper lambs, to the point where it caused problems when the farmer tried the standard method of fostering one of a pair of twin lambs with another mother. Ahla had none of this: she knew which lambs went with which mothers, and that's how she was going to make it be.

2. Baboon societies are made up of matrilines, groups of female blood relatives. The matrilines have a dominance hierarchy which overrides individual dominance -- the matriline rises or falls *together*. Such alterations are rare, the female hierarchy tends to be stable for years running.

3. It's not clear that baboons think of kin relationships in terms of "mother", "child", but they definitely think that certain individuals "go together", and the "going together" is a lot like property relationships.

4. When a female fights with a female from another matriline, they more often make up by proxy than directly. That is, a relative from the other matriline makes reconciling gestures (e.g. grooming), they calm down, and that acts to reconcile the fighters -- even if they haven't made reconciling gestures to each other.

5. The male hierarchy is simple and volatile. Males have few long-term relationships, and C/S think this is one reason males have much shorter lifespans than females: strong social relationships are buffers against emotional stress, especially fear and grief.

6. In their study population, the leading cause of death for infants is infanticide by males. Adults mostly die from predation. The habitat is extremely rich and the population density high -- other baboon populations have much lower infanticide levels.

7. Apes all use tools, from time to time. Baboons never do. Apes do not live in complex groups, yet they are clearly more intelligent than baboons (although baboons are pretty durn smart). Tool intelligence and social intelligence overlap, they have something in common -- even though tools have no minds, and the key element of social intelligence is predicting what the other creature will do, reading her mind.

8. *Teaching* is uniquely human: human babies are better at imitating, but human adults also spend a lot of time deliberately helping youngsters learn, which does not occur with either apes or baboons.

9. Baboons, apes, dogs, and probably others can understand hundreds of linguistic categories even though they produce very few.

10. Most baffling example of baboon thinking: the Lord of the Flies incident. During a water crossing, *all* the group's juveniles were separated from the adults, staying on one island (in the swamp) while the adults swam to the next. For three days, the juveniles cried out in distress -- and the adults never answered. The group was reunited only when the juveniles finally got up the courage to swim over to where the adults were.

Truth and Certainty

There's a long, fascinating discussion going on at Slacktivist's that I don't have time to sum up right now, but I wanted to put up a comment at Gay-hatin' Gospel Theory No. 4: The Exegetical Panic Defense:

I don't know if Exegetical Panic explains why homosexuality gets so much *more* panic than most of the many other things that contradict a simplistic reading of the Bible. But I do think that the risk for a fundamentalist of Exegetical Panic is going up all the time, so it becomes a constant source of stress.

A lot of this is due IMO to the greatest philosophical achievement of 20th-century science: realizing that the quest for capital-T Truth means you have to give up capital-C Certainty. It took a while, but I'd say most scientists are now content with the idea that there are things that are in principle uncertain, that one way to learn is to get proved wrong, and that your ideas about the world are going to change. That's why scientists can face situations like oops, we seem to have misplaced 80% of the universe -- AGAIN without getting terribly bent out of shape about it -- not that it wouldn't be nice to have some answers we all agree about, but it's not a horrible ontological trauma.

But I think I think living in a world like this *is* an trauma for a lot of people. Perhaps 20 years ago I remember reading an article in Biblical Archaeology Review, in which the author was expressing irritation at historical-critical analysis of the Bible, because "what kind of real knowledge changes every generation?" Well, that would be scientific knowledge, actually, where even if new knowledge doesn't sweep the old away, it changes it so it becomes gradually unrecognizable.

For a lot of people the result will be Future Shock. I think this is what a lot of the "culture wars" are about: people who've been trained not to expect the shock of the new, being hit with it wave by wave.

Evolutionary Psych & so on Book club?

I'm partway through reading The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory, and I want as many of you as possible read it so we can discuss it in a book group of some time. This is indeed the droid I've been looking for: not "the evolution of woman", but how to look at the evolution of both human sexes in a single, evolving organism, and how they have developed into human genders. Ev-psycho free so far, just science.

The writers' expertise is in paleoarchaeology & anthropology, especially of perishable technology: wood, string, textiles. So far their tale is a little week in primatology & biology; I can't speak to their physical anthropology. I'd love to be able to talk about it when I'm done, though, so I'm giving you-all a heads up that Talk might happen in a couple weeks.

Reporting on Sexual Selection

A lot of people have linked to the CNN report about a study of human mate preferences with the headline "Men want hot women", which hilzoy called the Dumbest Headline Ever. What seems to have slipped by is that CNN's headline isn't just dumb, it's wrong -- that's not what the study found.

