Diana Gitig — Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How food and culture made the human mind

Short review of Kevin Laland’s Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony.

Ars Technica
Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How food and culture made the human mind

Diana Gitig

Joanna Masel — How Your Savings Plan Fuels an Arms Race on Wall Street

Policy makers are keen to encourage people to save more money for retirement, e.g. via tax incentives. This is great advice for individuals; the more money an individual saves, the more comfortable their retirement. But is it also a good idea for society as a whole? What happens when everybody tries to save money at the same time?

To answer this, we need to understand the distinction between relative and absolute competitions. Think about a running race. An absolute competition pits each runner against the clock. In an evolutionary contest, where anyone who finishes the race in less than a certain time is allowed to have children, those with stumpy legs and flat feet will be replaced by the children of the fast runners. In future generations, the average person runs faster.

In contrast, in a relative competition, where competitors race in pairs against one another instead of against the clock, rules of fair play do not apply. One competitor is super fast. Unfortunately, he gets tackled from behind. In the ensuing brawl, he receives a solid blow to the head and passes out. The slower guy then wins. In each generation, the competition gets tougher, but not necessarily because the new generation runs faster. Strictly speaking, this relative competition does not favor being fast. What it favors is crossing the finish line before your competitor. Running fast is one way of crossing the finish line first. But evolution is a creative process, and there are many different ways of achieving the same goal. It is hard to predict which of the many solutions will triumph, and not all of the solutions are ones that we like.

If saving for retirement is an absolute contest, then policy makers are doing the right thing when they encourage people to save for retirement. But if saving for retirement is a relative contest, the incentives we give for retirement plans may achieve nothing, or even worse, do economic harm.

In the real world, it’s sometimes hard to figure out which competitions are relative and which are absolute. But the mathematics behind the two are different, and so are their outcomes. During my training in evolutionary biology, I learned to use a standard mathematical model in which competition was relative. In contrast, economists learn standard mathematical models that are based on absolute competitions. These default assumptions, built into the curriculum, can shape the way someone approaches a problem for the rest of their career.

As a result, economists are biased towards assuming that competitions increase prosperity. Evolutionary biologists like me are trained to have the opposite bias, instead assuming that competitions are zero-sum. In both cases, the truth is probably somewhere in between, but how we are trained affects which situations we see as “normal” and which as “special”, and which sort of mistakes we are most likely to make.
My recent book argues that saving for retirement has become a relative contest, but that economists dangerously mistake it for an absolute one.

Saving does not cause investment.

Evonomics
How Your Savings Plan Fuels an Arms Race on Wall Street
Joanna Masel

Joe Romm — Biology Major Bobby Jindal Pleads Ignorance On Evolution And Climate Science

Inconvenient truth. Jindal caught out by Howard Fineman.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) says he can’t be expected to know about climate science because he is “not a scientist.” Same for Florida Governor Rick Scott (R), Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY), and Sen.Marco Rubio (R-FL). 

But what happens when a highly educated guy who did study science in college wants to run for national office in a party that increasingly stands against facts and science? In the case of Louisiana Governor and perennial presidential wannabee Bobby Jindal (R), you act dumb and make tortuous statements. 

How dumb? 

At a breakfast organized by The Christian Monitor, Jindal was introduced as a biology major, Rhodes Scholar, and former President of the University of Louisiana System. Naturally, at one point HuffPost’s Howard Fineman said, “I want to ask a couple of science questions.” 

Jindal cluelessly fails to see what’s coming and excitedly interjects “I’m a biology major.” Fineman is happy to repeat that point and, of course, then asks him a bunch of obvious science questions, including whether he accepts evolution. 

So Jindal now feels compelled to explain, “I was not an evolutionary biologist.” Yeah, Jindal apparently got one of those Biology degrees from Brown University (with honors at the age of 20!) that doesn’t require learning about evolution — the central organizing principle of modern biology.

Climate Progress
Biology Major Bobby Jindal Pleads Ignorance On Evolution And Climate Science

Joe Romm

Chris Mooney — Why Right-Wingers Think the Way They Do: The Fascinating Psychological Origins of Political Ideology

This is a fairly long article and I have quoted from it liberally to summarize the main points, but you really should read the whole thing since it is spot on with respect to many key issues socially, politically and economically. There's a reason beyond rational disagreement. It  also supports the cognitive work of George Lakoff concerning the differences between liberals' and conservatives' mindsets and attitudes that shape their opposing norms. Evolutionary biology suggests the reasons for thes differences arising in the evolutionary process, resulting in hereditary dispositional traits. While the science is somewhat speculative, I regard this a must read unless you want to sit down with the books that Chris Mooney draws upon.

Let’s begin with the large body of shared ground. Surveying the evidence with a fair mind, it is hard to deny that science is revealing a very inconvenient truth about left and right: long before they become members of different parties, liberals and conservatives appear to start out as different people....

The most rock-solid finding, simply because it has been shown so many times in so many different studies, is that liberals and conservatives have different personalities....

