Attention to the Population Puzzle has been gaining attention with blogs written by: Rachel in Melbourne, Himalayan Sun, EconNewsAustralia, Simon Butler, Thomas Parkes, North Canberra Community Council, Jeremy Williams, Steve Austin, Population Media Center, Sharon Ede, The Australian, 2UE, and more… If there is a team of people ready to constructively and ethically address this problem, then count me in.

So far, over 1,200 people have read my post about The Wilberforce Award, but that’s not enough. It concerns me that only 550 or so people are fans of the facebook group “Dick Smith’s Wilberforce Award“, and that almost 4000 people are fans of a group called “What’s with the sudden overpopulation of wannabe ‘rappers’ ??!!” We need action and education. Or maybe we just need a rapper to bring lyrics about overpopulation to the world stage. Maybe someone like Matt Chamberlin, or… um… maybe not…  I think I’m more partial to someone like Imogen Heap spreading the message with inspiring music and splendid visuals… But Matt’s video clip is a comic and engaging way to raise awareness nonetheless.

Talking about popular music and population growth reminds me of my favourite Indonesian singer, Rhoma Irama  the king of Dangdut music—a popular style of music in Indonesia. When I was doing my fieldwork in Indonesia during 2007-2009, people would laugh when I told them that I liked the music of Rhoma Irama. They laughed even harder when I tried to sing any of his songs. Rhoma Irama was a huge star in Indonesia during the 70s and 80s. In 2007, locals didn’t expect a foreigner in his twenties to enjoy Dangdut music, let alone Rhoma Irama. But talking about Rhoma Irama’s music was a quick and easy way for me to find common points of interest with people in the places I was working. In 1977, Rhoma Irama released a song called “135million” that was about the number of people living in Indonesia and their many ethnic origins. The song still enjoys popularity, but people often joke that the lyrics need to be constantly changed. And really, every year, the lyrics need to be changed. By 1980, the population of Indonesia had grown to 147.5million and today the population is approaching 235million. When you have lived in the shanty towns of Indonesia, the overcrowded villages of the highland regions, and the poverty-ridden cities of the coast, you see first-hand the effects of rapid and unsustainable population growth. (Interested in Indonesia and the developing world? Read more about Globalisation and Ethics in Indonesia, and Globalisation, Ethics and Wellbeing).

Three websites that I highly recommend to everyone interested in birth rate, life expectancy, and population growth is the new Public Data Explorer available through Google;  Gapminder for an amazing array of publicly accessible data; and Poodwaddle World Clock for an engaging site with the most up to date statistics of our times (pun intended). Mixing design, statistics, and experience in global development, Hans Rosling delivers a fantastic presentation on global health for the TEDtalks available through YouTube. I urge you to watch it, you will not be disappointed.

At Macquarie University, I have been teaching for a subject on Human Evolution and Diversity. One of the rooms we use is an experimental education facility where one wall is entirely covered with whiteboad paint. That means that you can use the entire wall as a giant whiteboard. In the final tutorial of the year, I drew a line starting at a power-socket in the bottom left-hand corner of the wall, continued along the skirting board at the base of the wall, and then abruptly curved upwards at the right end of the wall. With the students, we plotted dates, important developments in medicine and technology, and population figures. Starting somewhere around 7million people pre-agriculture some 20,000 years ago, students were amazed to see just how suddenly population has soared since 1500AD (only recently) and peaked at 7billion people at the top right hand corner of the room.  Their faces grew from excitement at the beginning of the tutorial, to astonishment at the end of the tutorial. One of the most interesting discussions was about whether or not we owe China carbon-credits for the one-child policy. After vibrant discussions in all of my tutorial classes, there was a firm consensus that a multi-pronged, interdisciplinary and multi-sector effort was required to successfully implement steps to a sustainable future. Next year, we will continue a study group about sustainable populations for interested students. Our first venture will be to update the information contained in the chapter on ”Mining Australia” in Jared Diamond’s illuminating book, “Collapse”.

For those of you who are interested, I have written an article looking at Population growth, urbanisation & pollution in the developing world, which has been published by the postgraduate journal, NEO: Journal for Higher Degree Research Students in the Social Sciences and Humanities, Volume 3, 2010. This article is in English and French and has received fantastic support and feedback from my friends and colleagues in the Amicale des Centres Internationaux Francophones. Merci a vous tous! One of the ideas I raise in this article is the cheap production and distribution of the contraceptive pill to women who wish to use it. Now that the pill is off-patent, it means that we could turn this idea into a reality. And, in light of recent research highlighing the enormous health benefits the pill offers women, this idea becomes even more of an ethical imperative. Contrary to popular and misplaced belief, the pill has actually been proven to have a raft of health benefits. See this TVNZ special for more.

Recent evidence has shown that a small percentage of human DNA is Neanderthal. This Neanderthal DNA entered the human gene pool between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago.

While human DNA may contain traces of Neanderthal ancestors, mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthals has not been found in humans. Mitochondrial DNA comes uniquely from your mother. Is it plausible that male Neanderthals were able to mate with female humans, but that the reciprocal cross was unable to occur?

Analyses of the Y chromosome suggest that we share a common male ancestor 59,000 years ago. Could this male ancestor have possibly been Neanderthal?

If our common male ancestor is neanderthal, and considering that the Y chromosome is transmitted uniquely through the paternal line, could it mean that men are more closely related to Neanderthals than women? Have men and women truly come from two different species?

Visit the full post on our PLoS website for the full explanation of this intriguing hypothesis.

Our recent feature was Terrence Deacon’s article on the evolution of language in PNAS (May, 2010). You may like to read our in-depth post. Here’s a teaser:

Deacon (2010) puts forward an argument that language was not exclusively the product of the interorganismic processes of natural and sexual selection. Interorganismic processes include differential reproduction, divergence, drift, recombination and environment-correlated preservation (niche complementation). Deacon hypothesises that language evolved from the space for innovation afforded by the relaxation of selective pressures and the recruitment of intraorganismic evolution-like processes. Intraorganismic processes include redundancy, degeneracy, epigenetic accommodation, and synergy-correlated preservation (redistribution and complexification).

To read our more in-depth summary visit PLoS Neuroanthropology. And you can also check below the fold for a video of Deacon lecturing, as well as links to other coverage of Deacon’s work.

The WebCast below is hosted by the Department of Language and Literacy Education and the Faculty of Education, at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, as part of the plenary session at the 37th International Systemic Functional Congress:

Irving K. Barber Learning Centre feature this lecture by Deacon here.

According to Deacon’s reasoning, neural circuitry and social transmission were involved in shaping vocalisation and communication through the gradual accretion of variants within continually expanding proximal zones of innovation. The employment of neural and social structures served to distribute function onto multiple structures and simultaneously opened the space for the exploration and development of language. In some ways, humans became a self-domesticated species with loosened survival demands and a susceptibility to social control and experiential modification. The evolution of language is a consequence of fewer constraints, functional redistribution and the long-term adaptation of an array of flexible developmental mechanisms at the neurological, behavioural and social level.

Deacon’s article is featured in our post on PLoS Neuroanthropology, as well as posts by James Winters, Ursula Goodenough, and Blair Bolles.

Deacon also features in Les Fondations Francaises de la neuroanthropologie, Colour, is it in the brain, and Complete this quote.

The first is The Ecology of Human Development: Evolving Models for Cultural Psychology. Here is the abstract, part of a whole special issue in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology on the work of the husband-wife team John Whiting and Beatrice Whiting:

The Whiting model aimed to provide a blueprint for psychocultural research by generating testable hypotheses about the dynamic relationships of a culture with the psychology and behavior of its members. This analysis identifies reasons why the model was so effective at generating hypotheses borne out in empirical research, including its foundational insight that integrated nature and nurture, its reconceptualization of the significance of early environments, and its attention to biopsychocultural dynamics active in those environments.

Implications and the evolution of the ecological paradigm are tracked through presentations of three current models (developmental niche, ecocultural theory, bioecocultural microniche) and discussion of their related empirical literatures. Findings from these literatures converge to demonstrate the power of a developmental, cultural, ecological framework for explaining within- and between-population variation in cultural psychology.

The figure above is from this paper, and represents Carol’s own model for understanding human development. But the real point that Carol wants to make in emphasizing these three models goes as follows:

All of these models share a concern for how the cultural ecology of affect and affect regulation drive psychobehavioral development, competence, and well-being or health. Whoever has looked has found linkages among cultural practices, stress physiology, and emotion regulation. Note that each of these models foregrounds the development of emotion and emotion regulation and de-emphasizes classic knowledge acquisition. Although there are important reasons for this emphasis (Damasio, 2005), a reconsideration of what constitutes “knowledge” and more systematic investigation of the linkages between emotion and knowledge might prove valuable (588).

The second article is Habits of the Heart: Life History and the Developmental Neuroendocrinology of Emotion. This article was part of a special issue on Advances in Evolutionary Endocrinology in the American Journal of Human Biology. Here is Carol’s abstract:

The centrality of emotion in cognition and social intelligence as well as its impact on health has intensified investigation into the causes and consequences of individual variation in emotion regulation. Central processing of experience directly informs regulation of endocrine axes, essentially forming a neuro-endocrine continuum integrating information intake, processing, and physiological and behavioral response. Two major elements of life history—resource allocation and niche partitioning—are served by linking cognitive-affective with physiologic and behavioral processes. Scarce cognitive resources (attention, memory, and time) are allocated under guidance from affective co-processing. Affective-cognitive processing, in turn, regulates physiologic activity through neuro-endocrine outflow and thereby orchestrates energetic resource allocation and trade-offs, both acutely and through time. Reciprocally, peripheral activity (e.g., immunologic, metabolic, or energetic markers) influences affective-cognitive processing.

By guiding attention, memory, and behavior, affective-cognitive processing also informs individual stances toward, patterns of activity in, and relationships with the world. As such, it mediates processes of niche partitioning that adaptively exploit social and material resources. Developmental behavioral neurobiology has identified multiple factors that influence the ontogeny of emotion regulation to form affective and behavioral styles. Evidence is reviewed documenting roles for genetic, epigenetic, and experiential factors in the development of emotion regulation, social cognition, and behavior with important implications for understanding mechanisms that underlie life history construction and the sources of differential health. Overall, this dynamic arena for research promises to link the biological bases of life history theory with the psychobehavioral phenomena that figure so centrally in quotidian experience and adaptation, particularly, for humans.

In this second article, Carol is tying her work back into evolutionary theory. If the first took up more the cultural/psychological side, then here we are grounded in the mechanisms and ideas of biological anthropology. She writes here:

Given the evidence of gene-environment interactions and developmental effects discussed above, combinations of history and circumstance will condition the phenotypes generated from the genetic structure, and thus influence the impact of that structure on corresponding experience, welfare, behavior, and the balance of selective pressures upon genetic diversity. Such gene-environment interactions and their consequences for function and welfare deserve investigation across a wide range of human cultures and conditions. Such study bears exciting possibility for unlocking dynamics among culture, social conditions, the nature and distribution of social niches, and selection pressures operating on allelic variants (779).

Link to citation/abstract for Carol Worthman’s The Ecology of Human Development: Evolving Models for Cultural Psychology.

Link to citation/abstract for Carol Worthman’s Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion.

Update: You can see Carol lecture on Habits of the heart: Life history and the developmental neuroendocrinology of emotion regulation here.

Louis

As Shipman puts it in the Penn State press release about the research, if we only think about what domesticated animals do for us as a species, we miss the truly curious thing about our relationship to them:

No other mammal routinely adopts other species in the wild — no gazelles take in baby cheetahs, no mountain lions raise baby deer…. Every mouthful you feed to another species is one that your own children do not eat. On the face of it, caring for another species is maladaptive, so why do we humans do this?

Although researchers working on symbiotic inter-species relationships might highlight that the support of other species hardly requires adopting their young and feeding them canned kitten food (a critique Travis Pickering levels in his comments), Shipman’s statement highlights nicely that human-animal inter-species relationships seem to extend beyond merely treating them as tameable prey or means to a human end. But then again, this super-instrumentality could be ascribed to a large number of human traits.

The domestication of animals wasn’t merely about capturing a buffet-on-the-hoof, from Shipman’s perspective, but the continuation of a long-term evolutionary project by our species to study animals, first when we were prey for them, and later as predators ourselves.

One of the clinchers for her argument is that the first animals domesticated were not food sources, but a fellow predator and scavenger: the wolf (dogs being descendants of wolves, even a subspecies by some reckoning). Clearly, domestication wasn’t first about eating the animal:

Shipman suggests, instead, that the primary impetus for domestication was to transform animals we had been observing intently for millennia into living tools during their peak years, then only later using their meat as food. “As living tools, different domestic animals offer immense renewable resources for tasks such as tracking game, destroying rodents, protecting kin and goods, providing wool for warmth, moving humans and goods over long distances, and providing milk to human infants” she said. (again, from the press release.)

Overall, Shipman’s thesis is an interesting one, stronger in relation some eras than in others, in part because the implications, at an abstract level, can be quite vague. But I think her analytical framework is very much worth considering as it shifts some of the evolutionary theoretical discussions about hominin advances. Often, evolutionary theorists can treat the advent of tools or the domestication of plants as a rational advance brought on by purely cognitive means: an exclusively human community made a kind of technologically-available-means-ends calculation.

