In today’s New York Times, Natalie Angier discusses primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s forthcoming book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Hrdy posits that our capability of cooperating with others, our ability to empathize, and our attempts to see another’s perspective likely arose from the selective pressures of being part of a cooperatively breeding social group.

Also noted is the entertainment value of infants in societies without the usual technological devices. Even with them, babies can provide amusement, cf. Talking Heads’ “Stay Up Late.”

Maybe Kevin needs to hold a drooling infant and make him stay up all night. All night long.

Link to the original article: In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue.

March 3, 2009
Basics
In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
By NATALIE ANGIER
In seeking bipartisan support for his economic policies, President Obama has tried every tip on the standard hospitality crib sheet: beer and football, milk and cookies, Earth, Wind and Fire.

Maybe the president needs to borrow a new crib sheet — the kind with a genuine baby wrapped inside.

A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.

In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.

As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

Human beings evolved as cooperative breeders, says Dr. Hrdy, a reproductive strategy in which mothers are assisted by as-if mothers, or “allomothers,” individuals of either sex who help care for and feed the young. Most biologists would concur that humans have evolved the need for shared child care, but Dr. Hrdy takes it a step further, arguing that our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament. Our relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can fly from New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment. Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled with chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached,” Dr. Hrdy writes.

Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became adorable and keen to make connections with every passing adult gaze. Mothers became willing to play pass the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously hold on to their infants for the first six months or more of life. Other females may express real interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you never know when one of those females will turn infanticidal, or be unwilling or unable to defend the young ape against an infanticidal male.

By contrast, human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow others to hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser extent depending on tradition. Among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari, babies are held by a father, grandmother, older sibling or some other allomother maybe 25 percent of the time. Among the Efe foragers of Central Africa, babies spend 60 percent of their daylight hours being toted around by somebody other than their mother. In 87 percent of foraging societies, mothers sometimes suckle each other’s children, another remarkable display of social trust.

Dr. Hrdy wrote her book in part to counter what she sees as the reigning dogma among evolutionary scholars that humans evolved their extreme sociality and cooperative behavior to better compete with other humans. “I’m not comfortable accepting this idea that the origins of hypersociality can be found in warfare, or that in-group amity arose in the interest of out-group enmity,” she said in a telephone interview. Sure, humans have been notably violent and militaristic for the last 12,000 or so years, she said, when hunter-gatherers started settling down and defending territories, and populations started getting seriously dense. But before then? There weren’t enough people around to wage wars. By the latest estimates, the average population size during the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that preceded the Neolithic Age may have been around 2,000 breeding adults. “What would humans have been fighting over?” Dr. Hrdy said. “They were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive.”

Dr. Hrdy also argues that our human ancestors became emotionally modern long before the human brain had reached its current average volume of 1,300 cubic centimeters, which is about three times the size of a chimpanzee brain — in other words, that we became the nicest apes before becoming the smartest. You don’t need a bulging brain to evolve cooperative breeding. Many species of birds breed cooperatively, as do lions, rats, meerkats, wolves and marmosets, among others. But to become a cooperatively breeding ape, and to persuade a bunch of smart, hot-tempered, suspicious, politically cunning primates to start sharing child care and provisionings, now that took a novel evolutionary development, the advent of this thing called trust.

To explain the rise of cooperative breeding among our forebears, Dr. Hrdy synthesizes an array of new research in anthropology, genetics, infant development, comparative biology. She notes that recent research has overturned the longstanding insistence that humans are a patrilocal species, that is, with women moving away from their birth families to join their husbands. Instead, it seems that young mothers in many traditional societies have their own mothers and other female relatives close at hand, and who better to trust with baby care than your mom or your aunt? New studies have also shown the importance of postmenopausal women to gathering roots and tubers, the sort of unsexy foods that are difficult to disinter and lack the succulent status of, say, a freshly killed oryx, but that just may help feed the kids in hard times. Other anthropologists have made the startling discovery that children have entertainment value, and that among traditional cultures without television or Internet access, a bobble-headed baby is the best show in town.

However cooperative breeding got started, its impact on human evolution was profound. With helpers in the nest, women could give birth to offspring with ever longer childhoods — the better to build big brains and stout immune systems — and, paradoxically, at ever shrinking intervals. The average time between births for a chimpanzee mother is about six years; for a human mother, it’s two or three years. As a result of our combined braininess and fecundity, humans have managed to colonize the planet; exploit, marginalize or exterminate all competing forms of life; build a vast military-industrial complex all under the auspices of Bernard Madoff and with one yeti of a carbon footprint, and will somebody please hand me that baby before it’s too late.

