Kin and Kind - A Fight about the Genetics of Altruism

Jonah Lehrer
New Yorker - Dept. of Science
05 March 2012

Journal of Theoretical Biology (1964) by William Hamilton
--Genes for altruism could evolve if the benefit of an action exceeded the cost ot the individual once relatedness was taken into account.
--Altruism isn't really altruism.  It's just another means of spreading our genes by saving kin instead of having sex.
--Haplodiploidy--Female insects emerged from fertilzied while males emerged from unfertilized one.  Therefore, female insects protected the queen because they were more related to her than the males which is basically genetic greed.
--Eusociality--Indiviual insects live in vast cooperative societues like wasps and ants.

E.O. Wilson (entomologist) studied ants and doesn't believe the equation works (2000)
--Tens of thousands of insects that develped haplodiploidy did not evolve eusociality--so that relationship is statistically insignificant which contracticts Hamilton's thesis.
Eusociality is rare because it requires a long list of preadaptations before it happens.
----Cohesion of the group must come first.
----The female insects might then construct a defensible nest
----Genetic adaptations for eusocialty begins to happen (feeding larvae; division of labor)
----Once this happens, natural selection takes over allowing altruistic lifestyle to reproduce fast.
The relatedness of the ant colony is a consequence of eusociality, not the cause.

Darwin's The Descent of Man
Generosity evolved as an emergent principle of the group, not the individual.
Group Selection - While costly for the individual, generosity helped sustain the group which made individuals in the group more likely to survive.
This is mostly dismissed because the tangible benefits of group generosity are are less tangible than selfishness.

E.O. Wilson
If our behaviour was driven by group selection, we'd be like automotons in an ant colony.  If indiviual selection was the only thing that mattered, then we'd be entirely selfish.  We're shaped by both forces and stuck somewhere in between.

Group Think - The Brainstorming Myth

Jonah Lehrer
Annals of Ideas - 30 January 2012

Alex Osborn - Your Creative Power (1948)
--Brainstorming is characterized by the absence of criticism and negative feedback

Decades of research has shown that brainstorming sessions produce fewer ideas than same number of people who work individually and then pull their ideas.

Charles Nemeth 2003 Berkely Professor
--Debate conditions - groups that debate and criticize each others ideas.
--Debate conditions do not inhibit ideas, but stimulate them relative to every other condition.
--Stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with others and to reassess our viewpoints
--Even when ideas may be wrong, it expands our creative potential

The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together--It is the human friction that makes the spark.

The Sanctuary-The World's Oldest Temple and the Dawn of Civilization

Elif Batuman - The New Yorker
Dept. of Archaeology - 26 December 2011

Hunter Gatherers are believed to have lacked...
1) complex symbolic systems
2) social hierarchies
3) the division of labor.
...three things probably needed to build mega temples

The 22 acre mega temple at Gobelki Tepe in Turkey suggests that the need to build a sacred site might have obliged the hunter gatherers to mobilize a workforce, secure a stable food supply and spend long periods of time in one place

Hunter-gatherers weren't supposed to make large scale human representation sculptures because it conflicts with the animistic, non-hierarchical point of view.

The Neolithic Revolution, coined by V. Gordon Childe believed that the hunter-gatherers transition to subsistence and ultimately domestication was a result of climate changes.

Jacques Cauvin in the 70's proposed that a cult of the bull and fertility goddess, an ancient religion, had fostered a fertility oriented world view that engendered a shift to agriculture.
Gobelki Tepe may support this theory of an ideological trigger.

Studies of Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers shows that they spend about 20 hours a week gathering food, while farmers toiled all day. Paleoarchaeological data shows that early farmers had more anemia and vitamin deficiencies, died younger, had worse teeth, and were more prone to infectious diseases from close proximity to people and animals.
Why would people choose to be farmers?

Hunter-gatherers had it good until population growth caught up with increased food production, so they had to spend more time producing food to keep everyone alive. The farmers, because they were larger in number, killed off other hunter-gatherers or drove them off the land.
Was this the beginning of social and sexual inequality?

Some pople think Gobelki Temple is the Garden of Eden

Eve: "pain of childbirth....your husband will rule over you..." may refer to the decline of women's health and the need to produce babies to work the land.

Cain kills Abel and founds the first city.
Is this the beginning of terriotorial feuds, sibling rivalry, the constant threat of exile?

Sleeping with the Enemy - What happened between the Neanderthals and Us?

Annals of Evolution
Elizabeth Kolbert - 15 August 2011

• "Leaky Replacement" - Before modern humans replaced the Neanderthals, they had sex with them and produced children who helped populate Europe, Asia and the New World; Offspring were functional enough to be integrated with human society.