Shipman’s discussion, instead, focuses our attention on how humans might have been perceiving the world, and their place among a variety of species, not just in relations to other hominids. Considering how complex relations with animals might influence human foraging strategies, technology, and perhaps even symbolic functions is a useful new angle on a number of questions.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dogs lately (more on this), so considering the cognitive dimensions of our evolutionary relationship to animals is particularly relevant to me, but most specifically about dogs rather than other domesticates. I’m not sure I’m wholly persuaded by Shipman’s main point, which seems to be that the animal connection is driving the last several million years of human evolutionary development, but I do like very much how her perspective opens up a whole set of really intriguing theoretical questions.

Dog blogging and my canine connection

Dogs are on my mind, not merely because they’re my best friends (really), but also because I have an honours student doing a year-long research project on dog-human interaction in sheepherding trials.

One of the great things about being an academic advisor is working with intensely bright undergraduates. The collaboration can help remind the jaded researcher of just how great we have it, pursuing our curiosities and intellectual obsessions wherever they might lead. This year, I’m in the enviable position of working with three extremely sharp undergraduates doing their honours theses, which is like a senior year of the undergraduate career almost wholly devoted to a single long original project.

‘Dog man’ is Paul Keil, an impressive interdisciplinary thinker who, to our delight, is completing his thesis in the Department of Anthropology, but also works as a research assistant in the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science. Besides his project on dogs, he’s also helping on some research on collective memory and other issues in cognitive science.

Paul first brought the Shipman article to my attention when he must have gotten a pre-publication look at it from someone connected to Current Anthropology. This is the abstract:

A suite of unique physical and behavioral characteristics distinguishes Homo sapiens from other mammals. Three diagnostic human behaviors played key roles in human evolution: tool making, symbolic behavior and language, and the domestication of plants and animals. I focus here on a previously unrecognized fourth behavior, which I call the animal connection, that characterized the human lineage over the past 2.6 million years. I propose that the animal connection is the underlying link among the other key human behaviors and that it substantially influenced the evolution of humans.

Shipman’s hypothesis

In the introduction to the article, Shipman suggests that three key innovations are normally treated as hallmarks of our species: tool use, symbolic thought, and food domestication.

I hypothesize that a fourth trait, the animal connection, is an equally important and diagnostic behavior of humans and that the animal connection unites tool making, symbolic behavior and language, and domestication into an adaptive package.

In fact, I’d say that there’s a few other hallmarks, but some of these are less clearly linked to the ‘animal connection’ which is Shipman’s ultimate goal; one could cite bipedalism, adaptation to heat and long-distance movement, dietary versatility, complex social structures…

The exercise of isolating the human-ness from all other animals ‘essences’ is not a terribly interesting one to me. Just because other animals do something (like use tools or communicate) doesn’t mean that humans’ behaviours are any less odd or interesting.

Shipman sees this animal-human connection as beginning first with hominin observation of animals as prey (although also, presumably, our ancestors would have also worried about animals predator, to avoid or deter).

The animal connection comprises an increasingly intimate and reciprocal set of interactions between animals and humans (i.e., members of the genus Homo) starting ∼2.6 million years ago (mya). The animal connection began with the exploitation and observation of animals by humans. Over time, regular social interactions were incorporated into the animal connection. This trait is expressed today in the widespread adoption, or cross-species alloparenting, of animals—including dingoes, possums, bandicoots, raccoons, deer, moose, bison, fruit bats, lizards, bears, tapir, monkeys, sloths, coatimundis, antelopes, zebra, tree kangaroos, rabbits, weasels, ferrets, rodents, and birds, cervids, felids, and canids of all types…—as members of the family.

The list of animals with which we sometimes have alloparenting relationships is impressive, suggesting not merely that humans have been capable of domesticating all sorts of animals, but also that we’re pretty generous about providing a space in our communities and flexible enough to support a wide variation in animal behaviour. To put it bluntly, we’re pretty easy for an animal to counter-domesticate (or whatever you want to call what they’re doing to us as we’re domesticating them).

Spud (friend's puppy) with my hand

This two-way argument has also been made by theorists like Peter Bleed (2006), pointing out that focusing on the animal-human relationship as wholly driven by human domination underestimates the degree to which the little buggers have us where they want us (I mean, look at Spud – you want to say ‘no’ to that?). As early as the work of Zeuner (1963), theorists pointed out that the human-dog relationship was not like other dynamics of domestication, and that dogs themselves may have initiated a process that led to their eventual domestication by living commensally, or following along with humans and slowly adapting to life with our type, rather than by simply being the passive victims of human projects to dominate and shape animals.

Shipman’s approach is helpful in thinking about dogs in that she doesn’t draw such a stark divide between ‘wild’ and ‘domesticated’ animals, stressing instead the continuity in human ability to understand, observe and use animals. Similarly, Peter Bleed (2008) points out that a reconsideration by paleoanthropologists and evolutionary theorists of the transition between foraging and farming has also found continuity rather than an absolute and categorical divide.

Other hallmarks of humanity

Shipman goes on to review three other, more widely accepted hallmarks of human distinctiveness: tool use, symbolic language and domestication. She repeats the classic anthropological discussion by Leslie White of tool use as ‘extrasomatic adaptation,’ or outside-the-skin forms of adaptation:

Tool using in the broad sense is an extrasomatic adaptation (White 1959) of humans: a means by which humans evolved behaviorally without adapting physically.

As some long-time readers will realize, I’m not entirely comfortable with White’s terminology because I feel the hard-and-fast line between behaviour and biology, technological and physiological adaptation, obscures the ways that tools shape the human nervous system and body. To say that a tool is ‘extrasomatic’ or outside the body denies the ways that tools influence bodily development, whether it’s skeletal asymmetry or increased sensitivity in the thumbs of videogame players.

Stone tools are not easy to use or to manufacture, I would argue; chimpanzees, for example, have a very hard time manufacturing stone tools even when they are shown how to do it, because the manual skills involved – bringing high energy percussion precisely onto the tool’s surface – require great dexterity, eye-hand coordination, and trainability. But this is an argument for a different post – back to animals.

Shipman discusses a wide range of symbolic behaviour – ‘ritual, language, art, objects of personal adornment, and the use of ochre and pigments’ – as indicative of a distinctively human way of life. The difference between human symbolic behaviour, especially language, and animal communication has been discussed extensively in the anthropological literature, and a wide range of traits has been suggested as distinguishing the two. The arbitrariness of linguistic signs, the ability to generate greater complexity with grammar, the disambiguation possible with spoken words, the greater abstractness and ability to discuss non-concrete subjects or absent objects, rather than just index elements in the immediate environment, all stand out as critical.

Finally, beginning as early as around 15,000 bp, humans domesticated plants and animals, giving our ancestors control over food sources, making sedentary life possible, and eventually producing specialization and surplus labour, the foundation for ‘civilization’ and more rapid technological change.

As Shipman points out, following Clutton-Brock (1999), domesticating animals is significantly different from domesticating plants as it requires shaping animal behaviour as well as morphology, learning to interact with the animal’s instincts and capacities: ‘Domesticating an animal is fundamentally developing a means of communication with that animal’ (Shipman 2010). In contrast, humans do not have ‘reciprocal, individual relationships’ with the plants that we grow.

The connection between humans and animals must have been quite intimate, Shipman argues, as zoogenic diseases crossed over into human populations, and we know from ethnographic research that humans and domesticated animals often live under the same roof or in the same compounds.

The modern human-animal connection

Spud 'bites the hand...'

From the contrast between the rarity of alloparenting between species among other wild mammals and of feral children being raised by animals, Shipman concludes that the animal-human connection is essential to our species:

From this evidence, I conclude that adopting and nurturing individuals of another species is an extremely rare behavior among nonhumans, whereas the animal connection is a universal human behavior. In summary, the animal connection clearly is a universal human trait with a fundamental and enormous effect on human well-being.

Shipman cites statistics on household ownership of pets and expenditures on pets as demonstrating the ‘universality’ of the human-animal connection. In fact, the picture on this, I think, is a bit more ambivalent and even trending in the wrong direction for her argument.

In Japan, for example, highly urbanized populations have lower pet ownership rates: the rate is as low as 20% of households. In parts of the US and Australia, rates are much higher (around 62% of households in the US and 63% in Australia have pets), but these rates have fallen from as high as 85% in some rural regions. (I’m pulling some of my information off the Australian Companion Animal Council report, Contribution of the Pet Care industry to the Australian economy, 7th edition, 2010, and the 2009/2010 AAPA National Pet Owners Survey (US), not a free download.)

Like I said, I’m sympathetic to Shipman’s discussion, but I still run up against my own reservations about declaring things ‘universal’ when they are, in fact, quite rare in some societies. I’m just not sure why we need to make such an easily falsifiable over-reaching claim when the observation of patterns of human-animal nurturing is, regardless of universality, incredibly interesting.

The animal connection as evolutionary driver

In her account of human evolutionary developments, especially the advent of tool use, symbolic activity and animal domestication, there’s little serious to dispute; although some dates are still subject to debate, which commentators like Richard Klein point out, and other theorists might share my reservations about specific terms (like ‘extrasomatic adaptation’), the general outline is relatively well agreed upon and many familiar landmarks appear in Shipman’s outline.

Where Shipman’s evolutionary account starts to depart significantly from a consensus in the field is to point out the presence of animals and animal-human relations in the other three evolutionary milestone processes. She makes the case, not just to include animal-human connection among other defining traits, but as a foundation for the other major changes in hominin lifeways.

I hypothesize that as an ancient, diagnostic trait of the human lineage, the animal connection had a major influence on human evolution, genetics, and behavior. This hypothesis predicts that the fossil and archaeological record will include abundant evidence that (1) humans were intimately and persistently connected with animals, (2) human adaptive changes were causally linked to the animal connection, and (3) a meaningful adaptive advantage of the animal connection can be identified in each stage of human evolution.

Shipman first points to the advent of stone tools themselves, the fact that their development would have made our ancestors as much predator as prey, as the first step in the emergence of the animal-human connection. As hominins became more predatory, they would have to study both prey animals and fellow, competing predators, both to better acquire food and to fight off rivals.

The change in diet from primarily herbivore or opportunistic, carrion-eating omnivore to confident hunting predator was an extraordinary shift in relation to other animals, as Shipman points out in her response to other commentators:

Ecologically, making a transition from a largely herbivorous or even omnivorous niche to a predatory one is of tremendous importance. There are few examples in the mammalian world of species that have made such a transition, perhaps because it has such momentous consequences.

Louis comes home with us

What is not depicted in any recognizable fashion is also key: there are no landscapes, no depictions of geographic features (mountains, water sources), no dwellings or shelters, and nothing about climate or weather. Rarely depicted subjects include humans, insects, small animals, birds, plants, reptiles, nuts, fruit, berries, or tubers… Thus, the overwhelming frequency of animal depictions, coupled with the expanded exploitation of animal resources, indicates the increasing value of the animal connection.

Shipman points out that images of animals in cave paintings took more than just a little effort – pigments were costly in terms of resources as they often were carried long distances, mined, mixed with binding agents that might also be rare. Their use suggests, in the words of other theorists, that our ancestors were ‘informavores,’ my new word for the day.

Although most current discussions of the evolution of human intelligence focus on its usefulness in intra-species social interaction (for example, Robin Dunbar), Shipman highlights that these early representations do not feature human social interaction – though they could – but rather symbolically salient animals. From cave paintings, we see a community intelligence and visual code focused intensely on large-bodied animals, or inter-species communication, with a startling degree of detail and observational skill.

Shipman sums up:

The first and second stages of human evolution reveal a trajectory in behavior that is marked by an intensifying focus on the behavior and ecology of animals, accompanying a progressive broadening of the human predatory niche. When joined by increased sophistication in tool making, the animal connection enabled some human populations to procure more animal resources from a wider range of species and habitats—an obvious evolutionary advantage. Knowledge of the animals without the tools, or possession of the tools without the knowledge of the animals, was unlikely to have been advantageous.

I agree with Shipman’s basic point that tools without knowledge are unlikely to have been terribly helpful, but I don’t think that this necessarily proves humans have a special ‘connection’ with animals. After all, virtually every predator gets really good at either going hungry or understanding on some level, even if not at all conscious, where to find prey and how to bring it down.

But her restatement of some well-known facts, such as the predominance of animals, not all of which were primary food sources, in cave paintings in light of her argument about human-animal relations does demand some consideration. Was the animal-human connection driving human evolution? I’m not so sure. Is the predominance of animals in painting interesting? Hell, yes, and I’m glad she’s drawing this out for further thought.

Rather than seeing the ‘connection’ as a driver of human evolution, I think we can see it as a very intriguing product of having such a large brained, interpretively creative animal becoming a predator. The European cave paintings, often of animals that did not predominate in the painters’ diets, for example, may not have been caused by a ‘connection’ with animals, but by the challenges of passing on information about animals in human communities or of the creative elaboration of the relationship between predator and prey into new, ritualized, even magical or proto-religious forms.

The absences are as interesting as the fact that animals are present. For example, the fact that dogs and wolves do not appear more often in the paintings is intriguing, especially if dogs were already socially interacting in rich ways with humans by the time of the paintings. One suggestion is that dogs, like humans, were somehow tabooed from depiction, as neither species appears with anything like the frequency we might expect (if the depictions were simply drawn from daily life without ideological or cultural biases).

In historical hunters and gatherers, we often find very elaborate theories and even spiritualities around the predator-prey relationship: animals are treated with certain forms of respect and complex rituals structure elaborate ‘relationships’ that, in empirical terms, are pretty one-sided. The hunters may be staging all sorts of rituals in honour of their prey, but it’s not clear that this is because of any actual connection to the animals other than in the perceptions of the hunters. More likely, it’s an extraordinary projection that creates a rich relationship, lived experientially only by the humans involved, but one that may contain pragmatic as well as mystical information.