Philip José Farmer, a prolific and popular science fiction writer who shocked readers in the 1950s by depicting sex with aliens and challenged conventional pieties of the genre with caustic fables set on bizarre worlds of his own devising, died Wednesday. He was 91 and lived in Peoria, Ill.

As a pre-adolescent sprout, I’d sneak out copies of my older brother’s PJF paperbacks and devour them. The Riverworld series was my favorite, but New Riders of the Purple Wage made an impact, too. So passes a muscular imagination.

A teaser follows. The rest of the article (including photos), copiously dusted with SDC’s dry sardonic humor, may be found here: Elitist Liberals Visit The Creation Museum.

I am not particularly unusual in wanting to be there when history is unfolding. Last month I was excited about playing a tiny, tiny role in Obama’s victory over John McCain. A few weeks ago, I went to the Creation Museum with my wife, two friends, and 3 of the friends’ kids: one a junior in high school, another a seventh grader, the other ten years old. A bunch of smirky liberal-types making a trip to mock the Creation Museum was definitely not an historic event, but it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, we can look on the existence of such an embarassing abomination in our nation as a ‘high water mark’ for the fundies’ efforts to take over the show. Yeah, high water mark, Noah, ha ha.

I may be completely wrong about that. I hope not. What I do know is we wanted to see this thing for ourselves, and since it is merely a few hours away, it was no big problem to fit a visit into a Saturday. The museum is located near where Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky meet, and Kentucky was the big loser here, as it is located within that state. There’s some question as to whether the locals are happy about it, as evidenced by the bullet holes in a sign near the Museum (see above. Notice the Stop sign is unscathed).

Our first impressions: it is a rather large building, and the grounds with the topiary christmas-light adorned dinosaurs are extensive. The parking lot was maybe half-full. There were security guys out front directing traffic, assisted by their bloodhound. A couple times during the day we saw security running through the museum, but I have no idea why. It was spooky and vaguely totalitarian.

SDC’s blog, Words of Advice for Young People, is linked in the side bar but bears repeating here.

Many raucous panthoots and multiple long, languorous grooming sessions go to mistaSteve for pimping himself out.

Happy holidays, bonobos!

(Pharma-phunnies, some medically graphic, contained therein.)

Gerald Finley as Oppie (left) and Richard Paul Fink as Edward Teller, right.

More below the cut.

John Adams’ and Peter Sellars’ (no, not the Dr. Strangelove species) opera focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the events from June 1945 to the detonation of the Gadget on June 16, 1945. The opera premiered in San Francisco in October 2005 and has been performed in 2007 by the De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam; production is underway at the Lyric Opera in Chicago.

The Met’s version had some controversy. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, wanted some significant changes made to the opera’s staging — changes that Sellars’ declined to accept. Thus Penny Woolcock, a British film maker, took charge of the staging. Some criticism has been levied at Woolcock’s grittier imagery versus Sellars’ surrealism, but for this viewer, Woolcock’s staging worked well.

I won’t belabor a long review here since Alex Ross, a music critic, has done this so well in his blog Countdown (written in Oct. 2005) and in the New Yorker, False Dawn: The Met’s Take on John Adams’s Doctor Atomic (Oct. 27, 2008).

I loved the production for so many reasons: gorgeous voices, esp. Gerald Finley as Oppenheimer and Sasha Cooke as Kitty Oppenheimer (Kitty’s lyrics, influenced by Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry, have a hallucinatory quality); Woolcock’s staging and the costumes (period fifties garb and a group of actors in extraordinary kuchina Native American costumes standing over the increasingly agitated scientists and military personnel); and Sellars’ exquisite libretto which fuses historical dialog (“Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart” — spoken by Oppie a couple of minutes before the detonation), science and engineering (paeans to energy, matter and implosion, e.g.,

We surround the plutonium core

from thirty two points

spaced equally around its surface,

the thirty-two points

are the centers of the

twenty triangular faces

of an icosahedron interwoven with the twelve pentagonal faces

of a dodecahedron.

We squeeze the sphere.

Bring the atoms closer.

Til the subcritical mass

goes supercritical.

We disturb the stable nucleus.

