Human Nature
sastyk | April 26, 2013You get tiny, unexpected tastes of the world perfected in a lot of places, if you watch. I got it last week at my son Eli's bar mitzvah (which I'll write more about shortly). Naomi Shahib Nye got it in the place most of us feel as far from the world we want as possible - at her flight gate, waiting after a delay had been announced:
And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked…
emjohnson | June 29, 2010Author's Note: The following is an excerpt from my review of Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. For additional information see my posts Reexamining Ardipithecus ramidus in Light of Human Origins, Those Cheating Testicles, or Who's Your Baby? as well as Helen's Lament and the Origins of Forbidden Love. Christopher Ryan also blogs at Psychology Today.
When we think of the first swinger parties most of us imagine 1970s counter-culture, we don't picture Top Gun fighter pilots in World War II. Yet, according to researchers Joan and Dwight Dixon, it was on military bases…
emjohnson | April 22, 2010A new study shows that chimps sacrifice their own advantage if they earned it unfairly.Image: Owen Booth / Creative Commons
Fairness is the basis of the social contract. As citizens we expect that when we contribute our fair share we should receive our just reward. When social benefits are handed out unequally or when prior agreements are not honored it represents a breach of trust. Based on this, Americans were justifiably outraged when, not just one, but two administrations bailed out the wealthiest institutions in the country while tens of thousands of homeowners (many of whom were…
emjohnson | March 23, 2010Harvard Medical School physician and researcher J. Wes Ulm has a fascinating paper in the new edition of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, the quarterly academic periodical put out by Johns Hopkins University. His paper "The Cachet of the Cutthroat" investigates the legacy of ideas that formed the basis of laissez-faire social Darwinism:
Ultimately, Social Darwinism fails in practice because it never succeeded as a theory. It's not even Darwinist-Herbert Spencer, after all, had sketched out its contours even before Darwin published his own work. And when the great naturalist outlined a…
sastyk | February 24, 2010Not as off-topic for this blog as it might seem, I thought this (which I found through Gene Expression, one of my new favorite reads) essay on the merits of evolutionary psychology to be a very good and clear way of expressing my doubts on the subject.
He writes:
Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies. This does seem plausible. Babies are pretty cute, after all. It's a tempting explanation.
Here is one of the cutest baby pictures I found on a Google search.
And this is a bunny.…
emjohnson | January 23, 2010
Sapolsky's talk begins at 5:00 after an introduction by the Stanford Provost.
The neuroendocrinologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky has been one of my primary scientific influences and the reason I pursued my masters and PhD in primate behavior and evolution. Not only is he a brilliant researcher and writer, he's also a genuinely kind and supportive guy. Back in 2001, as an undergraduate, I wrote what was then my first fan letter to a neuroscientist. To my surprise he wrote back and we had an ongoing correspondence. He even recommended a piece of writing I had sent him to his editor…
emjohnson | November 9, 2009Reciprocity is an intrinsic feature of human beings as well as most species of ape. Chimpanzees and bonobos regularly engage in granting gifts of food and expect a return on their generosity (those who don't reciprocate are less likely to receive such gifts in the future) (de Waal and Brosnan 2006). This "tit-for-tat" basis of exchange exists in all human societies and becomes ritualized based on the cultural norms that are present. One of the most well known descriptions of reciprocity among indigenous societies is that of the Kula among the Trobriand Islanders near Papua New Guinea that…
emjohnson | October 26, 2009In a new understanding of the term power grab, researchers have shown that the supporters of a political candidate literally have their power taken from them after they lose an election. In a new study by Steven J. Stanton and colleagues in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, researchers asked 163 Republican and Democratic voters (57 of whom were men) to provide saliva samples both before and after the 2008 election between John McCain and Barack Obama. What the researchers determined was that Republican men showed significant reductions in testosterone after they learned that their candidate…
emjohnson | October 18, 2009Classical literature has judged Helen of Troy harshly. Because she chose Paris after having children with Menelaus, her chroniclers condemn her for the destruction of a great society. In Homer's Odyssey the bard writes:
Helen would never have yielded herself to a man from a foreign country, if she had known that the sons of Achaeans would come after her and bring her back. Heaven put it in her heart to do wrong, and she gave no thought to that sin, which has been the source of all our sorrows.
This has been the tradition in Western society. An open female sexuality has been viewed as…
emjohnson | October 15, 2009There may need to be a significant revision in the recent description of one of humanity's oldest ancestors. Ardipithecus ramidus (or "Ardi" for short), the 4.4 million year old hominid fossil discovery, has been a godsend to paleoanthropologists (pun intended). But one of the key researchers has made what could be a serious error in his interpretation.