Wolf/dog-human commensality

Starting at least 15 kya, humans began to have long-term interactions with wolves that transformed them into dogs. Shipman goes with the earliest dates provided by archaeological evidence of the ‘Goyet dog’ from Belgium, dated to 32 kya, but these remains are still fairly controversial, in part because the intervening evidence is fairly sparse. Moreover, genetic evidence tells a radically different story, pushing back the possible divergence of domesticated dogs from wolves to as long ago as 135kya (Vilà et al. 1997; see also Zeder et al. 2006; for a discussion, check Anthropology.net, but see Shipman’s piece in American Scientist).

In another of her articles, Shipman offers an account of human domestication of orphaned wolves that is consistent with the idea that animals are ‘tools,’ and the implication that humans were the active agents in the relationship, that disagrees with the more mutual relationship described by Paxton and the Coppingers. Shipman explained in her 2009 article in American Scientist (‘The Wolf at the Door’):

How did this important change come about? Probably in the distant past, humans took in a wolf cub, or even a whole litter of cubs, and provided shelter, food and protection. As the adopted cubs matured, some were aggressive, ferocious and difficult to handle; those probably ended up in the pot or were cast out. The ones that were more accepting of and more agreeable to humans were kept around longer and fed more. In time, humans might have co-opted the natural abilities of canids, using the dogs’ keen noses and swift running skills, for example, to assist in hunting game. If only the most desirable dogs were permitted to breed, the genes encoding for “better” dogs would continue to be concentrated until the new domesticated species (or subspecies) was formed.

The wide disparity in likely dates of dog domestication and the difficulty of determining the earliest example of dog/wolf-human relations points to the complexity of these relationships, that they are not as simple as the scenario Shipman provides. The story she adopts is consistent with her focus on alloparenting and animals as ‘living tools,’ but not consistent with current thinking about how the reciprocal relationship between wolves and humans produced dogs.

A number of scholars have pointed out that the first wolves living in close proximity to humans might have been ‘self-domesticating,’ either following camps of nomadic hunter-foragers (see Paxton 2000) or living commensally near permanent human settlements to forage on human refuse (see Coppinger and Coppinger 2001). This pre-domestication stage is typically referred to as ‘commensal’ living, when two species benefit from living in close proximity and avoid overt conflict. The Copingers, for example, focus on wolf scavenging in human dump sites as a key point of contact, but the existence of ‘dumps’ requires sedentary lifestyles.

If, however, we start to think that the date of first ‘domestication’ could be earlier than around 15 kya, we run up against a problem, described by Schleidt and Shalter (2003: 65):

A word of caution, however; what do we mean by “domesticated”? In a most general sense: “no longer in its wild or natural state.” But, were our own ancestors back then, long before they built permanent houses for themselves, less “wild” than the wolves they associated with?… Is it not absurd to talk about the “domestication” of dogs by humans who had not yet any permanent domiciles (“domus”)?

The point is not merely semantic. If the date of wolves becoming linked to human communities is significantly prior to 15 kya, then Schleidt and Shalter are right: wolves were adapting to humans on the move, not eating refuse from human ‘dumps.’ The humans themselves were nomadic, likely following herds of prey if skilled in game hunting (and not clustering at coastlines, for example). In other words, the humans were likely living a bit like wolves, albeit with a host of cultural traits and technological capacities well beyond their canine colleagues.

Peter Bleed (2008: 8 ) points out that fully-fledged domestication required sufficient stability of the human communities involved and dogs and humans may have developed their ‘connection’ long before humans founded permanent settlements. From the point of view of the animal species, a domesticated form can only survive if the ecological niche that it will occupy, that is, the human-centred environment, is reliable. Bleed writes:

Most importantly, this new way of life gave people a new ecological standing in that, by the end of the Pleistocene, human groups were big and regular enough to provide a separate and reliable niche that could be “occupied” by other species. This niche was not a geographic space. Rather, it rested on the cognitive and cultural capabilities of anatomically modern folk. By 12,000 years ago, that niche was substantial and dependable enough to become important to the evolution of other organisms.

By saying that the niche was ‘cognitive and cultural,’ Bleed also can be read to suggest that it was not the sedentary nature of the population so much as the stability and continuity of community practices. For dogs, especially, even a traveling group of humans might provide a sufficiently stable niche as long as their practices reliably generated food, edible refuse and other necessary resources. A camp wolf needs a relatively predictable band of humans to follow, not a dump to inhabit.

The archaeological invisibility of commensality

In either commensal scenario, the later, permanent settlement version or the earlier camp following discussion, the human-dog/wolf connection would be especially difficult to detect archaeologically because there might have been little or no initial physiological change to the wolves involved and much less intimate engagement than in the orphaned wolf pup scenario that Shipman repeats. Moreover, the earliest relationships could have involved minimal behavioural modification, as well (as I’ll discuss), as wolves are so social that the behavioural jump to living alongside humans might not be that great.

In addition, commensality likely occurred when there were still large numbers of non-domesticated and non-commensal dogs, so the slow modification of a fragment of the population might easily be masked by periodic gene flow between population resevoirs. The semi-domesticated dogs could have interbred with their wild relatives for long periods of time (it’s hard enough to keep our dogs on the property, and they’re neutered and don’t get a whiff of a wild relative in heat to encourage wandering off at night).

Shipman doesn’t dwell on the specific theoretical and archaeological problems posed by the distinctive case of dogs, nor does she integrate alternative accounts of commensality. This skews her account of the human-animal connection, especially because dogs were likely the first animals domesticated and may have been engaged in tens of thousands of years of commensal living prior to fully-fledged domestication. To really explore the animal connection, we would have to spend a fair bit of time and thought on this earliest and longest relationship with its distinctive character and the species that, arguably, taught humans how to interact intimately with animals. This chapter in human animal relations, in which dogs and only dogs were in intimate relations with humans, was at least a few thousand years, but more likely tens of thousands of years (and perhaps even as long as 100k years).

Ironically, the dog is an ideal animal to use as a paradigm for an ‘animal connection’ in Shipman’s argument, for all kinds of behavioural and social reasons (which we’ll get to). Mietje Germonpre critiques Shipman a bit for the absence of dogs in his commentary on the target article, but Germonpre’s focus on animals as ‘vessels of symbolic meanings’ and potential sacrifices for ritual activity, in my opinion, is a distraction from the central issue of cooperative relations.

Dogs as tools: my disagreement with Shipman

Shipman assumes that humans saw dogs as tools, treating the first domesticated animals much like stone choppers or wood spears, when she writes about the earliest examples of domestication. For Shipman, animal domestication was an extension of the logic of tools:

In essence, domestic animals are another kind of extra-somatic adaptation or tool that expands the resources humans can exploit. Transferring the concept of tool making and tool using from inanimate stone or wood to live animals was a fundamental advance in human evolution predicated on knowledge of biology, ecology, physiology, temperament, and intelligence of target species; of the selective breeding; and of communication techniques based on the animal connection.

Although I agree that animals are valuable renewable resources, the instrumental thrust of this account biases her article in two ways that I find difficult to reconcile.

First, because Shipman uses the idea of ‘living tool’ so strongly, the metaphor undermines the argument that the animal connection drives human evolutionary and technological development. Rather than privileging inter-species social relations and communication, the concept of ‘living tool’ subordinates the logic of animal domestication to the first great evolutionary development Shipman discusses: the creation of increasingly sophisticated inanimate technology. I’d like to suggest that animals are not tools, they have wills of their own, their own inclinations, instincts and patterns of reaction, so they demand more subtle cognitive abilities than inanimate tools.

Second, the account Shipman offers of human ancestors using animals to pursue human ends may exaggerate human foresight and refigure a collaborative dynamic as a human decision. Peter Bleed (2008: 8) warns that overestimating human awareness of what they were doing during domestication, over-emphasizing the instrumental account, and focusing too much on human agency can misrepresent the likely course of domestication. Bleed writes:

In spite of general understanding of the reciprocal nature of human ecological systems and Rindos’ warning that early human actors could not have been conscious of the implications of their actions, human choices and intentions tend to be given a central role in discussions of domestication. Even analyses offered from an explicitly evolutionary perspective present human cognitive capabilities as the factor that brought about changes in plants and animals.

A way of moving discussion of agricultural origins beyond narrow co-evolutionary approaches or explanations that rest on human intentionality is to ask how diverse nonhuman species might have been drawn into a new kind of relationship with people during the relatively brief period known as the Neolithic Revolution.

Shipman’s instrumental assumption — that animals are best thought of as ‘living tools’ —is not questioned by the commentators in Current Anthropology, but here I want to suggest that treating animals as ‘living tools’ creates several problems with understanding the course of domestication, especially of dogs. The irony, though, is that I think being more sensitive to the non-instrumental relations between humans and animals, especially dogs, actually helps Shipman’s argument and enriches the account of the animal connection by clearly distinguishing domestication from tool use.

Part of my resistance to thinking of animals as ‘tools’ arises from conversations with my honours student, Paul. I’ll let Paul report his findings (he’s writing up now), but one of the things that is clear from his ethnography is that dog handlers have to work with their animals, how the animal can’t simply be turned into a ‘tool’ that expresses the will of the human leader. Dogs, like other animals, have their own instincts, cognitive abilities, reactions and the like – handlers and dogs wind up much more like partners than in a one-sided or dictatorial relationship. Although Paul’s research is with modern examples, I think we have to reflect on what animals can do before we understand the tenor of early human-animal relations. (For example, some domestic animals may be so hard to handle that they are not ‘tools’ simply because of their obdurate-ness, whereas for dogs the issue is more than limitations or inclindations.)

Animals (huh!): What are they good for?

Roxy and Louis

At least 10 such resources can be identified as follows: (1) muscular power beyond human strength; (2) rapid transport of goods or people; (3) raw material (wool or hair) for making fabric, rope, and so on; (4) useful fertilizer, fuel, and building material (manure); (5) free disposal of refuse and ordure; (6) mobile wealth and storage for excess grain crops (which can be retrieved via slaughter); (7) high-fat and high-protein food (milk and milk products) for adults and weanlings, enabling a decrease in interbirth spacing; (8) protection for people, possessions, and dwellings; (9) tracking and killing of game or pests; and (10) combined traits that enable humans to live in new habitats. Examples of the last resource include the advantages camels offered in deserts, pigs and dogs in Oceania, reindeer and dogs in the Far North, yaks in the mountain regions of Asia, and alpacas and llamas in high-altitude South America.

When we focus on the likely long period of wolf-human commensality, an absolutely essential chapter in the biography of the animal connection, not all of these resources were in play. It’s unlikely, for example, that camp wolves or commensal dogs would have been any good for # 1, 2, 3, 4, or 7 in much of a way. #6 might have been a factor if humans kept commensal dogs to eventually eat them, but they would have made a terribly inefficient calorie storage device. #10 might be in play, but it’s not immediately obvious. The only things that commensal dogs would be good for in an indisputable fashion are functions #5, and to some degree, #8 and 9.

I do agree with Shipman that learning to handle and live successfully with animals would have been a selective advantage, but the point is that, for a very long period of time when humans were learning how to deal with dogs, the animals wouldn’t have been terribly useful measured by this standard of ten possible resources. Our ancestors would hardly have been able to get a camp wolf, an animal not entirely committed to hanging out with humans, to drag a sled full of gear. So what would dogs do for humans?

Sensing through animals: wolves, for example

Before dogs were useful for things like fetching balls and chasing fire trucks, I suspect one of the earliest capacities that they brought to neighbouring human communities was their perceptions. Wolves and other animals could perceive some sensations well before our ancestors, even if hominin sensory acuity in natural settings likely would have made their descendants seem positively disconnected from their environments (as I discussed in the post, Your Brain on Nature: Outdoors and Out of Reach 2). Wolves, for example, have especially acute hearing and night-time vision, both of which would be useful to humans.

The timescales of both models for a commensal transition to dog domestication suggest that their wolf ancestors may have first dwelled close by human encampments, living on waste and scavenging from humans. The wild dogs most likely to endure in this camp follower or garbage picker niche had to overcome both fear of humans excessive flight response, on the one hand, and too much aggression, on the other, or risk being driven off or injuring the source of scavengeable resources.

Whether dog ancestors were de facto members of human groups or just lurking nearby, humans would have come to realize that the animals sensed things that the humans could not. Sounds and smells that didn’t raise an alarm in humans might cause dogs to start growling or to perk up to pay attention, especially at night. The process would hardly have been all that unusual to accomplished hunters and savvy observers of animals (like those who produced the cave paintings in Southern Europe). The realization would have likely built upon earlier awareness that animals reacted to each other, for example, when hunting, if prey startled.

Anyone familiar with animals in the wild learns to read bird movements, changes in the background noise of a forest and the like in order to anticipate threats or even simply perceive things that are beyond the range of direct sensation. For example, finding sources of water can be made easier by observing animals’ movements, the sounds of frogs, tracks, and a host of other cues.

Since dogs, like other social animals, signal amongst themselves when they feel threatened or sense something intriguing, humans surely learned to cue on this behaviour, likely before dogs were domesticated to any degree. Growling, hair standing on end, and stirring more generally among dogs, especially if the dogs were not pointed at the humans, would have been a good sign that something was amiss.

In this sense, dogs could become a kind of sensory prosthesis for humans, providing cues from sensations that were below the threshold of direct human perception. I’m reminded of this many nights when our dogs detect movement that I cannot perceive or when my wife asks one of them, ‘What’s wrong?’ when they behave oddly.