Lyrics are taken from the works of Baudelaire, the Bhagavad-Gita and John Donne. The latter provided the lyrical power behind Finley-as-Oppenheimer’s impassioned and heart-wrenching aria:

Batter my heart, three person’d God; For, you

As yet but knock, breathe, knock, breathe, knock, breathe

Shine, and seek to mend;

Batter my heart, three person’d God;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, break, blow, break, blow

burn and make me new.

Batter my heart, three person’d God; For, you

As yet but knock, breathe, knock, breathe, knock, breathe

Shine, and seek to mend;

Batter my heart, three person’d God;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, break, blow, break, blow

burn and make me new.

I, like an usurpt town, to another due,

Labor to’admit you, but

Oh, to no end,

Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue,

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,

But am betroth’d unto your enemy,

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Here are a couple of video clips:

Adams’ music will not be to everyone’s taste, but as a Stravinsky aficionado, I enjoyed its harmonies, dissonance and the lyrically melodic which all inflect the score. Most striking was how time is stretched out as the countdown approaches, from the frantic atmosphere in June 1945 to the long seconds before the blast.

My only two complaints: I wanted to see Vishnu/Shiva (dammit, I mean, Woolcock could have pulled this off with her use of projection and fabric) and the final “blast” of light would have been more effective as illumination of the performers’ faces instead of the backdrop behind them. Otherwise, I recommend this opera (the performance in Amsterdam is out on DVD), which so lyrically embodies the moral complexities that the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project faced, and which we, as scientists and engineers in other venues, often confront albeit in less dramatic ways.

My favorite:

(Intelligently designed by Patrick Quigley and submitted to Inkling Magazine’s Design Your Own Darwin Fish.)

Josh Brolin (l) [No Country for Old Men] starred as the Lame Duck (r). Although not a doppelganger, Brolin nailed Bushie’s mannerisms and speech patterns perfectly. Interestingly, Christian Bale was originally cast in the role, but dropped out for various reasons.

As I reminded Spawn the Yonger, this is an Oliver Stone movie, and the director is known to take plenty of artistic license in his portrayal of historic figures and events. That said, Stone, an admirably unabashed lefty, provided surprisingly even-handed treatment of Bush who emerges as a sympathetic character. This is largely due to Brolin’s interpretation of Dubya: not exactly stupid, but often clueless and in way over his head. Brolin gives the character vulnerability.

The film lacks depth and is even kind of cartoonish, but that worked for me. If I want depth, I’ll read. The supporting cast was very entertaining and I could almost imagine them drawn out DC Comics style or part of a graphic novel. Thandie Newton smirked her way through Condolezza Rice’s role. Richard Dreyfus inhabited Dick Cheney with an incredibly chilling Dr. Strangelove moment when asked by Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) about the plans for an exit strategy from Iraq. Cheney/Dreyfus’ response: “There is no exit strategy.” That turns one’s blood cold, fictionalized account or no, because it’s all too believable that Cheney has chiseled that strategy in stone.

Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell and Bruce McGill as George Tenet (chief of the CIA) offered constant uneasiness and tension with the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz triumvirate. I can easily imagine Powell saying “Fuck you!” to Cheney as he did in the flick. McGill as Tenet was great with his “WTF?” and otherwise “I can’t believe what these assholes are doing” expressions as the White House manufactured “yellow cake” to justify the invasion. Toby Jones was a perfect weasel as Karl Rove. James Cromwell as Poppy and Ellen Burstyn as Bar were good enough, although the whole Oedipal thing between Poppy and Dubya was overplayed. Still, Poppy’s “deeply disappointed” had plausibility. Some cool surprises: Rob Corddry as sycophant Ari Fleischer (press secretary before Scott McClellan), Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair, and Stacy Keach as Earle Hudd, a fictional character who is a composite of W’s fundagelical clergy pals. Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush wasn’t terribly memorable.

The feel of the film was simultaneously comic and deeply chilling. In the midst of Bushie’s rah-rah cheerleaderism and his cabinet’s cold exuberance over the invasion of Iraq, Stone throws in jaw-droppingly graphic footage of the war. It was shocking (even for me), but served its purpose well, reminding the audience what really was — and is — at stake.