Several research groups have shown that compared with liberals, conservatives have a greater focus on negative stimuli or a “negativity bias”: they pay more attention to the alarming, the threatening, and the disgusting in life. In one experiment that captured this, Hibbing and his colleagues showed liberals and conservatives a series of collages, each comprised of a mixture of positive images (cute bunnies, smiling children) and negative ones (wounds, a person eating worms). Test subjects were fitted with eye-tracker devices that measured where they looked, and for how long. The results were stark: conservatives fixed their eyes on the negative images much more rapidly, and dwelled on them much longer, than did the liberals.
Liberals and conservatives, conclude Hibbing et al., “experience and process different worlds.” No wonder, then, that they often cannot agree. These experiments suggest that conservatives actually do live in a world that is more scary and threatening, at least as they perceive it. Trying to argue them out of it is pointless and naive. It’s like trying to argue them out of their skin....
In this context, Hibbing and his colleagues consider a variety of potential explanations for the stubborn fact that there is large, politically relevant psychological and biological diversity among members of the human species, and ultimately settle on a tentative combination of two ideas. First, they assert, conservatism is probably more basic and fundamental, because it is more suited to a world in which life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Being defensive, risk aversive, hierarchical, and tribal makes sense when the threats around you are very real and immediate. As many of these threats have relaxed in modern times, however, this may have unleashed more variability among the human species, simply because now we can afford it. Under this scenario, liberals are the Johnny-come-latelys to the politico-evolutionary pageant; the Enlightenment itself is less than 300 years old, less than an eyeblink in evolutionary time. “Liberalism may thus be viewed as an evolutionary luxury afforded by negative stimuli becoming less prevalent and deadly,” write Hibbing et al....
In other words, politics runs in families and is passed on to offspring. Hibbing and his coauthors suspect that what is ultimately being inherited is a set of core dispositions about how societies should resolve recurring problems: how to distribute resources (should we be individualistic or collectivist?); how to deal with outsiders and out-groups (are they threatening or enticing?); how to structure power relationships (should we be hierarchical or egalitarian?); and so on. These are, of course, problems that all human societies have had to grapple with; they are ancient. And inheriting a core disposition on how to resolve them would naturally predispose one to a variety of specific issue stances in a given political context.
All of which brings us to the really big question. It is difficult to believe that systematic psychological and biological differences between those who opt for the left and the right in different countries—differences that are likely reflected in the genetic code—arose purely by chance. And yet, providing an evolutionary explanation for what we see is fraught with peril: to put it bluntly, we weren’t there. We didn’t see it happen....
The answer, hints Tuschman in Our Political Nature, is that it may have been the liberals. For one core of the apparently universal left-right difference, he argues, is that the two groups pursue different reproductive strategies, different ways of ensuring offspring and fitness in the next generation.
And thus we enter the realm of full-blown, and inevitably highly controversial, evolutionary explanations. Tuschman doesn’t hold back. Conservatives, he suggests in one of three interrelated evolutionary accounts of the origins of politics, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary impulse that leads some of us to seek to control sexual reproduction and keep it within a relatively homogenous group. This naturally makes today’s conservatives more tribal and in-group oriented; if tribalism does anything, it makes it clear who you are and aren’t supposed to mate with.
Tuschman’s liberals, in contrast, are a modern reflection of an evolutionary impulse to take risks, and thereby pull in more genetic diversity through outbreeding. This naturally makes today’s liberals more exploratory and cosmopolitan, just as the personality tests always suggest. Ultimately, Tuschman bluntly writes, it all comes down to “different attitudes toward the transmission of DNA.” And if you want to set these two groups at absolute war with one another, all you need is something like the 1960s....
Returning to the present, Tuschman emphasizes that conservatives, and especially religious conservatives, always want to seem to control and restrict reproduction (and other sexual activities) more than liberals do. It’s understandably hard for an evolutionary biologist not to see behaviors that systematically affect patterns of reproduction in a Darwinian light.
And it’s not just reproductive patterns: Tuschman also suggests that other aspects of the liberal-conservative divide reflect other evolutionary challenges and differential strategies of responding to them. He traces different left-right views on hierarchy and equality to the structure of families (a move that cognitive linguist George Lakoff has in effect already made) and the effect of birth order on the personalities and political outlooks of siblings. And Tuschman traces more positive and negative (or, risk-aversive) views of human nature on the left and the right to different types of evolutionarily based altruism: altruism toward kin on the conservative side, and reciprocal altruism (which can be toward anyone) on the liberal side....

AlterNet
Why Right-Wingers Think the Way They Do: The Fascinating Psychological Origins of Political Ideology
Chris Mooney, The Washington Monthly

Chris Mooney — 6 Amazing Ways Animals Show Compassion

...if you're a primatologist..., your view of morality is radically different. You probably see indications of "moral" behaviors all throughout the animal kingdom, and especially among our primate relatives such as bonobos—who show high levels of empathy, have a female-dominated social structure, and use sex, rather than violence, to solve in-group social conflicts, and even when they encounter other, potentially hostile groups.

Emory University's Frans de Waal—the celebrated primatologist familiar from other books like The Age of Empathy—makes a case for our evolved and biologically grounded morality in his new bookThe Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. Morality, de Waal argues, "antedates religion… [and] much can be learned about its origins by considering our fellow primates."

In our interview (audio clip above, full length here), De Waal carefully explained his case for how morality springs from evolution and is part of us on a basic, emotional level—literally, part of the human wiring. That hardly means we're incapable of wrong. But it does mean that sympathy, compassion, and a sense of fairness are deeply embedded in us—and also, in our fellow animals.

Mother Jones
6 Amazing Ways Animals Show Compassion
Chris Mooney

Lord Keynes — Mises Flunks Evolution 101

Mises: "The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man’s reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.”

Reading too much Hobbes and not enough life science.

Social Democracy for the 21st Century
Mises Flunks Evolution 101
Lord Keynes