But the crucial dimension of this sensory commensality for the purposes of Shipman’s discussion of the animal connection is that this early realization that other animals sense, and the possibility of long-term dependence upon dogs or other animals as sensory prostheses, would involve a recognition on some level that animals ‘know’ things we do not. The humans would have to develop, in addition to an intra-species Theory of (Human) Mind, an inter-species Theory of (Animal) Mind, offering another important way that increasing intelligence might prove to be of adaptive advantage (see Flinn et al. 2005).

One of the key differences between dogs and wolves is that dogs can learn to pay attention to both their human interlocutors and to the things to which we pay attention. They cue off of our attention. For example, Miklósi et al. (2003) found that dogs are better social communicators with humans, looking to their handlers when running into an insoluble problem for cues like pointing, and hypothesize that dogs might even be better able to ‘read’ human faces than either wolves or other intelligent animals, like chimpanzees.

But the same hyper-social skill of looking to inter-species communication to understand the world is also a characteristic of humans, seen most clearly in the exaggerated case of guide (or ‘seeing eye’), tracking, and sniffer dogs. The fact that humans, not just dogs, can cue off the perceptions and non-verbal communication of other animals suggests that the animal connection is a manifestation of social intelligence, and thus part of a suite of advantages arising from increased encephalization (the reason I refer to Flinn et al. 2005). Sensory cuing, loosely under #8 of Shipman’s list of domesticated animal functions, might have been the first use dogs could have served to human communities, even before inter-species contact was intimate to any degree.

The reason I think sensory commensality would have been the first use of dogs is that it requires virtually no modification of wolf behaviour, except for proximity to humans. In addition, the human cognitive abilities required, the Theory of (Animal) Mind, is not a great leap for our ancestors either. Both human and dog adaptations are very much in line with the species’ hyper-sociality, and this sort of Theory of Mind activity and gregarious sociality with other species are not something found in a lot of other species. Even wild chimpanzees have trouble with things like pointing, which humans and dogs both figure out.

Wolf distribution (Wikimedia Commons, see below)

Fellow hunters

If we really want to think about how wolves might be useful to humans, one question to ask is what are wolves really good at doing: turns out, that’s hunting. Wolves are terribly young evolutionarily, not much older than humans; the available evidence suggests that a recognizably modern wolf may have only arisen less than 3 mya.

Prior to their partnering with humans, wolves were already enormously successful, behaviorally-flexible social canids, ranging across virtually the entire terrestrial Northern Hemisphere. They were the most wide-spread, large-bodied mammal, the top of the food chain, unless they came up against tigers or our ancestors. Ironically, once domesticated, Lupus became even more successful, tagging along with human colonization to every habitable continent.

Arguably, human ancestors displaced Lupus from its position atop the food pyramid, occupying a very similar niche of fast-moving, pack-hunting predator, well equipped to claiming ungulate game that moved in herds. Schleidt and Shalter (2003: 63) point out that human-dog collaboration brought together the two most social and successful hunters, remarkably similar in many ways once humans developed the necessary technology and skills.

Many later domesticates were complementary species, eating foods that humans could not digest and transforming them into animal protein (which we could). Dogs were different; dogs could be partners in doing something that our ancestors were increasingly good at doing themselves.

I take this analysis, in part, from Schleidt and Shalter (2003), who point out that both Homo sapiens and Canus lupus were extremely socially adept, pack hunting ominvores, as adept as other large carnivores at taking prey but less specialized or finicky about what they ate. Schleidt and Shalter (ibid.: 62) highlight how the social qualities of wolves, especially their cooperative inclinations and relatively nonviolent forms of intra-group organization, allow them to form “mixed, multi-species packs: humans, dogs, cats, goats, sheep, horses living in harmony.” One coming out of Africa, the other out of the Americas, these two mammals met up in the same niche with corresponding strengths in behaviour, and instead of fighting for competitive exclusion, ended up working together.

I’m not wholly convinced by the arguments that Schleidt and Shalter advance, but the idea that commensal wolves could hunt with humans seems to me to be more plausible than other initial uses from the list of ten potential resources. Wolves were already hunting in groups, using ambush and endurance-based techniques that might have been quite similar to contemporary humans, although humans likely brought some distinctive technological advances to the equation (such as projectile weapons).

Domestication from the dog’s perspective

Dogs are so unusual among domesticated animals, such an outlier, that the dog may be an instructive special case of domestication, also instructive to our ancestors in that the dog may have taught humans how to deal with animals. As Richard Klein suggests in his commentary on the Shipman article:

Only the special relationship between people and dogs may be significantly older [than 12k years], and almost everything about it, including its near ubiquity and its level of intimacy, suggests that it might be understood not so much from the human side but more from the dog’s as the human connection.

That is, if dogs are so unusual, maybe their domestication shows us more about the dog’s potential than about humans’ distinctive connections to animals. If dogs were self-domesticating, maybe they showed us how to do it, driving the rise of greater human intelligence about animals that would eventually lead our ancestors on to more challenging inter-species arrangements.

For example, Schleidt and Shalter (2003: 57), argue that the ability to be domesticated is not merely a matter of intelligence, nor is it of animals being like us or having our capacities. Schleidt and Shalter ask:

Isn’t it strange that, our being such an intelligent primate, we didn’t domesticate chimpanzees as companions instead? Why did we choose wolves even though they are strong enough to maim or kill us?

Chimpanzees turn out to be really hard to socialize; dogs, not so difficult. For Schleidt and Shalter, the case of dogs suggests that we need to understand how dogs are shaping us as well as how we are shaping their selection, a ‘tool’ that shapes its user (a process that I argued is under-explored when treating culture as ‘extra-somatic adaptation’; I would suggest tools also become part of our species’ developmental niche and selective pressures).

Rather than seeing the dog as a ‘tool,’ Peter Bleed says that we also need to understand the animals as active partners in the relationship and humans as active, but often unconscious selectors. Bleed (2008: 9) nicely compares the idea that humans directed domestication comparable to saying that ‘petri dishes developed penicillin.’ Instead, he advocates recognizing the active role of the human partners and domesticates: ‘There is theoretical and academic utility in looking at “domesticates” not as passive resources or even as co-evolving species, but as influential occupants of a dynamic set of opportunities afforded by people.’ For the camp wolves, humans were a potential niche to occupy, one that they adapted to so well that they wound up piggy-backing on human global dispersal.

Our non-human social life

To wrap up, I want to reflect on the implications of considering dogs as first animal domesticates and not as ‘tools.’ Shipman’s ideas are intriguing, and I think that, if we recognize the distinctive way that our ancestors likely interacted with dogs, we see that animal domestication, in part, was not an extension of the logic of tools, but a growing sophistication on the part of humans’ social capacities. Shipman writes:

Clearly, humans who handled and lived with animals more successfully accrued a selective advantage in performing tasks that humans without animals could not achieve. Domestication was reciprocal, as the animals in turn selected for behavioral or physical traits in humans, such as better communication with animals and the continued functioning of lactase into adulthood.

I also agree strongly that domestication was ‘reciprocal,’ the presence of animals shaping humans just as humans shaped domesticated animals, but again, I think her own description undermines a too-simple reading of the animals as ‘tools.’

One of the most well developed argument for the function of increasing intelligence in humans is that our ancestors needed a lot of cognitive wattage to deal with complex social interactions among their fellow hominids (see, for example, Flinn et al. 2005). In a world of alliances, in-group sexual competition, cooperative hunting, demanding childcare situations, extended kin-based solidarity and long-standing inter-group rivalry, a human needed a fair bit of gray (and white) matter to sort out all the players.

The social intelligence hypothesis, sometimes referred to as the ‘Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis’ after a concept introduced by primatologist Frans de Waal, suggests that a wide range of human cognitive abilities might serve well in a swirling social world, helping us to accomplish such tasks as perceiving each others’ motivations, ascertaining the limits of each others’ knowledge, remembering allies and enemies, and recognizing deception.

But increased intelligence also would have allowed humans to sort out animals behaviours and cognitive capacities, realizing which animals were really dangerous, which could be frightened off, and how different prey behaved when confronted. All sorts of activities, from ambush hunting to choosing a good safe place to sleep for the night would have been made more effective with increased intelligence as our ancestors started to perceive more, not just of other humans’ motivations and perceptions, but also the capacities of non-humans.

In this sense, I strongly agree with Pat Shipman:

Domestication, she explained, is a process that takes generations and puts selective pressure on abilities to observe, empathize, and communicate across species barriers. Once accomplished, the domestication of animals offers numerous advantages to those with these attributes. “The animal connection is an ancient and fundamentally human characteristic that has brought our lineage huge benefits over time,” Shipman said. “Our connection with animals has been intimately involved with the evolution of two key human attributes — tool making and language — and with constructing the powerful ecological niche now held by modern humans.” (from the Penn State press release)

Again, she may be over-reaching, but she’s spot on when saying that, once animals become part of our intimate niche, they start to be part of the selective forces acting upon us, whether that’s as disease resistance to zoonoses (illnesses originating in animals, such as measles in dogs, mumps in poultry, tuberculosis in cattle, and the common cold in horses, as Sandra Olsen lists in her commentary) or social attributes that might make a person more likely to succeed in a human niche that includes other animals.

For example, a genetic abnormality that makes a person smell tasty like a leg of lamb might be increasingly maladaptive if you’re camping out with only-recently-domesticated wolves. Or, more seriously, being able to communicate with dogs, using one’s own emotions or activities in ways that dogs find predictable and directive, could help a hunter accompanied by camp wolves or a human band member looking to canines for protection.

Conclusion: From Machiavellian to Doolittlean intelligence

In this context, the dog represents a really interesting social problem: dogs can be pretty damn unpredictable, and the same species that can become your ‘best friend’ (in a proverbial sense) is also a pretty fierce adversary. Unlike other animals that can be pretty reliably classed into ‘predator,’ ‘prey,’ or ‘irrelevant,’ dogs, especially in that communal period, would likely be capable of nearly anything from a hominid point of view.

You wouldn’t just need Machiavellian intelligence, you’d also need Doolittlean intelligence (after Dr. Doolittle, that is): sharpened abilities to perceive the emotions of a non-human, to recognize animal behaviour patterns, and to develop ways to affect those behaviour patterns. These animal connection-related skills would be on top of other animal liked cognitive skills, such as those needed to stalk prey and avoid predators. Domestication would have substantially increased the cognitive challenges of dealing with animals by welcoming a whole new, more complicated class of actors into long-term intimate contact with human groups.

What I’m suggesting is not quite as strong as what Shipman posits — that the animal-human connection drove human evolution — but rather that the possibility of an animal-human connection demonstrates that the humans involved aren’t just capable of Theory of (Human) Mind perception. They’re obviously figuring out a Theory of (Dog) Mind as well, and perhaps a whole range of other feats of subjectivity shifting that allows them to ‘walk in the paws,’ if you will, of other species.

In addition, if humans are able to develop a Theory of (Animal) Mind that is not simply anthropomorphizing, this would suggest that, at least in these circumstances, Theory of Mind was not only a projection of one’s own awareness, but might also be something more malleable or imaginative. One can see this very clearly in Rane Willerslev’s (2004) remarkable ethnographic research with Siberian hunters.

I’m not entirely convinced of this last point. Most evidence suggests that humans close to dogs tend to anthropomorphize; surveys in the US, for example, reliably assert that their animals have human-like personalities at rates of around 90% or higher. Although anthropomorphizing animals, assuming that they have human emotions, can be a profound error in understanding our non-human neighbours, the tendency to perceive animals as having human-like emotions or motivations or personalities suggests a supple flexibility in that social mind that extends beyond just human life.

This runs against some ideas about how humans accomplish such feats as perceiving others’ intentions, for example, by projecting ourselves into the position of the other actor or by simulating their emotional reactions in our own emotional parts of the nervous system (for example, through mirror neurons). Instead, our ancestors would have to learn to perceive a range of non-human actors as having their own social signaling and non-verbal communication. These ancestors couldn’t get to that space simply by anthropomorphizing because the animals don’t have identical forms of expression (although there are interesting relations).

Shipman’s account of human-animal relations as part of human evolution, although I disagree on some of the finer points, is a really persuasive and intriguing way to rethink human cognitive development. Her article (and the forthcoming book) reminds us to include animals, not simply as predators and prey, in our thinking about the niche in which our ancestors developed. But treating this relationship as an extension of tool use likely overstates our ancestors’ foresight about the usefulness of partially-domesticated wolves and underestimates the degree to which humans and animals were in reciprocal relationships.

But I’m grateful to Shipman, not merely for the thought provoking article, but also for a great opportunity to post pictures of my dogs! So here’s the crew at our farm:

For more on dogs and evolution:

The press release about Shipman’s work on Penn State’s website: New Hypothesis for Human Evolution and Human Nature.

An earlier article by Pat Shipman on ‘The Wolf at the Door’ (American Scientist) which discusses both the evidence of early dog domestication and the issue of how difficult it is to pin down specifically domestic variation in Lupus.
Commentary by John Hawks on The Aurignacian dogs.

For a dissenting view, you could start at Bruce Bower’s piece, ‘Oldest dog debated,’ at Science News.

Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs at Observations of a Nerd (great post, especially the discussion of Moscow feral dogs adapting to become great beggars on the city’s metros).

L. Case’s 2008 article from the Journal of Animal Sciences, ‘ASAS CENTENNIAL PAPER: Perspectives on domestication: The history of our relationship with man’s best friend.’ (86:3245-3251. doi:10.2527/jas.2008-1147)

See also Rodney L Honeycutt’s recent (2010) article, ‘Unraveling the mysteries of dog evolution,’ from BMC Biology (8/20, doi: 10.1186/1741-7007-8-20), available as an open source read at PubMed Central.