In his review of W, Ty Burr (of the Boston Globe; Burr is “my” most reliable film critic since I appear to share his tastes), this movie was made “too soon” and was thus uneven. Stone filmed this in a very short period of time, and I think it’s pretty obvious he intended to release it close to the election. When a clip of Bush speaking before Congress was shown with a flash of McCain on the screen, there was a collective murmur of derision throughout the theater. The area around Princeton is heavily Democratic so I guess that’s no surprise, plus I doubt that many up in Hunterdon County or in South Jersey with McCain/Palin signs in their yard are going to see this film. Some people walked out, but my guess is that it was because this, ummm, wasn’t exactly a great film.

Personally, I would much rather have seen Appaloosa (Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen), but I’m not one to discourage my kid’s zeal and budding activism.

I’ve played with the creature creator, which is actually rather fun…but it’s really just the most elaborate version of Mr Potatohead ever designed. What I’ve seen of the game itself puts me off a bit, though. It’s not going to teach one single thing about evolution, and actually teaches several things that are anti-evolutionary. It’s a design toy, not any kind of evolution simulator, but people are gushing over it as if it might actually improve the image of evolutionary biology.

Based on my admittedly limited experience with the Spore Creature Creator, I agree to a certain extent with this, but it might just spark some interest in evolutionary biology even if it doesn’t smack of full-blown accuracy. You know, sort of a gateway thing. I mean, the pulp science fiction stories I read as a kid weren’t scientifically accurate, but they did set my imagination to soaring and thinking about scientific principles. This new video game might just do that to young minds receptive to such things.

Like PZ’s Skatje, the elder fruit o’ my womb has been encouraging me to check the game out. Spawn the Elder is a video game fan boy, but he’s also an evo-devo fan boy, having read the popular books written by Sean B. Carroll and Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart (Endless Forms Most Beautiful and The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma, respectively) so he views the game with the appropriate perspective. Thus, he, along with his old mother (that would be me), was thrilled to watch the National Geographic Channel’s program last night, How to Build a Better Being. [Yes, you must suffer through an advertisement if you watch the clip from MSN-TV's "The First Ten Minutes." Long live running dog capitalist Amerika!]

Although the PR bits that I received in the Chimp Refuge banana box implied at a cursory glance that this might be a documentary about Spore itself, I was delighted to see that the major focus by far was on evo-devo.

The NGC program was very well done. The concepts of hox genes as “genetic tool kits” and how these play into development, morphology and evolution were presented at a level that a scientifically curious layperson could readily comprehend, certainly a bright middle-schooler. The scientists interviewed expressed a true joy and infectious excitement about their research. From fruit flies to Tiktaalik (the fossil fish) to the human hand to the radula of an abalone, the interconnectedness of life’s “genetic tool kit” is illustrated in a very accessible way. The laconic but clearly curious and intelligent Will Wright, the creator of Spore, acted as the nominative “host.”

Spawn the Elder and I really geeked out over this TV show. And what precipitated it? A plug for a video game. So even if “Spore” doesn’t reflect absolute accuracy of evolutionary processes, the fact that evo-devo showed up in popular culture, even if it is on the high numbers of cable TV, made me swoon!

I highly recommend the NGC program. Catch it on the rebound.

Erstwhile Science Blogger Carl Zimmer covered the impending release of Spore in his excellent NYT article Gaming Evolves. From Carl’s piece:

Unlike the typical shoot-them-till-they’re-all-dead video game, Spore was strongly influenced by science, and in particular by evolutionary biology. Mr. Wright will appear in a documentary next Tuesday on the National Geographic Channel, sharing his new game with leading evolutionary biologists and talking with them about the evolution of complex life.

Brian Ries, PR wonk, sent a clip from National Geographic in which Will Wright, the principal designer behind Spore and The Sims, discusses “How to Build a Better Being.”

And yes, this post is diverging into a free advert for the game, but it does look very cool. I was entranced with the Creature Creator; other Science Bloggers have fiddled around with this, too — just type “Spore” into the search function on the main site. So I’m afraid hobbit burglers, elven loremasters, and dwarf guardians are going to slip by the wayside in favor of Tetris-like nucleotides and amino acids, bizarre microbes and arthrpods and Punctuated-by-Fun(tm) evolution!

I wonder if the infamous Zero Punctuation a.k.a. Ben Croshaw will deign to make a commentary on this. Probably not. But if the Beck Fan Club is pining for his full-on yammering, do check out Croshaw’s video game reviews (video clips below – NSFW). Even if you’re not a gamer, they’re rabidly amusing, although his churning stream o’ verbiage is but a pale and measured British-by-way-of-Australia (or some such sun sinking on the empire) version of kemibe’s at his most shrill.