Christopher Ryan, who writes for Psychology Today at his blog Sex at Dawn (also the title of his forthcoming book) has discovered evidence that could undermine Owen Lovejoy's argument about human sexual evolution ever since Ardi:
In a…
emjohnson | October 10, 2009
In the classic film Casablanca, the drama hinges on Ilsa's choice between two men: her kind and supportive husband or her rugged and passionate ex-lover. In a moment of abandon, Ilsa returns to her lover's arms only to later change her mind and choose the more stable life she would have with her long-term partner. But what if something as simple as a pill had caused Ilsa to feel differently and make the opposite choice?
In a new paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution biologists Alexandra Alvergne and Virpi Lummaa at the University of Sheffield in England raise the possibility…
emjohnson | September 24, 2009Seed magazine has just posted my review of Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. I wanted to use this opportunity to thank Nikki, Evan, Bora and everyone else that helped in developing this piece. For posts on related topics please see Misunderstanding Dawkins, The Sacrifice of Admetus, Bonobos "Red in Tooth and Claw", The Evolution of Morality and Laboratory Evidence for the Breakdown of the Selfish Gene.
In a fitting metaphor, the most recent experiment with social darwinism resulted in mass extinction. Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling claimed he was…
emjohnson | September 23, 2009Author's Note: This piece is a continuation of my article "Survival of the Kindest" that appeared in Seed magazine.
As an undergraduate in biology and anthropology I read every one of Dawkins' books voraciously and would get into heated debates with my close friends about the Dawkins-Gould rivalry. He was one of the primary voices that taught me to love science and want to devote my life to the pursuit of natural knowledge. So before you read anything else, go out and read Dawkins' work. It's worth your time. This post will still be here when you come back.
The problem that I've found as…
emjohnson | September 21, 2009Heracles battles Death for generosity's sake / Frederic Lord Leighton (1869-71)
Whereas great scientific theories stand the test of time when they accurately predict the natural world through repeated empirical trials, great literature transcends the ages when it speaks to universal qualities of human experience. Such inspirational works can also, without the authors realizing at the time, reveal the sublime beauty and tragedy of our evolutionary drama. Few classical authors have tapped into this zeitgeist of biological experience as the Greek tragedian Euripides. The conflict between…
emjohnson | September 20, 2009
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the third of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
In my earlier pieces "Bonobo (Re)Visions" as well as "Bonobos and the Politics of Human Nature" I pointed out how conservative pundits were eager to jump on any criticism of this species because it fit their ideology of nature as "red in tooth and claw" (to use the line from Tennyson). In his response in eSkeptic Frans de Waal…
emjohnson | September 19, 2009Bonobos often adopt a "missionary" posture during copulation (photograph by Frans de Waal).
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the second of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As I wrote earlier in Bonobo (Re)Visions, Ian Parker's "exposé" in The New Yorker was beautifully written but wrong on many levels. Now the straw man who Parker claims to have torn down, primatologist Frans de Waal, answers his…
emjohnson | September 18, 2009
As part of the series of reposts leading up to my review of Frans de Waal's newest book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society I present the first of three pieces that appeared after Ian Parker's 2007 article "Swingers" appeared in The New Yorker.
As expected, the apologists for unreason who promote Intelligent Design have jumped on the recent article in The New Yorker about bonobos. This inspired me to write at more length about the article since this is a species I've studied closely for the last two years. Denyse O'Leary at Uncommon Descent uses the article to proudly…
emjohnson | September 17, 2009
Darwin evicts a Social Darwinist and Eugenicist from his house / Northwestern Univ.
Primatologist Frans de Waal, author of such classic works as Chimpanzee Politics, Peacemaking Among Primates, Good Natured: The Origin of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, and Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape is now coming out with his new book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. My review of this work will be out early next week to mark the book's national release on September 22. Today and in the next few days I will be reposting pieces I've written over the years on the…
emjohnson | August 17, 2009Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "Where there's marriage without love there will be love without marriage." His affairs are well known in American history, however this founding father may have been stating a truth extending to evolutionary history as well.
Christopher Ryan (author of the forthcoming Sex at Dawn) offers some thoughts on the role of novelty in the sex lives of our favorite primate. He suggests that men are drawn to variety in sexual partners while women are drawn to variety in technique:
When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they…
emjohnson | August 7, 2009The Evolution of Spite is the Evil Twin of Altruism
Someone walks into a crowded restaurant, looks about the diners calmly, and blows themselves up as well as everyone nearby. Why? This is a scenario that forces us to explain the dark side of human nature. Why do humans have a capacity for such hate that they'll take their own lives in order to destroy others?
A study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on chimpanzee behavior suggests that humans may be alone in this way: a dubious distinction to say the least. In a review published in the Chicago Tribune the researchers…