Science writer Carl Zimmer offers an account of dog intelligence, the opening of the Duke Canine Cognition Centre, and Henry the schnoodle figuring out what pointing means at Time Magazine: ‘The Secrets Inside Your Dog’s Mind.’

Retrieverman compiles a number of sources of accounts of ‘camp wolves’ living with Native American, Aboriginal, and other at least partially foraging peoples in his post, Camp Wolves.

Images:

Ridiculously cute photos of Louis, Roxy and Spud (a friend’s Groodle puppy), by the author.

Map of wolf distribution from Wikimedia Commons.
Created by Tommyknocker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wolf_distr.gif

Cartoon. Not sure anymore. (If anyone knows, I’m happy to put a credit on this.)

Stumble It!

References:

Bleed, Peter. (2006). Living in the human niche Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 15 (1), 8-10 DOI: 10.1002/evan.20084

Clutton-Brock, J. 1999. A natural history of domesticated mammals. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Coppinger, Raymond, and Lorna Coppinger. 2001. Dogs: A new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

FLINN, M., GEARY, D., & WARD, C. (2005). Ecological dominance, social competition, and coalitionary arms racesWhy humans evolved extraordinary intelligence Evolution and Human Behavior, 26 (1), 10-46 DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.005

Miklósi A, Kubinyi E, Topál J, Gácsi M, Virányi Z, & Csányi V (2003). A simple reason for a big difference: wolves do not look back at humans, but dogs do. Current biology : CB, 13 (9), 763-6 PMID: 12725735

Paxton, D. (2000). A Case for a Naturalistic Perspective Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals, 13 (1), 5-8 DOI: 10.2752/089279300786999996

Schleidt, Wolfgang M., & Shalter, Michael D. (2003). Co-evolution of Humans and Canids: An Alternative View of Dog Domestication: Homo Homini Lupus? Evolution and Cognition, 9 (1), 57-72

Shipman, Pat. (2010). The Animal Connection and Human Evolution Current Anthropology, 51 (4), 519-538 DOI: 10.1086/653816

Vila, C. et al. (1997). Multiple and Ancient Origins of the Domestic Dog Science, 276 (5319), 1687-1689 DOI: 10.1126/science.276.5319.1687

Willerslev, R. (2004). NOT ANIMAL, NOT NOT-ANIMAL: HUNTING, IMITATION AND EMPATHETIC KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE SIBERIAN YUKAGHIRS Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10 (3), 629-652 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2004.00205.x

Zeder, Melinda A., Eve Emshwiller, Bruce D. Smith and Daniel G. Bradley. 2006. Documenting domestication: the inter-section of genetics and archaeology. Trends in Genetics 22(3): 139-155. doi:10.1016/j.tig.2006.01.007

Zeuner, Friedrich Eberhard. 1963. A History of Domesticated Animals. Harper & Row: New York, Evanston.

Susan Blackmore is up to her usual shenanigans, promoting memes like the red in her hair, following fashion when it’s just not good science.

She has an essay over at the New York Times, The Third Replicator, and will also be engaged in debate with other folks at On the Human, the online project of the National Humanities Center. The entire essay and further discussion are available there at Temes: An Emerging Third Replicator.

Blackmore’s basic argument is that information is multiplying, and the resulting evolutionary process – due to variation, inheritance, and internet success – is best understood through the concepts of “memes” and “temes”:

All around us information seems to be multiplying at an ever increasing pace. New books are published, new designs for toasters and i-gadgets appear, new music is composed or synthesized and, perhaps above all, new content is uploaded into cyberspace…

It is perhaps rather obvious to attribute this to the evolutionary algorithm or Darwinian process, as I will do, but I wish to emphasize one part of this process — copying. The reason information can increase like this is that, if the necessary raw materials are available, copying creates more information. Of course it is not new information, but if the copies vary (which they will if only by virtue of copying errors), and if not all variants survive to be copied again (which is inevitable given limited resources), then we have the complete three-step process of natural selection (Dennett, 1995). From here novel designs and truly new information emerge…

When our ancestors began to imitate they let loose a new evolutionary process based not on genes but on a second replicator, memes. Genes and memes then coevolved, transforming us into better and better meme machines…

[I]n the early 21st century, we are seeing the emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (short for technological memes, though I have considered other names). They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping stones from one replicator to the next.

The basic analysis is two-step: (a) like so many spectacular failures before, slot humans into a reductive evolutionary analysis – eugenics, selfish-gene sociobiology, and now the memes/temes team (and damn, it makes me mad because this really hampers people’s understanding of how to do good evolutionary analysis!); (b) come up with a categorical concept and apply it everywhere – the replicator (genes, memes, and temes) – even after the complexities of actual genetic “copying” reveal a dynamic and incomplete process, not a prime mover and essentialist causal force (and damn, it makes me mad because this really hampers people’s understanding of how to do neural/anthropolological analysis!).

The great advantage of this is that most people can follow a two-step analysis, a one-two punch, a back-and-forth dance move. It’s easy, often appealing, and doesn’t require a lot of practice or skill to ape.

Let me go back to my initial play on words, off McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” Here’s a part of the Wikipedia entry on just that phrase which reveals the immediate downfall to Blackmore:

McLuhan describes the “content” of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As the society’s values, norms and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.

The content of “memes” or “temes,” the simplistic juicy idea, really distracts us from two messages: what the social implications of Ms. Blackmore’s ideas are (and she sure has plenty to say there, and does so often), and how technology actually drives wholesale transformations in ways that makes the the concept of “temes” seem so inadequate, so antiquated. Why are a search engine, a social connector, and a video uploader the three top sites in the world? It’s not because of temes – it’s because people use them.

I could go on and on, but there’s not much point. I’ll let Greg speak for me in his post, We Hate Memes, Pass It On:

So, why do I hate the concept of ‘ideas replicating from brain to brain.’ After all, I work on physical education and imitative learning; shouldn’t I be happy that memetic theory places such a premium on imitative learning? What is my problem!? Ah, let me count the problems… I’ll just give you 10 Problems with Memetics to keep it manageable.

Greg starts with (1) Reifying the activity of brains, (2) Attributing personality to the reification of ideas, (3) Doesn’t ‘self-replicating’ mean replicating by one’s self?, (4) The term ‘meme’ applied to divergent phenomena, and another six gems for you.

In the meantime, here is someone who actually does work on YouTube and other Internet phenomena, anthropologist Michael Wesch.

American culture may be deviating increasingly from traditional social practices that emerged in our ancestral “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA). Empathy, the backbone of compassionate moral behavior, is decreasing…

In fact, the way we raise our children it seems that the USA is increasingly depriving them of the practices that lead to well being and a moral sense.

Together Narvaez and Panksepp are organizing a conference on Human Nature and Early Experience: Addressing the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness”, where Schore will be one of the featured speakers.

Charles Darwin had high hopes for humanity. He pointed to the unique way that human evolution was driven in part by a “moral sense.” Its key evolutionary features are the social instincts, taking pleasure in the company of others, and feeling sympathy for fellow humans. It was promoted by intellectual abilities, such as memory for the past and the ability to contrast one’s desires with the intentions of others, leading to conscience development, and, after language acquisition, concern for the opinion of others and the community at large…

What Darwin considered the moral-engine of positive human thriving may be under threat. Ill-advised practices and beliefs have become normalized without much fanfare, such as the common use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms, the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby is spoiling it, the placing of infants in impersonal daycare, and so on. We recommend that scientists and citizens step back from and reexamine these common culturally accepted practices and pay attention to potential life-time effects on people. It is an ethical issue.

Link to The Decline of Children and the Moral Sense

Behind the squirrel’s success lies a phenomenal elasticity of body, brain and behavior. Squirrels can leap a span 10 times the length of their body, roughly double what the best human long jumper can manage. They can rotate their ankles 180 degrees, and so keep a grip while climbing no matter which way they’re facing. Squirrels can learn by watching others — cross-phyletically, if need be.

In the acuity of their visual system, the sensitivity and deftness with which they can manipulate objects, their sociability, chattiness and willingness to deceive, squirrels turn out to be surprisingly similar to primates. They nest communally as multigenerational, matrilineal clans, and at the end of a hard day’s forage, they greet each other with a mutual nuzzling of cheek and lip glands that looks decidedly like a kiss.

The gray squirrel is diurnal and has the keen eyesight to match. “Its primary visual cortex is huge,” said Jon H. Kaas, a comparative neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, A squirrel’s peripheral vision is as sharp as its focal eyesight, which means it can see what’s above and beside it without moving its head.

“We’ve seen seeds that were recached as many as five times,” said Dr. Steele. The squirrels recache to deter theft, lest another squirrel spied the burial the first X times. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, the Steele team showed that when squirrels are certain that they are being watched, they will actively seek to deceive the would-be thieves. They’ll dig a hole, pretend to push an acorn in, and then cover it over, all the while keeping the prized seed hidden in their mouth. “Deceptive caching involves some pretty serious decision making,” Dr. Steele said. “It meets the criteria of tactical deception, which previously was thought to only occur in primates.”

Link to Natalie Angier’s Nut? What Nut? The Squirrel Outwits to Survive article

You can watch the video in three parts on YouTube, starting with this segment:

Dawkins discussed, among other subjects, his childhood in Africa, Wikipedia, the influence of his parents on his scientific worldview, his sense of wonder in the face of evolution and the natural world, as well as his feeling that the belief in a divine creator actually belittles our sense of the universe. Dawkins expressed again his views on human problems with perceiving beyond a humanist scale, a topic he had done at greater length in his talk on the ‘queer’ universe at TEDs. You can also watch the ‘Elders’ video and video extras on the ABC website, or read the transcript.

The interview was painful toward the end, I found (I’m not alone — see the discussion on Reddit). Dawkins is brittle and prickly at his best, and when he doesn’t like the way things are going, he can be positively obtuse and testy. Denton, in contrast, can be gentle and funny when someone is working with him, but he doesn’t hold up well, it seems, with such a challenging subject. There were moments when it felt like a soft-focus celebrity interview of a high-functioning but affectively flat android (note: to all the Dawkins fans, this is a metaphor, I don’t actually think Dawkins was grown in a vat of nutrient fluid). In other words, I’m not sure this was a shining moment for either of them, although it definitely starts out better than it ends.

Dawkins as an ‘Elder’

The problem was putting Dawkins on a show called ‘Elders’: although he’s probably the most famous atheist walking around right now (not they we all have these labels clearly affixed to us), he doesn’t seem to have nailed the ‘elders’ role so much, except the part where he gets his knickers in a twist that he’s being served tapioca pudding again. Although ‘Elder’ might seem like an age-grade title, anyone over a certain age qualifying for the title when they get their ‘silver discount’ card, the reality is that we expect more of an ‘Elder’ than just longevity and grumpiness.

That is, Denton’s show tries to feature those who have amassed some wisdom, who bring with them the perspective of a life long- and well-lived, who can share their years of insights, field softball questions with grace, humour and a bit of artistry, and generally come across as avuncular and twinkly-eyed (or at least not squinty-eyed). By this measure, Dawkins probably fails. At times he comes across as enthused about science, but at other moments he nails ‘intransigent’ more than ‘insightful,’ ‘mystified’ more than ‘mirth-filled,’ ‘grouchy’ more than ‘graceful.’

For example, Denton asks about Dawkins’ confrontation with the disgraced pastor, Ted Haggard, on the show ‘Root of All Evil?’ Haggard is so obviously a crank, so irritating and just so weird (what the hell is wrong with the man’s lips?!). In addition, since the video was made, Haggard’s been so summarily disgraced and exposed as an epic hypocrite, that you think, ‘ah, now Dawkins can relax — he totally made this guy look like a jackass.’ The questions seem to hover at a possible turning point, especially as Denton tries to bore down to what might be the ‘wisdom’ or life lessons — anger, belief, and how to keep oneself in perspective — with Dawkins able to reflect back on a clear case where he’s come off looking pretty good in relation to an ideological adversary. Is he confident or magnanimous? Can he hit the big, slow-moving target, the easy questions that might show his status as an ‘elder’?

ANDREW DENTON: ‘When do you laugh at yourself?’
RICHARD DAWKINS: ‘… [extended pause]… Are all the questions going to be like this?’
[sound of crickets chirping in studio.]

Ouch.

At an earlier point, Denton asked him to ‘define success,’ and Dawkins gave us this excruciating exchange:

ANDREW DENTON: What’s your definition of success?
RICHARD DAWKINS: …Oh dear, I don’t really answer that kind of question…
ANDREW DENTON: Why not?
RICHARD DAWKINS: …I’m just trying, well, because I just think of it as a dictionary word, which has a dictionary definition and you can go and look it up. I don’t have a personal…
ANDREW DENTON: Well, you don’t have a marker in your life for what would be achievement?
RICHARD DAWKINS: No, it’s cause it’s either you just give a dictionary definition or it becomes very complicated and personal. No, I don’t really think I’ve got a got a good answer to that.

Denton made similar plodding, inch-by-inch headway with questions about ‘belief,’ ‘love’ and ‘wisdom’; a question about how he understands people who talk about their ‘love of God’ was like pulling teeth. It was interesting to watch Dawkins try (and mostly fail) to grapple sympathetically with other people’s irrationality. Overall, the interview was about as warm and cuddly as a turtle. Fans of Dawkins will likely enjoy it, but those who aren’t already converts are likely to find him off-putting. Although indisputably knowledgeable in his field, he demonstrates very little knowledge of people or even how interviews work.

Reflections on Dawkins as evolutionary spokesman

Dawkins bests Greer and Sen as public intellectual in UK

He seems to have gotten the role of evolutionary spokesperson, and it’s not clear how he ever even got a call back from his first audition. I’m well aware that it’s normal for intellectuals to split hairs and resent their successful peers; in Australia, they call it the ‘tall poppy’ syndrome, where successful individuals are disproportionately criticised. But in this case, I do feel like we could do better than Dawkins for the cause

He’s a less-than-ideal public front for evolutionary thought, in my opinion, for three reasons, at least two of which I think were clearly on display in the interview: his theoretical arguments, personality and aggressive atheism. I won’t dwell on this for too long, but I figure it’s better to share, especially as I might also be able to direct people to another decent contribution of Australian media (I quite like Denton usually), and I have all the Australian patriotic fervor of a convert.

Dawkins’ variant of evolutionary theory

First, I think Dawkins is subtly wrong on some crucial details of evolutionary theory, especially some of the ideas for which he is most famous Stephen Jay Gould referred to Dawkins and like-minded theorists as ‘ultra-Darwinists,’ accusing them of privileging natural selection above all other organic and evolutionary processes (the Gould-Dawkins debates, which are explored in Kim Sterenley’s book, Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest). One of the key problems in Dawkins’ account of evolution is a radical collapse of explanatory scales; genetics and evolution operate on very different time scales, so for Dawkins largely to deny (by neglect) that there might be emergent dynamics on intervening scales is like saying that nothing that occurs between particle physics and astrophysics (say, for example, chemistry) has any meaningful impact on how galactic systems unfold. Sure, a particle physicist might tell us that, but we would be deeply suspicious.

Dawkins, in his most influential work, privileged the gene itself as the unit of selection, rather than the organism, as if genes were surviving, reproducing, being selected, not the living beings who bear those genes. In his view, organisms are a sort of survival machine for their genes, vehicles employed by genes as replicators to get themselves to proliferate. In his own words, he made this choice of focus for rhetorical reasons (which I can understand):

It rapidly became clear to me that the most imaginative way of looking at evolution, and the most inspiring way of teaching it, was to say that it’s all about the genes. It’s the genes that, for their own good, are manipulating the bodies they ride about in. The individual organism is a survival machine for its genes. (see Dawkins’ biography on Edge: The Third Culture)

Although the term ‘selfish gene’ is a metaphor, and I don’t want to be overly critical of a metaphor, there is certainly a tendency in Dawkins’ work to anthropomorphize the gene, to attribute to it interests, a kind of motivation, and even strategies, even if this is only a rhetorical strategy that Dawkins is using. Imaginative, perhaps, but also dangerous, and to the degree that Dawkins has successfully persuaded people to think this way, there’s damage to repair, as it’s only part of the story and quite likely to be over-extended.

Some of Dawkins’ supporters argue that others of his supporters, not Dawkins, are the ones responsible for the over-reach in the areas of study that Dawkins helped to inspire. Danny Hillis, for example, writes:

notions like selfish genes, memes, and extended phenotype are powerful and exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these ideas. They’re too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin.

I’m not sure I’d put him in the same league with Marx or Darwin. I don’t think The Selfish Gene or The God Delusion quite sits on the same shelf as either Das Kapital or The Origin of Species. Nor do I think that ‘dangerous’ ideas are necessarily bad. But if a set of terms is so persistently getting people into mischief, so consistently sending people off to extremes, maybe they’re more misleading than ‘dangerous’ and need to be substantially rethought. Specifically, I think ‘selfish genes’ and ‘memes’ are a problem; ‘extended phenotype’ is a bit more interesting.

I suspect that my discomfort with the ‘selfish gene’ concept is because the argument was first penned in a very different intellectual environment. To the degree that Dawkins persuaded people, some of the best parts of his arguments have likely become common knowledge in the field of evolutionary thought, only the odder or more extreme bits still standing out as distinctively his own. So again, I don’t want to be unfair to an important theorist, especially as his ideas make it possible to explore subjects like neuroanthropology, but for foundational ideas not to become anachronism, they have to be updated and flexible, not rigid and overly idealized.

In the past, I’ve been pretty hard on the ‘memes’ concept, which I think is one of the more unfortunate ideas in evolutionary theory, although, again, I try not to blame Dawkins for the truly egregious abuses of his neologism by other theorists (on ‘memes’ you can read more here and here). But even other evolutionary theorists typically find this theoretical reach hard to accept, and the Dawkins’ version of this nugget of stupidity is already hard to swallow, even before abuse by over-zealous followers. Unlike the ‘selfish gene,’ which has a core of insight, I feel like ‘meme’ is pretty hopeless all the way down, but you’ll have to read our other posts on the subject to really get all the arguments against ‘memetics’.

But the most difficult aspect of Dawkins’ evolutionary theory for neuroanthropology, in my opinion, is that he has so little interest in phenotype or in developmental dynamics, privileging selective pressures and genetic inheritance over variation, non-selective evolutionary pressures, random events, and an organism’s development. I feel that Dawkins’ account of evolution is too directional, too comfortable with assumptions about improvement, increased complexity, and growing fitness (ironically, I think that this sort of directionality and assumption about ‘improvement’ are an error shared with Creationists, although Dawkins’ and those who agree with him commit it on a much smaller scale).

Dawkins has been scathing at times of anyone who thinks evolution might be affected by any processes other than natural or sexual selection in ways that seem to me close-minded and, frankly, idealistic rather than scientific. It may be logically consistent to believe only in a single force shaping organisms, but this doesn’t make it scientific or even consistent with empirical facts. In addition, because we at Neuroanthropology.net take so seriously emergent dynamics — how culture and behavioural patterns can affect gene expression or child development, for example — there’s very little space in Dawkins’ theories for most of the subjects we write about. Instead, ideas like ‘meme’ and ‘selfish genes’ sort of suck the air out of the room and make sustained exploration of organism-level and social dynamics virtually impossible. It’s odd that a guy so concerned about the scale of perception can be so blasé that his concepts are a kind of scorched earth assault on whole sections of biology, ecology, ethology, epigenetics, neuropsychology, and other life sciences.

Specifically, as a spokesman for evolutionary theory, I’m not sure that his brand is the best symbol for what we all do: Dawkins’ model of evolution is not terribly inclusive of the range of evolutionary work being done, and it plays into some nasty popular tendencies toward simplistic thinking and genetic essentialism. In other words, if he’s setting up the public tent for evolutionary theorists to get a hearing, he’s put the stakes awful close together and we’re not all going to get in there. Moreover, we’re going to have to fight public prejudices that some of his arguments may actually harden and exaggerate.

Dawkins: the personality issue

The second reason that I’m uncomfortable with Dawkins as the public face of evolutionary thought is the personality issue. He may be the reigning ‘Mr. Evolution,’ but he won’t be picking up the ‘Congeniality’ prize from the other contestants. Just read the description of Dawkins that appeared on the ABC website, and was picked up by other websites:

Richard Dawkins is the essence of scientific reason, an evolutionary biologist, a best-selling author, and strident atheist. He’s been declared one of the most influential – and provocative – thinkers of our time.

The ‘essence of scientific reason’? Well, at least he’s ‘strident.’ Dawkins’ is the most ultra- of the Darwinists, more Darwinist than Darwin even. Or, as the press sometimes likes to call him, ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler.’

It’s just that he comes across in episodes like this interview as a bit bi-polar. He alternates between so passionless that he seems to be empathy-impaired and then suddenly ‘strident’ and over-irritated, the scientific equivalent of the old guy yelling, ‘You kids, get off my lawn, or I’m callin’ the police!’ Dawkins doesn’t seem to have an overly-broad palette of emotional colours; a bit of scientific wonder, a streak of irritability, and the rest appears to be confusion about what other lifeforms around him might think or feel. There’s no problem with affective flatness — some of my best friends are pretty monotone — but as a ‘charismatic’ leader or media personality, Dawkins is about as compelling as most of the current crop of Australian federal opposition leaders (one reason that Labour has little to worry about in federal elections).

One of the great problems with the Ultra-Believers — religious fundamentalists, Creationists, and other adversaries of Dawkins — is that they’re so absurdly humourless, up-tight, and self-righteous. So it’s especially sad that Dawkins brings to the debate little humour, no gentleness or empathy, and precious little ability to laugh at himself. The two sides sound too similar: equally graceless. Wouldn’t it be nice if our side’s frontman was charming, or at least more life-like than the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace?

For example, Denton asks at the very end of the interview: ‘I do have one final question, having read some of your work, having looked at a lot of your work, I’m curious, what star sign are you?’ Dawkins can’t even get a chuckle or a strained smile out of this, what has to be the most absurd question you could ask Dawkins short of one about his guardian angel, reading his palm, or who he thinks he was in a previous lifetime. Especially to an Australian audience, this complete inability to laugh at himself makes Dawkins come across as pretty damn unlikeable.

Why can’t we have an ‘essence of scientific reason’ with a touch of cleverness, kindness, good humour, patience or some other personal virtues? Why does the ‘essence of scientific reason’ personified have to be so cold and inflexible, so brittle and unlikeable? And do we really need a lot more moral outrage in the public debate about religion, faith, human origins, and the like? Sometimes I feel like Dawkins and the Creationists are like mirror images of each other, alike in every way except the crucial question of whether they believe in evolution. The presentation style mirrors Dawkins’ missionary zeal for evolutionary theory, but it also seems to give more credit to the doubters, the Creationists, and the evolution deniers than they deserve. Getting wound up by Creationists implies that they have a point, or even a leg to stand on; a bit of joyful, chuckling condescension seems to me to be a more appropriate way to deal with these yahoos.

But, as I’ve written elsewhere, it’s easier for me to be magnanimous, living in a (mostly) secular country and not suffering from their meddling in my kids’ school curriculum. And as an anthropologist, I’m a kind of professional ‘shallow believer’ in whatever people want to tell me (‘You say you’re possessed? Awesome. What’s that like?’). To be sympathetic, I’d probably be at least as irritable as Dawkins if I ever had to deal with Ted Haggard.

Atheism and evolutionary thought

Merry Christmas!

I’m a scientist. I believe there is a profound contradiction between science and religious belief. There is no well demonstrated reason to believe in God and I think the idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

If he thinks that it’s so important to convince people about evolutionary theory, he may not be doing himself any favours by bundling it with the insistence that accepting evolution necessitates denying the existence of divinity. Even in a secular society like Australia, about 80% of those who responded to a question about religion in the 2006 Census expressed belief in some sort of religion.

On this point, in addition, Dawkins is simply wrong empirically: there are other evolutionary theorists who are not atheists. Full stop End of discussion. He says it’s impossible to believe in God and evolutionary theory at the same time; here’s someone who does it — he’s wrong.

So for Dawkins to argue that it is logically impossible or a ‘profound contradiction’ to hold to evolutionary theory and believe in some sort of deity requires him to assume that any theistic evolutionary theorist must be illogical, self-delusional, or lying. He has referred to religion as a ‘virus’ of the mind, which is only insulting until you realize that meme-theory basically assumes every idea, skill or concept behaves like a virus.

In other words, if this is the spokesperson for evolutionary theory, he’s attaching another message that’s a kind of poison pill to the more widely-accepted argument for evolution; even in the notoriously Creationist US, at least 40% of the population expresses support for the assertion that humans ‘developed from earlier species of animals’, a much higher percentage than accept atheism (see this article in New Scientist, for example). I wish Dawkins didn’t bring up atheism with evolutionary theory; it just confuses and entangles things as far as I’m concerned.

In fact, when Dawkins describes the ‘poetry’ in science, he sounds very much like a natural theologian, arguing that the ‘majesty’ of nature demonstrates some sort of beauty (or divinity, in the case of the theologian). In the interview, Dawkins says:

Science is opening your eyes to the wonderfulness of what’s there. It’s, it’s as though you’ve got tiny little, I’ve used the analogy of a burka, you know those dreadful ghastly black tents that Muslims wear, and you’ve got this tiny slit, rip open the burka. That’s what science does, and the light floods in, and that’s poetry. The poetry of the expanding universe, the poetry of geological time, the poetry of the deep complexity of life, all these things, which we’re not normally equipped to understand and the science gives it to us.

Don’t get me wrong; I actually like what he’s saying here. I like Dawkins more when he’s talking about the aesthetic joy to be found in science than elsewhere in the interview, such as when he refuses to talk about what he would consider a personal view of ‘success.’ When he describes being ‘overwhelmed by the scale of the universe’ and a kind of exultation in the imagination-challenging scale of the universe, Dawkins nails some of the passion of natural sciences.

Again, maybe it’s the anthropologist in me that prefers to leave open the questions that cannot be closed, to acknowledge whenever possible diverse perspectives, and to engage with the insights that come from diverse worldviews. I suspect that, if I were to read Dawkins’ works articulating his atheist perspective (books like The God Delusion), I wouldn’t find much of substance to argue against. I don’t think religion is necessarily the most dangerous human invention; certainly, nationalism, race, and millenarianism would all have to rank up with religion when it comes to motivating intentional immiseration of our fellow humans. And there’s a few technological innovations that are looking pretty dangerous at the moment.

After-thoughts

I went back and watched video interviews of Stephen Jay Gould (see an interview by Charlie Rose and one here on YouTube) just to make sure I wasn’t romanticising him, and was reminded again why I miss his writing so much.

Look, before anyone writes some comment suggesting I don’t know that this interview wasn’t really the kind of forum where Dawkins’ warmth, sense of humour, and engaging personality could shine, I do respect Prof. Dawkins for a whole host of projects: he’s amazingly prolific and has taken principled stands on everything from animal rights to opposition to the Iraq War, against medical quackery and ‘intelligent design’ in school curricula, as an environmentalist and in general for scientific rationalism. There’s LOTS to like in Dawkins’ CV. He’s put forward some of the most compelling and widely cited works on evolutionary theory; even though I might personally disagree with some of the crucial details, I can certainly respect the quality of the work, and from where he’s writing (and written) it in time and the intellectual terrain.

I think I’d be more comfortable with Dawkins if I saw more evidence that he acknowledged diversity of opinion among evolutionary theorists in his public statements, even though I can understand why, faced with someone like Ted Haggard, who tries to use this scientific debate to discredit scientists, Dawkins might opt to temporarily overlook the arguments. In fact, Dawkins has written some very kind things about Gould, and by all accounts, their debate was respectful; if so, it’s credit to both, as these arguments can get so bitter and ad hominem. So although I found Dawkins a bit brittle and irritable on the surface in this interview with Denton, he clearly is capable of exemplary intellectual generosity. I just wish we got to see more of it.

More about Richard Dawkins

National Geographic recorded a video interview with Prof. Dawkins on the event of Darwin’s birthday about evolution, Darwin, and belief in God.

Another discussion by David Shütz at the weblog, Sentire Cum Ecclesia,Andrew Denton’s interview with “Elder” Richard Dawkins.

Cartoon from Edge: The Third Culture, ‘RICHARD DAWKINS TOPS PROSPECT’S LIST OF BRITAIN’S TOP 100 PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS.’

Photo of Prof. Dawkins with Christmas tree from The Hour’s Blog.

Jesus! vs Darwin!

In the spirit of stirring the pot though, I recently gave a presentation ‘Sympathy for Creationists, and Other Thoughts from a Sceptical Anthropologist,’ and thought that I might do an online version. I want to suggest that many ‘believers’ in evolutionary theory share some of the intellectual errors evidenced by Creationists. You know the general principle: try to irritate everyone in your audience so that you at least know they have a pulse.

Many thanks to the Macquarie University Sceptics’ Society for their kind invitation. The Sceptics were a great audience, and I only regret that there was no way to audiotape the lecture — well, actually, I’m probably not half as funny as I like to remember myself being, so maybe it’s a good thing. In addition, I can’t post all the slides because they are, as usual in my lectures, filled with the flotsam and jetsam of the Interwebs, including unlicensed cartoons, pilfered photographs, swiped graphics and other materials. Although it’s one thing to use these sorts of images in a non-commercial presentation, I don’t feel comfortable pinning them up on Neuroanthropology.net.

So although this post will not follow my lecture point-for-point, nor will it have the excellent questions that the audience presented (which my failing memory is already turning into my ‘own’ thoughts in an act of cerebral self-aggrandizement), this should be fun, and it will allow me to link to evolution-related stuff all over the place.

Giving it to Creationists

From my position in Australia, surrounded by the ivory façade of academe and far from the school board wars of Kansas and other Creationists nonsense, it’s easy to forget how much anger and derision Creationists generate. Their claims that the earth is quite young, that humans shared the planet with dinosaurs, that the Flood and Noah explain patterns of species diffusion and the like… well, it’s easy to laugh from the mostly secular soil of Oz, viewing Creationists with the kind of benign and slightly condescending amusement reserved for the tooth fairy and those who follow closely America’s Next Top Model.

From Dr. Amy Skeptical OB

You could just as easily spend the next few hours checking out videos of the very smart but exceptionally brittle Richard Dawkins delivering smackdowns of all sorts, numerous skewerings of Ben Stein’s ‘if-I-can’t-understand-it-evolution-can’t-be-true’ approach to argument, or the 30-part series (no, that’s not an exaggeration), ‘Why People Laugh at Creationists’ by Thunderf00t on YouTube.

People like Dawkins and the stupendously prolific scourge of Creationists, P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula, seem to have an inexhaustible supply of fodder sent in waves from the other side, a never-ending supply of Creationists’ lame arguments with which to demonstrate the many intellectual weapons in their arsenal. Like heroes in a samurai film, evolution proponents who choose to engage the armies of Creationism are supplied with a steady stream of victims who charge at them with hopeless ineptitude, merely allowing the heroes to demonstrate their extraordinary abilities by shredding them one after another.

You can almost hear the director:

PZ Myers Simpsonized (hey, from his own site)

‘Cue the fight music… pan out from Richard’s and PZ’s narrowed eyes under their helmets, back-to-back, swords raised in preparation… keep panning… hordes from Texas School Board and Creationist Museum and textbook publishers all wait on your cues… wait for crescendo… wait… NOW! come screaming at ‘im!

*sounds of shrieking followed by unbelievable carnage, screaming, sword slicing.*
*more screaming*
*more slicing *
*screaming less frequent *
*groaning and whimpering *
*Ben Stein begs for mercy *
*slice *
*last groan *

BRILLIANT! Zoom in on PZ as he cleans blade on the flag of the regiment from Kansas State Board of Education, Richard spits out shreds of textbook warning stickers… and, CUT! That’s a print!’

The critics of Creationism — and theology-in-sheep’s-clothing version, Intelligent Design — find more than enough to criticize in the sermons and ‘instructional’ videos filled with simplistic arguments, opportunistic fact poaching, aggressive ignorance, moralistic posturing, and monumental self-deceit of all sorts. I could say that the ‘critique is easy,’ but after watching a few of the more clever videos that are critical of Creationism, I’d have to say that some of the critique is quite sophisticated and thoroughly trounces many of the points that Creationists make, taking them seriously enough to actually refute the outrageous claims point by point.

So in my contrarian spirit, I offer some sympathy for Creationists (apologies to the Rolling Stones), although I have no intention of suggesting that I believe their account of the origin of species. In addition, I have the luxury of not having to deal with these people directly very often, and they are certainly not making decisions about my child’s education on the basis of their understandings of sacred texts. So, if what I write seems too generous, please understand that these folks really aren’t my problem – condolences to you if they’re yours.

Why believe?

One of the first points I made to the Sceptics is that one of the problems that I think we run into when arguing with Creationists is a basic disagreement about the concept of ‘belief’ or ‘faith.’ When I say that I ‘believe’ in evolution, it’s like saying that I ‘believe’ in the theory that matter is composed of atoms, or even that I ‘believe’ my car is still in the parking lot where I left it. This ‘belief,’ not surprisingly, is pretty damn easy for me. Believing in these things is not something I struggle with or question or have any angst over, although all three (evolution, atoms and my car), ironically, depend upon assumptions about things that I cannot directly perceive at the moment.

That is, all of them are simply assumptions about how things work that are, mostly, consistent with the evidence, my own observations, what reasonable people tend to say, and the like. I don’t subject the existence of atoms or the location of my car to constant scrutiny; to do so would probably be the slippery slope to a kind of existential obsessive-compulsive disorder (and I’m a busy man, too busy for any sort of existential questioning…).

When people of faith say that they ‘believe’ something, I suspect that they are describing a very different sort of feeling (and I don’t assume that they all have the same psychological experience of something called ‘faith’). That is, the way people talk about religious ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ suggests to me that they are not experiencing what I do when I sit here at a café table pretty certain that I’m going to be able to find my car and get home when I finish my lunch and coffee.

I haven’t done any sort of systematic research on this, but I’ve spent a fair chunk of my life in Catholic schools, both as a student and as a teacher, and around various sorts of believers (they’re everywhere, I tell you!). If you’ll pardon me for stating the obvious, I’ve found that people tend to describe belief in the supernatural as a kind of achievement. Please note, this is based more on a Christian model than others, and even more of a Protestant than a Catholic approach to faith (although I think US Catholics are often very ‘Protestant’ in this regard compared to my interactions with Brazilian and Irish Catholics, but that’s another posting and maybe on a different site).

In my experience, faith makes the faithful feel happy; they prize having belief; and some seem to be worried about losing it. This kind of belief in God and Creation is an act of will; in the face of anxiety to a greater or lessor degree, to maintain a state of confident ‘belief’ in something that is, if not impossible, certainly improbable, and by most Christian definitions, doesn’t offer much evidence to make a person confident. After all, if a person actually had proof of God’s existence, or a theatre bill from the opening night of Creation, it would sort of make a mockery of the Christian concept of faith itself. That is, if I could come up with a convincing mathematical proof of God, I’d negate the whole need for faith, thus debasing the very attainment and maintenance of faith, the key to salvation, in a manner of speaking.

In contrast, most scientists don’t lose their faith in atoms, nor do they fear losing their belief that atoms exist. I’m reasonably confident that, even if I were to have a crisis of faith in atoms, they’d still be there for me. Few scientists would likely be pleased with themselves for believing in atoms, nor would they think that people successfully believing in atoms was a kind of achievement.

In other words, religious faith seems to be simultaneously more anxious and more precious than other sorts of mundane beliefs, such as confidence in the predictability of the material world such as where one left one’s car. When I had to teach about this at Notre Dame one semester with a very small group of pretty intense undergrads, I gave them Kierkegaard to read, in part to mess with their heads – the ones not already having crises of various sorts – and partially just to see what they thought about Fear and Trembling.

I won’t go into Kierkegaard here, in part because it’s way too rich for a throw-away line, but I think he highlights this difference between confidence in everyday life and faith in the supernatural in his own ventriloquist-like style, taking up various positions within the same debate: ‘It is human to complain, human to weep with one who weeps, but it is greater to have faith and more blessed to behold the believer.’ For some American Christians I’ve come into contact with, faith seems to be relatively easy; in contrast, the faith described by Paul in the epistles, by Augustine, and by Kierkegaard is a much more superhuman accomplishment.

If we look across the human species, believing in the supernatural is the statistically dominant human condition, even if belief in a particular act of ‘creation’ is less dominant. For some proponents of evolutionary theory, the fact that so many people believe in creation is a sign of our species’ fallibility, primitiveness and enslavement to superstition. Sure, probably… But it’s also just a signal of the way that our brains work (something anthropologists like Harvey Whitehouse and Pascal Boyer have much more carefully discussed).

Why resist evolution?

Okay, so if faith is inherently the belief in what can’t be demonstrated, and many theologians don’t have a problem with evolutionary theories (including folks like the late John Paul II), why do some Creationists get themselves so bent out of shape about evolution? We could cite the usual explanations: stupidity, ignorance, fear, obedience to authority, loss of status, guilt-by-association, dislike of pointy-headed science geeks with wire-rim glasses, and so on. We could argue that, in many cases, arguments for the ‘need’ for faith as a moral constraint on society demonstrate great lack of faith in human nature, or that some belief in God looks psychologically like the longing for a powerful daddy…

But I’m not going to go down that road. First, I’ve been down that road, it’s a nice drive if you don’t mind the traffic, and I kind of know where it goes. In the presentation to the sceptics, instead of arguing that Creationism is either a form of psychological compensation or intellectual dishonesty, I suggested that some evolutionary theorists don’t really do the cause a favour when dealing with this hardened core of resistance to accepting evolution as the basic mechanism of species development and change. That is, some of the arguments that extrapolate from evolutionary theory undermine the credibility of evolution in the eyes of a wider public.

Here I don’t just mean the militant atheists who try to use evolutionary theory to prove the non-existence of the unprovable deity, but also those who put forward ‘evolutionary’ accounts to justify present patterns of human behaviour, which often turn out to be intentionally scandalizing or factually challenged on various levels. If you don’t get what I’m alluding to, you might be new around here, but I’ve written extensively about how evolutionary ‘explanations’ for things like sexual behaviour or gender traits are often shallow, overly glib, and do no credit to evolution as an explanatory framework (for some of the earlier posts on this subject, there’s a summary at Sex on the brain & neuroanthropology on sex).

(To all of you out there who want to use evolution to prove that God doesn’t exist, I understand your frustration. Look, I feel for you guys, but the believers did say that God, by definition, is unprovable, so you’ve got a bit of an uphill battle on that one. Yes, I realize that many of these theistically motivated individuals advocate social policies that are well worth getting upset about. You want to argue with them? Go ahead, knock yourself out, and I’ll support you on the social policy front. But I won’t get into the argument about whether the by-definition-unprovable can be either proven or disproven. Our lives are a finite resource: you gotta pick your battles.)

In my discussion with the Sceptics, I briefly touched on some of the more egregious examples of evolutionary psychology and pseudo-evolutionary thought, and why religiously-minded people might get uptight about these. The example I used was the controversial book, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion. In the talk, I pointed out that, even if the arguments about a biological bases for sexual coercion were well-founded, and some critics have argued that they are not, the book still begs a whole series of questions if someone seeks to ask the applications to thinking about everyday existence in 2009 (for a longer review, see American Scientist’s review by Craig Stanford).

One of the key issues for me is the whole notion of ‘human nature,’ and the degree to which behaviour is determined by selective mechanisms. Ironically, I think that the notion of ‘human nature’ sometimes employed in evolutionary psychology is a kind of essentializing error that also comes up in Creationist thought.

Thinking like Creationists: Three basic errors

150 years ago, Charles Darwin published the first edition of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, which would go through six editions in his lifetime. Although it met with hostility when it was first published, most historians argue that evolution was widely accepted among scientists within twenty years, leading to a wholesale rethinking of biology, although often in ways that departed significantly from the views Darwin presented in The Origin.

I suggested to the Sydney Sceptics that to truly integrate Darwin’s approach to natural selection into our thinking would require substantial changes in the way we see the world, even though many of us see ourselves as being oriented by science and proponents of evolutionary theory. That is, even though we’ve had 150 years to digest The Origin of Species, the process is still not complete. Elements of pre-Darwinian or non-Darwinian understandings still creep into our worldview, seemingly immune to their logical inconsistency.

I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I pointed out that, just as I have sympathy for Creationists, I also have sympathy for our own failures to fully integrate evolutionary thinking (although not so much sympathy that I wouldn’t deduct credit for incorrect answers on anyone’s midterm in a couple of weeks). Darwin himself clearly suffered a great deal of emotional angst when he was preparing the book and other manuscripts on evolutionary theory, and even his contemporary proponents, the people who acted as his public defenders when his shyness and fragile health prevented him from doing this in person, did not fully assimilate what Darwin was suggesting.

In the bulk of the talk, I focused on three basic errors that I think are commonly shared by both Creationists and by some proponents of evolutionary theory, meeting points where the two theories are surprisingly parallel.

Teleologic error: Evolution ‘designs’

One reason that Darwin himself did not like the word ‘evolution’ (he preferred ‘transformation’ and didn’t use ‘evolution’ until the sixth edition of The Origin of Species) was that he thought it suggested improvement or progress or some sort of directionality to changes in species.

The alternative, as I put on my slides: ‘Evolution happens.’ I think both Creationists and many evolution proponents resist the implications of the utter directionless-ness of evolutionary development, either recoiling from the recognition that this is a completely rudderless existence or simply not being able to comprehend what non-intended, design-less development might look like. This is certainly at the heart of many Creationists’ critiques of evolutionary thought: how could something so complex as an organism be the result of unplanned changes?

Some accounts of evolutionary change or trait emergence seem to me to exacerbate this tendency toward teleology by carelessly arguing that physiological changes are ‘for’ a particular function or fitness-related purpose. Human brains are ‘for’ social negotiation or gills are ‘for’ breathing or sexual reproduction is ‘for’ resistance to parasites or the like. The same thing happens when people use the word ‘design’ to talk about the evolution of organisms or their traits; I often find myself getting caught on the phrase, ‘Evolution designed [trait or species] for [purpose or niche].’ For example, in some recent discussions of human anatomy, we’ve seen a theory that some of the distinctive traits of the human body might be advantageous only if the hominins with these traits ran, especially long distance. Does this mean we were ‘designed to run’?

Strictly speaking, no physiological trait is ‘for’ anything in the sense of having a pre-ordained or intended purpose. The preposition is tricky because, of course, traits may be ‘for’ a function in the sense that the function is what they get used ‘for.’ But sometimes the use of ‘for’ implies a degree of forethought, planning or design that is simply not present. Moreover, to talk about evolution ‘designing’ something is to anthropomorphize a process, to treat it… well… like a divine being.

My critique may seem persnickety, but this sort of implied, non-conscious pattern of using design as a metaphor to talk about evolution is exactly the sort of error that many Creationists make, seeing intention where there is only selection. I can understand completely the difficulty in thinking about the intentionless change characteristic of evolutionary development, the challenge of holding fast to a way of talking about species transformation that does not anthropomorphize the process, but it also does give me some degree of empathy for those who see this as a sign of divinity.

Essentializing error: species as ‘type’

One of the other errors that seems to creep into evolutionary thought is the essentializing error, the assumption that all individuals in a species are members of a type or category. To me, one of the implications of The Origin of Species is that species are unstable, constantly changing, and precariously balanced populations of individuals that might, at almost any time, split into multiple species or change into other sorts of individuals, were there not very active processes stabilizing them.

Without gene flow and consistency in selective forces, for example, there’s no reason to assume that a species will not change even if the environment is relatively stable. This might sound overly dynamic, but in an evolutionary timescale, change can happen much more quickly than Darwin originally suggested.

However, the human brain, especially with the use of language, seems to function much better with types than with pools of variation. We assign names to categories of things and talk about them as if individuals of the type were interchangeable, even if we might suspect on some level that they are not. Fair enough, it’s a trait of language, and we can’t get around it without creating a hopeless situation where every thing and every exemplar of a species has its own name, but we shouldn’t then let the assumption be that there is a ‘type-ness,’ a shared essence in a species which is really a population with inherent variation.

For this reason, even though I may use the term ‘human nature’ myself at times, I think it’s an erroneous concept, even before we start talking about specific behaviours that allegedly make up that ‘nature’ because ‘nature’ gives too much credence to the existence of the type. The sequencing of ‘the human genome,’ for example, is really a sequencing of ‘a human’s genome.’ And there is certainly nothing to guarantee that this specific sequence is either more representative than any other, or that it will remain fixed over time even if it is somehow decided to be statistically representative. Just the simple fact that all human populations do not have the same rate of reproduction suggests that the overall human ‘type’ is undergoing steady modification over time, if we take shifts in the species-wide proportion of different genes as constituting our ‘type.’

One of the consequences of the essentializing error, in my opinion, is that we may be led to ignore both variation and future change, among other things. That is, as a neuroanthropologist, I am interested in variation, no matter how statistically insignificant that variation might be; the essentializing error tends to suggest that the variation is not important or crucial, that there is some shared commonality that is the real identity of the human species. I suspect that the particular forms and possibilities of variation are really want make humans distinctive from other species. That is, we’re not distinctive because we’re all the same; we’re distinctive because we’re capable of producing certain types of variants (such as tool-using variants, cooperative variants, cognitively-sophisticated variants) that other species don’t tend to produce.

There are lots of problem with thinking in ‘types’ but one is that, as soon as you say, ‘A human being has the specific trait of being symbol using, bipedal, …’ what do you do with the individual who is born to a human population who is not capable of using symbols or does not walk bipedally? Philosophically, we’ve created all sorts of trouble for ourselves, but, again, I have sympathy for the error because it occurs in both Creationists and evolutionary thinkers, likely an artefact of the social tools we use to think: language.

Complexity bias: bigger is more interesting

In the discussion with the Sceptics, I pointed out that one of the real blows of The Origin of Species to Westerners’ sense of self was that the book seemed to argue that humans were not central to the whole of Creation. Although the book did not mention humans, it implied that there was no separate creation of species with clear divisions among them. I would argue that this displacement of anthropocentrism has only grown worse over the intervening years, just as Galileo’s refutation of the Ptolemaic view of the heavens has only been exacerbated by new discoveries in astronomy.

If we survey all of life on this planet, the ‘average’ organism is single-celled. If we look at ‘tree’ diagrams of the genetic diversity and relatedness of organisms, large-bodied, multicellular organisms are a bit of a sideshow, a collection of huge, closely-related freaks. In terms of just numbers and variety, the big tent houses the incredible variety of life that cannot even be seen with the unaided eye.

I like to point out to my students (and I think I did it in the Sceptics lecture) that, even if we take our own skin as a boundary for our census of life, we still would find more cells within and on that boundary that do not share our DNA than actually belong to our own germline cells. For all of these single-celled creatures, we are a giant, moving host, a kind of living, walking planet that provides them with most of their needs. In addition, without this population of passenger cells to help digest our food, clean us, fight off more dangerous intruders and the like, we would not last long.

Darwin wrote himself a marginal note to himself, ‘Never say higher or lower in referring to organisms.’ Most of us, even biologists, have a hard time sticking to this scrupulousness, and we tend to project value judgments onto even more neutral-sounding language (like my use of the terms ‘complex’ and ‘simple’ or ‘multi-cellular’ and ‘single-celled’).

From Carl Zimmer. 2002. Evolution (William Heinemann), p. 102.

Disproportionately, biology journals and doctoral theses focus, not on the vast majority of single-celled organisms on the planet, but on these odd combinations of cells, these walking colonies. Of course, there are exceptions, so please don’t write me to tell me that you love cyanobacteria or have a thing for firmicutes, so my point is moot. In the main, we, as a species, are pretty self-centred, believing that, even if the universe does not revolve around us, at least we’re typical of life.

I’m as guilty as anyone else of this complexity bias: I’m an anthropologist (as in ‘anthropos’ = ‘human’), and I am emotionally attached to the other large multicellular creatures that I share the planet’s crust with rather than the masses of easy-to-overlook little forms of life that make our sideshow possible. Okay, so maybe I’m pushing this leap, but there’s a link from a multicellular bias to human exceptionalism, the idea that humans are special, distinctive, separate from other animals.

We are exceptional, but not in the sense that we are fundamentally different from other animals; we, like our large-bodied evolutionary close relations, are odd and unusual in the grand circus of life. I think that Creationism turns this oddity into a kind of Divine License, a Adamic Stewardship, an assumption that humans are God’s special favourite creatures and Creation was given to us. Even many biologists and environmentalists focus on humans and large multicellular organisms disproportionately. An evolutionary framework, in contrast, is a more sobering assessment of our peculiarity, a sense for our fragility and dependence on all these other ‘simpler’ organisms. (Look, for example, at the fate of large-bodied multicellular organisms in the previous great extinctions.)

(In the original talk, I also discussed the error of hereditarianism, but I’ve already put most of my thoughts on the subject in the section on essentializing. I take the concept from Jonathan Marks, and he does a great discussion of ‘folk’ theories of heredity in his book, What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee.)

Conclusion: are you feeling the sympathy?

authoritative source unknown

I recognize that Creationists sometimes offer examples of logic tortured so badly that Dick Cheney would cringe, arguments so acrobatic that P. T. Barnum would be awed, assertions so tendentious that Johnnie Cochran would blanche (I’ll stop…). This piece is more about the difficulty of really seeing the world through an evolutionary lens.

When Charles Darwin first started working on the ideas that would become The Origin of Species, he knew that they would be hard to accept, even difficult to grasp, as well as counter to social and theological frameworks of the day. That is, although some theorists like Stephen Jay Gould have argued that Darwninian natural selection is quite simple, ‘almost axiomatic,’ I suspect that the psychological distances needed to travel to truly become Darwinian in outlook are a challenge, even if the individual is favourably predisposed toward the theory. For example, some of the early proponents of his theories, like Alfred Wallace and Thomas Henry Huxley who famously acted as the public defender of Darwin, subtly reintroduced some of these same biases into their thinking about evolution. (For example, Wallace thought that there was an unbridgeable gulf between human mental faculties and those of other apes.)

My point is not that some people are habitually wrong, although that’s likely true. Rather, I want to highlight that, although natural selection may be simple in axiomatic terms, it is a real challenge to integrate it into everyday thought. Even our ways of speaking tend to reintroduce errors of teleology, essentialism and complexity bias, leading us to use terms like ‘design,’ a species’ ‘nature,’ and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ organisms without considering much their implications. I say this as a fellow offender, but one that is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with these chronic errors.

As an undergraduate, I once heard George Mentore say that theologists and anthropologists were polar opposites. I can’t remember what specifically he identified as the polarity, but I would argue that it is an interesting contrast: theologists are very concerned with what we believe, more so than other sorts of scholars, and sorting out right from wrong belief. Oddly, anthropologists are less concerned about the rightness or wrongness of belief; you say you’re possessed by evil spirits or live on the back of a giant turtle or travel to the moon in your dreams? Excellent! What’s that like?

Anthropologists are professionally credulous, believing for the sake of exploring cultural worldviews nearly anything people tell us, at least for the length of time it takes to interview someone. Maybe my sympathy for Creationists comes from a professional commitment to respecting people’s worldviews and seeking to understand how on earth their various accounts of reality might seem plausible to them. That is, it’s very hard to hold for long a worldview that comes up against an obdurate reality again and again, especially if you hope to pass on this worldview to anyone else.

Global statistics tell us that Creationism must have some sort of consistency with observable facts (note: I said ‘observable,’ not scientific), some ability to make sense of empirical reality even if it is simply wrong in scientific terms. Like a description of the sun being a flaming chariot that travels across the sky, we know it’s wrong, but we also can seek to understand how it might appear to be plausible.

In fact, I think that Creationism exhibits some of the same errors that I might expect to find on trick questions in a multiple-choice midterm for a class in human evolution. Creationism adheres to patterns of error in thought: belief that our intellectual categories are reflected in reality; attribution of purpose and direction to the unfolding of events; and a firm conviction that we are both distinctive and fundamentally important to reality. In fact, Darwinian thought and evolutionary theory more broadly are an existential assault on this sense of the world, one that Western societies have struggled to integrate since the first publication of The Origin of Species. I still don’t think Creationists are right, but I do feel like I know where they’re coming from.

Stumble It!

Credits:
Jesus! vs. Darwin! from Flickr uploaded by The Searcher.

Intelligent design cartoon from Dr. Amy, The Skeptical OB.

P. Z. Myers Simpsonized from Pharyngula, What happened to my chin? (Don’t worry, PZ. I think chins are selected against in Simpsonization…)

Teach Both Theories cartoon from Durango Bill (original source unknown).

Graphic showing proportion of global believers in different religions taken from Traiperserond, God and science line up for another dance. Originally, the graphic comes from an article in New Scientist, but I’m loathe to cite the article because it commits a serious teleological error, well, several. I feel justified though because it’s behind a subscription wall.

Darwin, Very Gradual Change cartoon from integral.virishi.net

Evolution Darwinism graphic by Austin Cline, appears at About.com.

Tree of Life diagram originally from Carl Zimmer. 2002. Evolution (William Heinemann), p. 102. Available online at Classification of Living Organisms, greenspirit.org.uk.

Creation Museum Cartoon from CREATION MUSEUM: ANOTHER WAY TO FLEECE THE SHEEPLE, at Musings from the Coast.