I haven't seen the full study (subscription required), but the press release helps me decode it a bit, as does the abstract. The article, "Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences", is by Peter Todd et al., an international group mostly at the Max Planck Inst. in Berlin.[1]

As a biological rule, sexual selection is about female choice. Males do not, generally speaking, choose mates, they get chosen by females.[2] In the vast majority of animal species, males fight each other to be the one chosen by females. They compete for territories so females who are basically house-hunting will choose them along with the house. They are the ones who grow the bright colors or the elaborate antlers as conspicuous biological consumption, to show they have health and vigor to burn.[3]

There are a few species of birds where sexual selection is reversed and brightly-colored females compete for drab males, but this is never the case for mammals. When I was in grad school (in evolutionary biology) it is a byward that "milk is the limiting factor for mammal populations", which means that female mammals have even more at stake than female birds and are correspondingly choosier.

In other words, any time you see a popular discussion of human evolutionary biology, psychology, or sexual selection that does not focus on female choice, something fishy is going on. By "fishy" I mean:

a) the person doesn't actually understand evolutionary biology and is just making stuff up to fit their (his) prejudices and presuppositions

or

b) they are talking about something that is not based in biology, but *is* culture

or

c) they are talking about a way human biology differs from that of other animals, a way humans are distinctive and even abnormal

It's clear to me that Todd et al. are doing none of these things. This is really a methodological paper, to establish that speed dating can be used to study human mate choice. Speed dating is superficial and limited, but it also lets researchers study a lot of human interactions very quickly and without many ethical difficulties. This is a preliminary, does-this-fly study, that Todd et al. hope to use as the basis for studies with larger sample sizes.

One reason Todd et al. think speed dating is a reasonable thing to study is that they found men to be much less choosy than women. Again, this is exactly what an evolutionary biologist would predict: that female choice is crucial, while males will basically take whatever they can get. I think that if Todd et al. had found men being pickier than women at speed dating they would probably have thrown the results out as being culturally determined and therefore, from an evolutionary perspective, uninteresting.

This is what they mean by writing in the abstract that

Unlike the cognitive processes that Buston and Emlen inferred from self-reports, this pattern of results from actual mate choices is very much in line with the evolutionary predictions of parental investment theory.

Now, I think they're wrong. I don't think speed dating is a good predictor of human mate choice, whether "mate" means "person you live with" or "the other parent of your offspring". I think the anthropological evidence is that human mate choice (however defined) is *both* (a) subject to strong cultural influence, and (b) biologically distinctive.[4] I also see plenty of evidence that in most cultures sexual selection on females is as strong as sexual selection on males. This is a biologically unusual pattern, and thus should have biologically unusual causes and produce unusual results.

The mere fact that Todd et al. are using "speed dating" and "parental investment theory" in the same place should make you think twice -- or LOL, because becoming parents together is not really what the participants have in mind. More seriously, parental investment theory doesn't predict that all mating systems should be the same, or that females should *always* be doing the sexual selection -- it depends on the organism's ecology and reproductive biology.[5]

But, whether you agree with Todd or not, you should notice that CNN's headline says nothing at all about women's choices and how important they are: it's just What Men Want. Is this is common-or-garden variety sexism (in which men *must* be the active party), is it that the CNN editors subconsciously realize that women are choosy and thus need more information, is it part of a pervasive problem with science journalism echidne has discussed, is it just stupidity? I personally am splitting my vote between "sexism" and "stupidity", but you be the judge.

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[1] PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has a complex and idiosyncratic submission policy which used to have a very large component of pure ego- and nepo-tism. That has been reduced, but it's still important to note who is listed as the "Editor" of a particular article. This one is credited to Gordian Orians, a evolutionary biologist (expert on vertebrate mating systems) for whom I have huge respect but who's not all that young anymore.

[2] This article is a good, non-controversial overview of sexual selection and mate choice.

[3] For instance, it's male peacocks who have the gorgeous tails, male deer who have antlers, male lions who have manes. Do I need more examples, or does everybody know this?

[4] Notably, in the vast majority of human cultures people other than the couple have input into human mate choice. This has no parallel in nature, which means it should have effects that a naturalist would not expect.

[5] For instance, marmosets and tamarins are small South American primates that are frequently polyandrous, where a single female mates with more than one male. Male marmosets do a great deal of baby-carrying and other child-care (=high paternal investment). Probably because of the extra help from the males and from older siblings, marmosets usually have twins and occasionally even triplets, while twinning is rare in other primates.

You can see from the abstract of this review article ("Ontogenetic variation in small-bodied New World primates: implications for patterns of reproduction and infant care") that parental investment theory doesn't predict a single social system for even this one group of creatures. It depends on what they eat, how fast the offspring grow before and after they're born, how large a group of adults can find food together, and even on twins being genetic blended in the womb. (that last article is *boggling* -- germ-line chimerism! in a primate! no wonder they're almost eusocial. I'm gobsmacked, scientifically speaking. I'll write more about this later.)