• All non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA.


• Leipzig performed tests on chimps, orangutans, and 2.5 year old children and found that they all preformed comparably on tasks involved in understanding the physical world.


• Apes grasped quantity as well as kids--choosing the dish that contained more treats rather than less treats which is rudimentary understanding of mathematics.


• Kids perfromed better in reading social cues--adults pointing to things to help the kids pick something whereas the apes didn't realize this as help.


• Apes seem to lack the impulse towards collective problem solving which is central to human society.


• From archaeological records, Neanderthals evolved in Europe or western Asia and spread out from there, stopping when they reached an obstacle like a body of water--only modern humans tried venturing out in the ocean when they don't see land---which suggests that there is some kind of adventuring or madness encoded in modern humans--the need to explore.


• Neanderthals and modern humnas share an ancestor that is about 400,000 years old whereas our common ancestor with chimps is 5-7 million years ago.


• People who have faulty copies of RUNX2 often develop conditions with Nenderthal like features including flared rib cages. Two genes that have been implicated in autism also appears to have changed substantially between Neanderthals and humans---interesting because one of the symptoms of autism is inability to read social cues

The Possibilian - What a Brush with Death Taught David Eagleman about the Mysteries of Time and the Brain

Burkhard Bilger - New Yorker
25 April 2011

• How much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds?


• Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments....yet the data rarely matches our reality.


• Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives?


• A sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It's there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. The interesting about time is that there is no spot. It's a distributed property that rides on top of all others.


• The brain needs time to get its story straight. It gathers up all of the evidence of our senses and only then reveals it to us. If all our senes are slightly delayed, we have no context by which to measure a given lag.


• When something threatens your life, the amygdala in your brain kicks into overdrive and records every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last.


• The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain records, and the more quickly time seems to pass.

The Efficiency Dilemma - If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?

Annals of Environmentalism

David Owen - 27 December 2010

Efforts to improve energy efficiency can more than negate any environmental gains.

• Jevons Paradox (1865) - It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is a equivalent to a diminished consumption.
• If you increase the productivity of anything, you have the effect of reducing its implicit price, because you get more return for the same money.
• Rebound (current term)--increased energy consumption more than cancels out any energy savings as backfire.

As the ability to chill things has grown, so has the opportunity to buy chilled things--a potent positive feedback loop.

• Most of the electricity that powers refrigerators is generated by burning fossil fuels.
• The growth of American refrigerator volumes parallels American body-mass index.\

• New Yorkers throw out vegetable most often.
• When we throw away food, we discard the nutrients; we also throw away the energy required to keep it cold, as well as the energy that went into growing, harvesting, etc.
• According to a 2009 study, more than one quarter of US freshwater goes into producing food that is later discarded.

We now use as much energy to cool buildings as we did for everything in 1955.

The problem with efficiency gains is that we reinvest them in additional consumption---Paving roads makes travel easier, so we will drive further to get goods and live further away from work.

The Apostate - Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology

Lawrence Wright

21 February 2011

• Tommy Davis - the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International.
• Church of Scientology mission - Transform individual lives and the world; a civilization without insanity, criminals, and war--where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights.
• Scientology postulates that everyone is a Thetan--an immortal spirtual being that lives through countless lifetimes.
• ARC trinity - Affinity, Reality, and Communication. Affinity means the emotional response that partners have to one another; reality is the common agreement. Together, these contribute to the flow of communication. The three parts together equal understanding. Raising or lowering any one affects all three.
• Clear - comes from Dianetics; A person who becomes clear is adaptable to and able to change his environment.
• E-Meter--kind of like a polygraph; measures electric changes in a body based on a persons answers to the auditors questions. Once the E-meter jumped, the auditor would focus on this topic until the subject was free of the emotional consequences of the troubling experience. The goal is to uncover and neutralize the emotional memories that are plaguing one's behavior.
• An operating Thetan is one who can handle things without having to use a body or physical means
• Dianetics tries to identify the source of self-destructive behavior. The reactive mind, a kind of data bank that is filled with traumatic memories called engrams. The object of Dianetics is to drain one of all these engrams and to leave the person "Clear".
• History - A major cause of Mankind's problems began 75 million years ago. The planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of 90 planets under the leadership of the Despot, Xenu. The chief problem was overpopulation. Surplus beings were taken to volcanoes on Earth. These volcanoes were bombed, destroying the people, but freeing the spirits, called Thetans---which attached to one another in clusters. Over time, these spirits were implanted with the seeds of aberrant behavior. When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep on perpetuating themselves.
• A core concept in Scientology is that something isn't true unless you find it true in your own life.
• Hubbard recognized that if you want to inspire a culture towards peace an harmony, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish.