The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
Geoffrey Miller
Miller, Geoffrey;
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
Vintage, 2001, 538 pages
ISBN 0099288249, 9780099288244
topics: | evolution | gender | brain | neuro-science | sex
Redefine yourself
When I first read this book, I was surprised there wasn't a bigger brouhaha about it. For me, it was one of the most profoundly eye-opening books for many years. But over the years, it has been building in strength, it seems, and now I see references to it quite often.
Miller (Cognitive Science PhD from Stanford) considers sexual selection and how it may have affected what our brain (mind) is today. Given that the brain weighs only 2 percent of our body weight, but consumes 15 percent of our oxygen and 25 percent of our energy, there must be something that caused it to grow so big. Miller advances a plethora of arguments that this something was sexual selection.
Excerpts and Comments
Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, argued that human art, music, humor, fiction, religion, and philosophy are not real adaptations, but biological side-effects of other evolved abilities. "If music confers no survival advantage, where does it come from and why does it work?" [concludes] that art and music must be like cheesecake and pornography -- cultural inventions that stimulate our tastes in evolutionarily novel ways, without improving our evolutionary success. - p.5 [but does not agree with Pinker, argues to the contrary]
- Human behaviour: An evolutionary view-- brains heavier than a pound evolved only in the great apes, in several varieties of elephants and mammoths, and in a few dozen species of dolphins and whales. chimpanzee brains - one pound, human brains - three pounds, bottlenose dolphin - 4 pounds elephant brains - 11 lbs sperm whale brains - 18 lbs - 17 no plausible survival payoffs for - humour storytelling [?] gossip [?] art music self-consciousness ornate language imaginative ideologies [?] religion [?] morality [?] - 18 [I am not so sure abou the one's I flagged with "?"] Pinker: Language Instinct: elephant's trunk raises some of the same problems as human language - a large complex adaptation that arose relatively recently in evolution, in only one group of mammals. Yet the elephant's trunk does not raise these problems. There was convergent evolution towards grasping tentacle-like structures among octopi and the squid. The evolution of the trunk split the ancestors of elephants very quickly into mammoths, mastodons, and elephants (adaptive radiation). Our unique human abilities [language] do not show convergent evolution, nor adaptive radiation. [Rather loosely argued. Language as an adaptation may need other skills already present in related species. Sound aspects (older, more universal - e.g. music) - is related to birdsong. ] - 19 How could our ancestors afford the energy costs of large brains? Evidence in the last decade reveals how our ancestors evolved the ability to exploit energy-rich foods such as game animals that could be hunted for meat, and underground tubers that could be dug up and cooked. These energy rich foods could also be digested using shorer intestines than other apes. Leslie Aiello: Our smaller guts also increased our energy budget above what is available to other apes. - 23 the first gene specifically identified with extremely high intelligence, IGF2R, on chromosome 6.
Darwin and sexual selection
As a child, Charles Darwin collected beetles avidly, and was once so determined to capture a specimen, despite having his hands full, that he placed it in his mouth to carry home. . . . He saw that many animals, especially males, have colorful plumage and melodious songs. These complex and costly traits have no apparent use in the animals' daily routine of feeding, fleeing and fighting. [After returning from the Beagle trip, he was intrigued by peacocks in English gardens. To his son Francis:] "The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!" - 35 REF: Helena Cronin: The ant and the peacock - the only good history of sexual selection. The origin of species, 1859 - has three pages on sexual selection: sexual selection depends "not on a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between individuals of one zex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex." [37] He noticed that most differences between males and females are either specializations for making eggs or sperm, or weaponry and ornamentation used during sexual competition. - 40 One result of sexual selection is a very fast divergence between species -- the weaponry and ornamentation of one species can go off in a different direction from the weaponry and ornamentation of a closely related species. 40 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex 900 page, two vol book of 1871: He who admits the principle of sexual selection will be led to the remarkable conclusion that the cerebral system not only regulates most of the existing functions of the bpdy, but has indirectly influenced progressive development of various bodily structures and of certain mental qualities. Courage, pugnacity, perseverance, strength and size of body, weapons of all kinds, musical organs, both vocal and instrumental, bright colours, stripes, and marks, and ornamental appendages, have all been indirectly gained by one sex or the other, through the influence of love and jealousy, through the appreciation of the beautiful in sound, colour, or form, and through the exertion of choice; and these powers of the mind manifestly depend on the development of the cerebral system. - 47-48
Opposition to sexual selection
The ease with which Alfred Russel Wallace independently discovered
natural selection during a bout of Malaysian malaria (46)... [ AW] was
constantly emphasizing the power of selection to explain biological
structures that seem inexplicable. He was the world's expert on animal
coloration, camouflage, and was more generous than Darwin in
attributing high intelligence to 'savages.' .. Yet Wallace was utterly
hostile to Darwin's theory of sexual selection through mate
choice. .. Did not consider male ornaments to be proper adaptations
that evolved for some real purpose .. were the unselected side effects
of an exuberant animal physiology that has a natural predilection for
bright colors and loud songs. A random animal, cut in half, shows
many brightly coloured internal organs. Wallace pointed out that
internal coloration cannot usually result from mate choice ==> organs
have a natural tendency to assume bright colours just because of their
chimistry and physiology. On the outside, selection favours
camouflage so animals often look dull and drab. [IDEA: Blood is red so
we can see it easily]
Wallace then claims: the more active an organ, the more colourful it
is. Males are more active, therefore more colours.
(1889 book, Darwinism): "The enormously lengthened plumes of the birds
of paradise and the peacock... have been developed to so great an
extent [because] there is a surplus of strength, vitality and
growth-power which is able to expand itself in this way without
injury." Males are even more energetic in the mating season, and
their ornaments grow more colourful. Energy surplus ==> released in
ardent songs and extravagant dances. - 49
Wallace's energy surplus theory foreshadowed Freud's speculation that
human artistic display is the sublimation of excess sexual energy.
Stephen Jay Gould's claim (1977: Ontogeny and Phylogeny): human
creative intelligence is a side-effect of surplus brain size. Makes
little evolutionary sense: surplus energy usually converted into fat,
not creativity. 50-1
[NOTE: Surplus of energy theory ==> Tagore's art as surplus:
"man has a surplus where he can proudly assert that knowledge is for
the sake of knowledge. Upon this fund of surplus his science and
philosophy thrive. ... Man has a fund of emotional energy which is not
all occupied with his self-preservation. This surplus seeks its outlet
in the creation of Art, for man's civilization is built upon its
surplus. ] Tagore, Personality
Though he remained an evolutionist about everything else, Wallace was
a creationist about 'the human spirit'. Allied with anti-Darwinians
who claimed that evolution could never account for human
consciousness, intelligence, or creativity. Developed interests in
mesmerism and went to seances. - 50
Edward Westermark, 1894 (History of Human marriage) spent hundreds of
pages trying to undermine the idea that premodern humans were free to
choose their sexual partners. He thought that traditional arranged
marriages destroyed any possibility of sexual selection. Like most
anthropologists of his era, he saw women as pawns in male power games,
and young lovers as dominated by matchmaking parents. He founded the
tradition of seeing marriage primarily as a way of cementing alliances
between families, a view that dominated anthropology until the last
years of the 20th c. 52
The rediscovery of Mendel's work around 1900 shifted interest from
Darwin and his sexual selection ideas. For young biologists at the
turn of the century, genes were the way forward. 53
Ronald Fisher, runaway sexual selection, 1930: The genetical theory of
natural selection. Originally posed as a counter argument (Thomas
Hunt Morgan, 1903): If female birds preferred slightly brighter
plumage, all males would produce brighter plumage, but now the goal
would be shifted: "Shall we assume that ... the two continue heaping
up the ornaments on one side and the appreciation of these ornaments
on the other?" FIsher suggested that a female who prefers
super-ornamented males, will produce super-ornamented sons, who will
be super-attractive to other females, etc. 56
The narrow adaption was perhaps reinforced by 20th c. aesthetics which
held conpicuous, costly ornamentation in low regard. Walter Gropius
(1920s) and other in the Bauhaus movement, Germany argued that in a
socialist utopia, working people would not waste time and energy
hand-decorating objects for purchase by the rich, merely so the rich
could show how much wasteful ornamentation they could afford. Form
should follow function. Ornament was morally decadent and politically
reactionary. ==> Spilled over into science ==> JBS Haldane suggested
that the excesses of sexual selection may be 'advantageous for the
individual, but ultimately disastrous for the species.' 61
Female biologists doing fieldwork drew more attention to female
choice among the animals they studied, esp in primatology: Jane
Goodall, Diane Fossey, Sarah Hrdy, Jeanne Altmann, Alison Jolly,
Barbara Smuts. 63
Handicap principle: sexual ornaments are high cost
1975, Amotz Zahavi: handicap principle: high costs of sexual ornaments make them reliable as fitness indicators. 63 In the 1980s [After a hundred year of neglect] sexual selection became the hottest area of evolutionary biology and animal behaviour research. 65 [Once sexual selection became mainstream, sophisticated methods already existing in experimental psychology were applied] to mate choice. In species after species, females were seen to show preferences for one male over another, for beautiful ornaments over bedraggled ones, for a higher level of fitness over a lower. Female choice was observed by Linda Partridge in fruit flies, by Malte Andersson in widowbirds and by Michael Ryan in Tungara frogs. David Buss even showed evidence of mate choice in humans. [Sex differences in human mate selection: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences v. 12 1-49] Three requirements of runaway ornamentation: a. variation (all biological traits show variation) b. heritable (variation must be capable of being passed down) c. selection: (e.g. female preference for long tails) Fisher's key insight : the female daughters of choosy females will also inherit the preference for long tails ==> runaway selection. 71 If our ancestors were perfectly monogamous, runaway sexual selection could not have started. 75 Generally the larger the body difference between male and female, the more polygynous the species. Humans: [Compared to the the average human female] the average male is about 10 percent taller, 20 percent heavier, 50 percent stronger in the upper body muscles, and 100 percent stronger in the hands grip strength. ==> moderate degree of polygyny. 75 A problem with the runaway brain theory is that runaway is supposed to produce large sex differences in whatever trait is under sexual selection. Peacock tails are much larger than peahen tails. If the human brain tripled in size because of sexual selection ... men would have three-pound brains and women would still have one-pound brains like other apes... Male human brains average 1,440 grams, while female brains average 1,250 grams. Compared to body size, the brain difference shrinks to 100 grams. This 8 percent difference is larger than can be predicted by other theories, but much smaller than would be predicted by the runaway brain theory. 81 Similarly if creative intelligence evolved through runaway, one would expect men to have much higher IQ's. The underlying 'general intelligence' ability (technically called 'the g factor')... In the best analysis, Arthur Jensen, The g factor, 1988: "The sex difference in psychometric g is either totally nonexistent or is of uncertain direction and of inconsequential magnitude." No diffs found on most reliable g factor tests, involving abstract symbolic reasoning, such as Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. 82 Men have slightly higher variation in IQ, producing more geniuses as well as more idiots, but this variation does not reflect a greater variation in the underlying g factor. 82 Male humans paint more pictures, record more jazz albums, write more books, commit more murders, and perform more strange feats to enter the Guinness book of Records. Demographic data show not only a large sex difference in such display behaviours, but also a peak between the age of 20 and 30. [But many of these may also be due to cultural reasons like] the nightmare of patriarchy. 82-3 However, in most animals, distinct sexes specialize in making DNA packets of different sizes. The female sex evolved to make large packets in which their DNA comes with additional nutrients to give offspring a jumpstart in their development (egg). The male sex evolved to make the smallest possible packets in which their DNA is almost naked, contributing no nutrients to their offspring (sperm). 85 In the 1970s, biologist Robert Trivers realized that, from this difference in 'parental investment', all else follows. [Females make fewer costlier eggs than males make sperm. Eggs become the limiting resource, and males compete more intensely to fertilize eggs than females do to acquire sperm, and thus females are choosier than males.] 85-6 In female mammals the cost of pregnancy and milk production are particularly high, amplifying the difference. 86 For male genes, copulation is the gateway to immortality. This is why males risk their lives for copulation opportunities -- and why a male praying mantis continues copulating even after a female has eaten his head. 87 Choosy females may be quite active in searching for good mates [passive females and active males] is uselessly simplistic and not biological or Darwinian] 88
Reproduction Strategies
- Cloning / Cell division: Bacteria simply divide and conquerAmong
multicellular organisms like fungi, some cells are specialized for
making genetically identical bodies. Advantages - fast -
exponential rise in nutrient rich environments. Problematic for the
long term :
a. no adaptive power - susceptible to extinction
b. mutations cannot be checked
- Sexual Reproduction - mutations in one parent may be masked by
normal genes in the other (dominance), or at least, progeny have a
higher variation in terms of mutations; some are more mutated and
die without progeny, others have fewer and thrive. Of the 1.7 mn
species, most have sexual reproduction: 1m animals, vast majority
sexual, all animals larger than a few mm- all mammals, birds,
reptiles; 300K plants, 250K through flowers that attract
pollinators. Asexual - Only very small, very transient, parasitic,
bacterial = brainless. Large bodies must have sexual reproduction
in order to adapt against parasites that mutate much faster. 99-100, 176
[Biologically almost all mutations are negative. ]
Incest is a bad idea because blood relatives often inherit the same
mutations 101
A small number of animals and a large number of flowering plants are
hermaphroditic. Because they still compete to attract mates, they
still evolve sexual ornaments (but no sex differences). 85
Since evolution is a long-term winners-take-all contest, it is more
important to produce a few good offspring than large numbers of
mediocre ones. [Risk-seeking strategy] 102
Human brain as fitness indicator
Brain's Complexity makes it vulnerable to impairment through mutations, and its size makes it physiologically costly. By producing behaviours such as language and art that only a costly, complex brain could produce, we may be advertising our fitness to potential mates. 104 EVOLUTIONARY FITNESS: the fit between an organism and its environment, leading to a higher survival probability. How to measure etc is a matter of debate in biology. Related to "condition" - which depends on external factors such as food availability etc, as well as basical physical fitness, which may be lower due to a temporary factor such as injury. Can also have mental fitness (as in "fit to stand as witness"). WD Hamilton (Oxford biologist) - pointed out the strong correlation between Evolutionary fitness and Physical/Mental fitness. 108-110 Many fitness indicators advertise fitness by revealing the animal's condition. From the p.o.v. of an animal making sexual choices, fitness indicators are just proxies for good genes. 111 --- George Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, 1966 It is to the female's advantage to be able to pick the most fit male available for fathering her brood. Unusually fit fathers tend to have unusually fit offspring. One of the functions of courtship would be the advertisement, by a male, of how fit he is. A male whose general health and nutrition enables him to indulge in full development of seondary sexual characters, especially courtship behavior, is likely to be reasonably fit genetically. Other important signs of fitness would be the ability to occupy a choice nesting site and a large territory, and the power to defeat or intimidate other males. In submitting only to a male with such signs of fitness a female would probably aiding the survival of her own genes. 114 Lek is Swedish for a playful game or party. Some birds like sage grouse congregate in leks to choose their sexual partners. The males display as vigorously as they can, dancing, strutting, and cooing. The females wander around inspecting them, remembering them, and coming back to copulate with their favourite after they have seen enough. In species that lek, the males usually contribute nothing but their genes. The most attractive male may mate with thirty females one morning; average males usually mate with none. [The lek paradox: After some generations of this, the variation in fitness should disappear and the basis for female selectivity should disappear; why doesn't this happen?] 116 In the 1980s WD Hamilton and John Tooby independently developed the idea that variation in fitness coulod be sustained over very long periods by populations evolving interactively with their parasites. [The peacock's tail also advertises his conquest of his parasites.] 117 Imagine all the DNA in our 23 pairs of chromosomes laid end to end in a single strip. The DNA from a single human cell would be about six feet long, and contain about 80,000 genes. [Simple traits such as skin colour may be involved in a half-dozen genes, a moderately complex feature such as the shape of the face may have several hundred, but a very complex organ like the brain would involve tens of thousands of genes. (This percentage is not known, but geneticists estimate that between a third and half of the genes are active in the brain). By focusing on the brain, the observer could make a better estimate of mutation load and fitness. ] 121
Honest Signaling
Anita Loos 1925 novel Gentlemen prefer Blondes: Lorelei Lee forces
suitors to spend large amounts of money on her, to show how much they
really have. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class 1899,
people increasingly advertise their wealth by ornamenting themselves
with costly luxuries ==> Conspicuous consumption. Well accepted in
Economics (1960s) - if I spend more and create surplus capacity in my
factory, I advertise my financial strength and drive off
competitors. 125-128
Amotz Zahavi 1975 -> only costly signals can be honest. Most sexual
ornaments as "handicaps". Sexual selections cares more for the
prodiguous magnitude of the waste than about its precise form. 129
Our brains are only 2 percent of our body weight, but they consume 15
percent of our oxygen intake, 25 percent of our metabolic energy, and
40 percent of our blood glucose. Spending several hours thinking
hard, or conversing seriously, makes us tired and hungry. 134
The 10 percent or so of our brains that are not shared with other apes
include abilities like creative intelligence and complex
language... these absurd wastes of time, energy and effort. 133
[AM: But these also confer specific and wide-ranging evolutionary
benefits!]
The concept of fitness indicators violates eight core values
- basic variation violates human equality [But most people realize
that there is a lot of variation;
- free will+choice+actions + social and family environments shape
human development (not heritable brain aspects)
- advertising fitness violates humility, decorum and tact
- sexual status hierarchies violate egalitarian social organization
- people sorting themselves into sexual pairs based on assessing each
others' fitness violates romantic ideal of personal compatibility
- The conspicuous waste demanded by the handicap principle violates
our values of frugality, simplicity, and efficiency
- The sexual choice mechanisms violate our belief that people should
be judged by their character, not the quality of their genes
- It seems nihilistic to propose that such lofty capacities as for
art, language, and music are merely a loud and insistent
proclaimation - "I am fit, my genes are good, mate with me!"
A mind evolved as a set of fitness indicators can sound like a fascist
nightmare.
Social norms evolve to protect the individual; humility from
braggarts, frugality from waste, and egalitarianism from arbitrary
despotism. 135-6
But without reproductive competition, we cannot formulate a theory for
human origins.
SENSORY BIAS: Displays match senses
Richard Dawkins and John Krebs, 1978, Information or Manipulation? In
Krebs and Davies (eds), Behavioral Ecology, p.282-309, J.R.:
Sender of signal is trying to selfishly influence the behaviour of
others
==> signals are good for the sender, not the receiver. They
are sent to manipulate behaviour, not to convey useful information.
If the receiver and sender's genetic interests overlap, they may
cooperate. The receiver may develop greater sensitivity to the
signals, and the messages may evolve to be quieter, simpler, and
cheaper. Cells within a body have almost identical interests and
strong incentives to cooperate, so intercellular signalling is very
efficient.
On the other hand, if the receiver's interests deviate from the
sender's, signals will tend to become excessively manipulative.
Predators may trap prey by evolving lures that resemble the prey's
own favorite food. In defence, receiver's may become insensitive to
the signal. Prey may evolve the ability do discriminate between the
lure and the real food. This may be why lures are so rare in nature.
Courtship - sometimes exploitative and sometimes cooperative.
Typically males of most species like sex regardless of the
attractiveness and fitness of the females, so they tend to treat
female senses as security systems to be cracked. This is why male
pigeons strut for hours in front of female pigeon eyes, and why male
humans buy fake pheronomes and booklets on how to seduce women. On
the other hand, females typically want sex only with very attractive,
very fit males, so tend to evolve senses that respond only to signals
of high attractiveness and fitness. 140
Colour vision evolved in part to notice brightly coloured fruit. THe
fruit evolved to spread its seeds by attracting fruit eaters such as
primates and birds. ... If a male happens to evolve a bright red face,
he might prove more attractive to females with colour vision oriented
to looking for red fruit. 141
If female ears of one species hears best at 8909 hertz, then male
calls center around that frequency. Males calling at other
frequencies would find their genes going extinct.
Michael Ryan: Often, females find it easier to locate males with a
deeper-than-average call, [??because calls at a lower frequence travel
longer?] and there is a "sensory bias" towards deeper calls. But this
may also be because of females preferring larger males which produce
lower-pitched calls. 143
The preponderance of stripes and dots in sexual ornamentation may be
driven towards stimulating edge detectors in the V1 area. Magnus
Enquist suggested that ornamentations with bilateral and radial
symmetry may have evolved to exploit parts of the visual system that
work with 3D rotations and are optimally excited by radially symmetric
patterns (stars, sunbursts, eyespots). 145
Pleasure-Seeking
Tim Guilford / Marion Stamp Dawkins: Apart from sensory bias, there can be attentional, cognitive, memory, judgment, emotional, and hedonic biases. These can be even more important - i.e. mind as an entertainment system. Imagine a cold, calculating chooser, whose neural circuits weigh the variables without any hedonic component. Contrast the hot chooser, whose behaviour in the end is the same, but it has very different subjective feelings - including aesthetic rapture, curiosity, warmth, happiness, awe, lust, and adoration. These feelings play a direct causal role in the choice process. But an external observer cannot tell them apart. [Or can he?] Suppose that the pleasure system of the hot chooser is the same pleasure system it uses for all other domains - e.g. level of endorphins in the nervous system, which responds to seeing an attractive mate is similar to that in eating good food, escaping a predator, or viewing a beautiful scene, watching its children thrive, etc. All its decisions are mediated by this pleasure-meter. Over the short term, both hot and cold choosers will behave similarly. But in the long term, they differ in how their systems evolve to new signals. E.g. a male has a mutation that makes him give good food to a female, the cold female will eat the food but it may not influence her mate choice; on the other hand the hot-chooser will have her pleasure-meter enhanced and may favour the food-giving mutant. Similarly, hot choosers would prefer behaviour that saved them from predators, led them to a rich beautiful habitat, etc. 148-50 ORNAMENTS vs INDICATORS Ornaments - wasteful devices evolved to meet runaway sexual Indicators - indicative of evolutionary fitness Most sexual signals are a mix of both. [IDEA: Monotonicity of innovations] Giraffe's neck could have evolved gradually, each increment giving a small improvement; so also an insect's camouflage. But eyes, middle ear, etc. Dawkins and Manfred Eigen - possible to evolve along a continuous trajectory with small improvements at every stage. This may be the most significant problem that theories of evolutionary biology must address. 166 [BILL: William Eberhand, in his book, Sexual Selection and Animal Genitalia, tells us that the one of the first things that begins to diverge when one species splits off into another species is the penis shape. And what force makes the penis change shape? To quote Miller: "In Eberhard's view, this is because female choice focuses on the details of penis shape, and female choice apparently drives most micro-innovation." p. 169.] HAREM system: When food comes in patches large enough for several females to share, they tend to band together... if the female band is not too large, a single male can exclude other males from sexual access: hamadryas baboons, colobus monkeys, some langurs, and gorillas. Competition between males ==> strong sexual selection pressure on male size, strength, aggressiveness, and large canine teeth. When food is in still larger patches, the female groups can be goo large ==> complex, multi-male, multi-female group, as in some baboons, macaques, ring-tailed lemurs, howler monkeys, chimpanzees. Three kinds of female preference in primates: - preference for high ranking males capable of protecting the female and offspring - preferences for male friends that have groomed the female a lot and have been kind to her offspring; - preference for new males from outside the group, perhaps to avoid genetic inbreeding 184 MALE CHOICE: When costs of male sexual competition and courtship are high, males also have incentives to be choosy. When male choice becomes important, sexual selection affects females as well as males. 185 Because sexual choice often shapes traits to work as fitness indicators, it can also produce traits that show large differences between individuals within the same population. If male choice selected female buttocks as reliable indicators of fertility, health and youth, we should not expect all females to have identical buttocks, for that would make the trait useless. 229 Developmental Stability: Symmetry despite mutations and environmental challenges - faces and breasts - symmetry of sexual ornaments is an important detrminant of sexual attractiveness in many species. 229-30 The human penis is the largest among primates:
| Length of erect penis in primates | |
| Gorilla | 3 cm |
| Chimpanzee | 7.5 cm |
| Orangutan | 3.5 cm |
| Human | 12 cm |
What is art for?
Anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake: What is Art for? (1988) and Homo
Aestheticus, (1992), argues that human art shows three features
reflecting its role as a biological adaptation with a role in evolution
a) ubiquitous across culture groups
b) Arts are sources of pleasure for both artist and viewer, and
evolution tends to make pleasurable those behaviours that are
adaptive. (e.g. food is pleasurable when hungry)
c) Artistic production entails effort - costs not incurred without
some adaptive rationale. (Ernst Grosse, 1897 book - The
beginnings of Art comments on the wastefulness of art: Art would
have long been rejected by natural selection.)
Like most mental adaptations, the ability to produce and appreciate
art is not present at birth. 260
Art is very old - evidence of using red ocher for body ornamentation
in Africa 100,000 years ago. ...
To Darwin, high cost, apparent uselessness, and manifest beauty
usually indicated that a behaviour had a hidden courtship
function. But not to most art theorists...
German Romanticism, Schiller and Goethe - art as a higher plane where genius
trancends the petty concerns of the world. 261
Art as social glue (like ritual, religion, music) that holds groups
together - anthropologists Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, AR
Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons 262
There is no clear line between Great Art, fashion, and other human
ornamentation such as body-painting, jewelry, and clothing. No clear
line between ornamenting our bodies and ornamenting our lives, nor
between art and craft. 267
Bowerbird Nests
Human ornamentation is different from the peacocks because it is made with our minds rather than grown on our bodies. The only other animals that spend significant time and energy constructing purely aesthetic displays are the bowerbirds of New Guinea and Australia. Each of the 18 species constructs a different style of nest, only by males, and only for courtship. Males that build superior bowers can mate upto ten times a day with different females. Once inseminated, the females go off, build their own small cup-shaped nests, and raise their offspring with no male support, rather like Picasso's mistresses. By contrast, male nests are enormous, sometimes large enough for David Attenborough to crawl inside. The golden bowerbird of northern Australia, though only nine inches long, builds a sort of roofed gazebo upto nine feet high. A hut built by a human male to similar proportions would top 70 feet and weigh several tons. Male bowerbirds decorate their bowers with mosses, ferns, orchids, snail shells, berries and bark. They fly around searching for the most brilliantly coloured natural objects, and arrange them carefully in clusters of uniform colour. Males often try to steal ornaments, especially blue feathers... strength to defend their delicate work is a precondition of their artistry. Females appear to favor bowers that are sturdy, symmetrical and well-ornamented with colour. Regent and Satin Bowerbirds even paint an avenue they construct with a walkway flanked by two long walls. They use bluish regurgitated fruit residues. Presumably the females have favored the best male painters for many generations. 268 Male of many bowerbird species are also more brightly coloured than females, and they dance, and also sing, producing guttural wheeezes and cries, and also imitations of the songs of other species. However, male bowerbirds pale compared to their relatives, the spectacular birds-of-paradise, where sexual choice resulted in an efflorescence of plumage in 40 species. Bowerbirds - proliferation of ornamental nests in 18 species. 269 If you could interview a male satin bowerbird for Artforum magazine, he might say something like, "I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with colour and form for their own sake, quite inexplicable. I cannot remember when I developed this raging thirst to present richly saturated colour-fields within a monumental yet minimalist stage-set, but I feel connected to something beyond myself when I indulge these passions. When I see a beautiful orchid high in a tree, I simply must have it for my own. When I see a single shell out of place in my creation, I must run to put it right. ... It would be an insult to suggest that I create in order to procreate. We live in a post-Freudian, post-modernist era in which crude sexual meta-narratives are no longer credible explanations of our artistic impulses. 269-70 In "The EXTENDED PHENOTYPE" Richard Dawkins argued that genes are often selected for effects that spread outside the body into the environment. It is meaningful to talk about genes for a spider's web, a termite mound, or a beaver's dam. [So why not other art?] 270 bipedalism freed our hands for making sexual ornaments - some on the body (tattoo, face makeup, hairstyles, hair dye, jewelry, furs, clothing), and filling our houses with art... We make useful objects with as much style and ornament as we can afford, and make useless objects with purely aesthetic appeal. 271 Darwin viewed human ornmanetation and clothing as outcomes of sexual selection. In "The Descent of Man" he citd the popularity across tribal people of nail colors, eyelid colors, hair dyes, hair cutting and braiding, head shaving, teeth staining, tooth removal, tattooing, scarification, skull deformations, and piercing of the nose, ears and lips. Darwin observed that 'self-adornment, vanity, and the admiration of others, seem to be the commonest motives' for self-ornamentation. He also noted that in most cultures, men adorn themselves more than women. He also stressed the time costs of acquiring rare pigments, the pain costs of aesthetic mutiliation, Finally he argued against a cultural explanation of ornamentation, observing that 'It is extremely improbable that these practices which are followed by so many distinct nations are due to tradition from any common source.' 272 Throughout the 1800s Herbert Spencer argued that sexual selection accounts for most of what humans consider beautiful, including bird plumage and song, flowers, human bodies, and music, drama, fiction and poetry. Max Nordau (Paradoxes, 1896) attributed sexual emotions and artistic productivity to a hypothetical part of the brain called the generative center. Freud viewed art as sublimated sexuality. 272 Thoomas Clay, "The origin of the sense of beauty": That a very large part of art is directly inspired by erotic motives is perfectly true, and that various forms of art play an important part in love songs and courtship is obvious, but this is because buauty produced by art has in itself the power of arousing emotion, and is therefore naturally made use of to heighten the total pleasure. .. but we cannot admit that it is due to the sex feeling that rhythm, symmetry, harmony, and beautiful colour are capable of giving us a pleasurable feeling. 272-3 Modigliani's cocaine-fueled quest to have sex with every one of the hundreds of models he painted. Gauguin's drive to infect every girl in Polynesia with his syphillis. Picasso fathered one child by his first wife Olga Koklova, another by his mistress Marie-Therese Walter, and two more by his mistress Francoise Gelot. His tireless energy, prodigious output, and sexual appetite seem to have been tightly intertwined. 273 If we view art as an example of a biological signalling system, we can break it up into two parts - producing art, and judging art. The second is more mysterious. ... Powerful forces like aesthetic rapture are the footprint of powerful selection forces. 273-4
Runaway Beauty
Aesthetic tastes evolved as part of female mate choice - certain tastes regarding male ornaments were propagated. Wodaabe people (Bororo) cattle-herders of Nigeria/Niger - young men spend hours painting their faces and ornamenting their bodies. Men also dance vigorously for seven full nights - end of ceremony the men line up and woman invites the man she finds most attractive for a sexual encounter. Wodaabe women usually prefer the tallest men with the whitest teeth, the largest eyes, the straightest nose, the most elaborate body-painting, and the most creative ornamentation - and the men have evolved in all these directions. 277 EXPLAINING AESTHETIC TASTE: Sensory bias - stripes are liked because V1 is most sensitive to stripes. 278 From a neuroscientist's viewpoint, we are our brains. Holds for both genetically acquired as well as cultural preferences. 279 Rhesus moneys - Nicholas Humphrey (1970s) - preference for white to red light, focused pictures to out-of-focus, and pictures of monkeys to anything else. But no other aesthetic preferences for forms, shapes, patterns, symmetries, or compositions. ALthough rhesus monkey visual systems are remarkably similar to ours, they exhibit no sensory bias leading to aesthetic preference. 279 Desmond Morris - Chimpanzee paintings (1962, The biology of art) - similar to abstract expressionist paintings. Salvador Dali: "The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human, the hand of Jackson Pollock is almost animal." But research showed that Chimpanzees were driven reactively by paper edges, and to any geometric forms already printed on the paper. If a human does not snatch away the paper in time, the chimp tends to cover the page with a meaningless multicoloured smear. 280
Beautiful is costly (? Rare?)
Throughout history, the beauty of an object has depended very much on its cost. That cost could be measured in time, energy, skill, or money. Objects that were cheap and easy to produce were almost never considered beautiful. Veblen (Theory of Leisure Class): "The marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles." Our sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to prefer what is difficult as opposed to easy, rare as opposed to common, costly as opposed to cheap, skillful as opposed to talentless, and fit as opposed to unfit. Ellen Dissanayake: human art depends on 'making things special' 281 The fundamental challenge facing the artist is to demonstrated their fitness by making something that lower-fitness competitors could not make, thus proving themselves more socially and sexually attractive. This challenge arises not only in the visual arts, but also in music, storytelling, humour and many other behaviours. 282 Franz Boas, "Primitive Art" (1955, Dover) shows how most aesthetic preferences of tribal peoples can be traced to the appreciation of patience, careful execution, and technical perfection. In his view, this thirst for virtuosity explains our preferences for regular form, symmetry, perfectly repeated decorative motifs, smooth surfaces, and uniform colour fields. Art historian Ernst Gombrich made powerful arguments along similar lines in his "The sense of order" (1984), viewing decorative arts as displays of skill that play on our perceptual senses. 282 Beauty conveys truth, but not about the human condition in general (for this reason, Plato and Hegel derogate art compared to philosophy). However, art delivers truth about the condition of the a particular human, the artist. 282
Beauty of mathematics
When mathematicians are talking about the "art" of therem proving, they are recognizing that good theorems are often the products of minds with high fitness. It is a claim for the social status of their medium - likewise for the 'arts' of warfare, chess, football, cooking, gardening, teaching, and sex itself. 283 Kant: Critique of Judgment (1790) - beauty cannot be reduced to utility, aesthetic judgment must be disinterested (ideal beauty), but there is also 'adherent beauty' - biologically and personally relevant. 283 Elite aesthetics - vs Folk aesthetics - Art historian Arthur Danto: "We have entered a period of art so absolute in its freedom that it seems but a name for an infinite play with its own concept." - art for art's sake - makes it difficult to judge artist's talent - "my child could have done that." ==> where is the evidence of artistic skill? 285 ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION Veblen: when spoons were made by hand, those with the most symmetrical form, the smoothest finish, and most intricate ornamentation were considered the most beautiful. ... Now we favour conpicuously handmade spoons, with charming asymmetries, irregular finish, and crude ornamentation which would have shamed any 18th c. silversmith's apprentice. Cultural theorist Walter Benjamin: Before photography, accurate visual representations required enormous skill to draw or paint... later painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction. Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill - the brushstroke became an end in itself, like the hammer marks on a handmade spoon. 287
Dyes, pigmented and coloured clothing
When Alexander sacked the royal treasury of the Persian capital Susa in 331 BC, its most valuable contents were a set of 200-year old purple robes. By AD 400, cloth dyed with 'purpura', a purple dye obtained from the murex mollusk, cost about four times its weight in gold, and Emperor Theodosium of Byzantium forbade its use except by the Imperial family, upon pain of death. Colourful objects were considered beautiful, not least because they reliably indicated resourcefulness/cost. 287 Constantin Brancusi sent his streamlined bronze sculpture, Bird in Space, to be exhibited in the US. A customs official imposed 40 p.c. fine since he classified the object as a bronze machine part rather than a birdlike piece of art. Was overruled following months of testimony by the art cognoscenti. 287
Handaxe as art
2.5 mya - stone tools 1.6 mya - H. Erectus - Handaxes - shaped like a child's hand, with a point, and sharp all around. Became extremely popular - were made until about 200K years ago, until the time of H. Sapiens. Many variations on same basic design. Reasonable functionality, cutting edge / weight, but hard to hold due to sharp edge all around. Were they thrown at prey (HG Wells)? Unlikely - spears (at least 400K ya) were better. Some handaxes are large, intended to be held in two hands and admired; others less than two inches - too small to be useful. Many of the finest handaxes show no signs of use such as chipped edges. Marek Kohn, "As we know it" (1999) - handaxe as a highly visible indicator of fitness, as a criterion for mate choice. "Hand axes are a measure of strength, skill, and character." COSTLY (Zahavian handicap): Modern experts with 25 years of flint-knapping experience take about 20 minutes to make a decent handaxe, whereas a simple edged tool can be made in just a couple of minutes. + risk of injury - modern flint-knappers wear goggles/leather aprons/boots, and often get cuts on their hands. [IDEA: Make your stone tool - knapping] 289-91 [IDEA: Handaxe - ruled for millions of years - 500 times the length of recorded history - how did they live?] Oscar Wilde: The ideal husband - strong pressure to demonstrate high moral stature to their lovers and spouses. Will the highly principled Lady Ghiltern still lover her husband after learning that he acquired his fortune by selling a government secret? 293 [IDEA: Also - Shyama story - Vajrasen cannot take the immoral act of sacrificing uttiya] Murder, unkindness, rape, rudeness, failure to help the injured, fraud, racism, war crimes, failing to leave a tip in a restaurant, cheating at sports - all immoral - and all something that you would not wish to tell your lover / spouse. ==> sexual selection favours social norms. Can explain sympathy, agreeableness, moral leadership, sexual fidelity, good parenting, charitable generosity, sportsmanship... Biologist Irwin Tessman, anthropologist Kristen Hawkes and James Boone, primatologist Franz de Waal. While altruism can be among the most potent displays of moral character, altruism is not the only display. As with other displays, moral displays concerned less with the benefit conferred on others, more on the cost imposed on oneself ==> costly indicators are stronger handicaps. 294 Ecologists have long understood that the typical interaction between any two individuals or species is neither competition nor cooperation but neutralism. Anything else takes too much energy. ... Our attitudes to others are not dominated by hate, exploitation, spite, competitiveness, or treachery, but by indifference. So why do we do anything but shrug when we see opportunities for care or generosity? [IDEA: relationship between two musical notes - also apathy?]
Cheat Detection
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby - humans if evolved under reciprocal altruism, must be capable of detecting cheats. Repeatedly verified in many experiments. 303 Karl Marx: Society may be based on status signals without reciprocity (dominance hierarchy), or reciprocity without status signals (egalitarian utopia). Our outrage against cheats is directed at those who display deceptive fitness indicators, not just those who fail to return a kindness. 303 In the 60s, evolutionary selfishness of the gene was seen as as leading automaticall to the selfishness of human individuals. Richard Dawkins: If you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature." [Led] Biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould to reject the selfish-gene view of evolution. Franz de Waal - note of optimism, in Good Natured (1996) - Humans and other animals have been endowed with a capacity for genuine love, sympathy, and care, a fact that can and will one day be fully reconciled with the idea that genetic self-determination drives the evolutionary process. 305 experimental economics research - irrationally high generosity between adults playing bargaining games. Economist Robert Frank, Passions within Reason: the strategic role of the emotions, 1988 [306] Irwin Tresmanm, 1995 - role for sexual selection in defining the esteem of one's partner. Noted that human generosity goes beyond the demands of kinship and reciprocity. Generosity may work as a Zahavian handicap that shows fitness, and thus evolved through SS. Anthropologist James Boone combined Zahavi's handicap theory with Veblen's conspicuous consumption theory to explain costly, conspicuous displays of magnanimity. 307
Hunting and Maleness
Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes: only 3 percent chance per day of successfully killing a large animal. hunting success is much higher when they go after smaller, weaker animals. The smaller the game, the more of its meat can be eaten before it rots. When hunters really need to eat, they will give up on the large game and catch the small. Anthropologist Helen Fisher - The Sex Contract (1982) - male hunting provided meat for sexual partners burdened by babies. ... not fashionable today Often the amount of meat the hunter gets is statistically indistinguishable from anyone else's share. After perhaps a month of hunting effort, the hunter gets around 10 percent of the carcass, around 20 to 30 pounds of meat which must be consumed within a few days before it rots. 310 Kristen Hawkes: Meat from large game is a "public good" ... Evolution cannot favour such genetic tendencies... 311 Men spend huge amounts of time and energy doing useless sweaty things with one another: basketball, sumo, cricket, skiing, tae kwon do, mountaineering, boxing. To an evolutionist, human sports are just another form of ritualized male contest in which males compete to display their fitness to females. From a female's point of view, sports are convenient because they make mate choice easier - she can tell which male is healthier, stronger, more coordinated, and more skilfull. 312 Now consider two different hominid groups that evolve to prefer different sports. Oue group prefers the club-fighting sport favoured by the Yanomano tribe of teh Amazon: males stand facing each other and take turns bashing their opponent in the head with a very long stick until one contestant gives up, faints, or drops dead. THe females prefer mating with the winner since he may have stronger arms, better aim, a thicker skull or a pulse. ... The second group evolves a different sport: they compete to sneak up on big animals, and throw spears at them, and then chase the wounded animals until they drop dead. ... Here again, the competitive display system is wasteful: the males may spend all day chasing animals around, getting injured, getting tired, stumbling into thorn bushes, being gored, etc. And yet, the hunting sport is not as wasteful as club-fighting, because of the meat. 312-313 Amos and Avishag Zahavi: Arabian Babblers - songbirds in Israel. Some birds act as sentinels - behaving altruistically - warning others of predators, and trying to mob the intruder and drive it away. They share food with non-relatives. Why this altruistic behaviour? The birds even compete to perform the apparently altruistic behaviours. Dominant animals, upon seeing a subordinate trying to act as a sentinel, will attack and drive off the subordinate, taking over the sentinel role. The Zahavi's propose that the birds view these altruistic acts as handicaps, thereby attaining higher social status. 314 Around 1950, the economist John Nash - idea of 'Nash equilibrium' - a set of strategies, one for each player, s.t. no player has an incentive to switch to a different strategy, given what the other players are already doing. The idea of equilibrium is the foundation of modern game theory, and therefore of modern economics, business and military strategy.
Driving Equilibria
Driving on the left, Driving on the right - different equilibria. Also an equilibrium - taxi-drivers of Bangalore - 50% on right, 50% of the time to the left. Imagine that cars suddenly start arriving in a country. People start driving without knowing which side of the road the other drivers will favour. Eventually some pick the left consistently, others the right, and still others 50-50. There is no rational basis for predicting which equilibrium emerges. Even though the latter has a high rate of collisions, it still has a small probability of emerging. 315-6 Which equilibrium depends not on rational logic but on historical contingency. For most realistically complex games, hundreds of thousands of possible equilibria. Sports Example: Club fighting and hunting both possible - but hunting has higher payoff for all. 317 James Boone, 1998 paper - "The evolution of magnanimity": Now imagine that in some of these groups, elites signal their power by piling up their year's agricultural surplus in the plaza and burning it up in front of their subordinates. In other groups, elites engage in status displays by staging elaborate feasts and handing out gifts to their subjects. After several generations of intense warfare, which type of display behaviour is likely to survive in the population? One might expect that the "feasters" would be much more successful in attracting supporters than the "burners". 318 Evolution does not favour truly selfless altruism, but the hidden benefit of generosity is reproductive rather than nepotistic or reciprocal. Evolution could sustain high levels of altruism by rewarding the altruistic with high social status and improved mating opportunities. 318 Men tip better than women 327 John D. Rockefeller, Sr. In business he was a ruthless monopolist, but in private he was a devout Baptist committed to good works right from his adolescence. Even during his first year of work as an assistant accountant at the age of 15, he gave 6 percent of his paltry salary to charity. This rose to 10 percent by age 20, when he raised \$2,000 to save his church from bankruptcy, and contributed to a fund for an African-American man in Cincinnati to buy his wife out of slavery. A young woman in his congregation said that although he was not especially handsome: "He was much thought of by these spiritual minded young women because of his goodness, his religious fervour, his earnestness and willingness in the church, and his apparent sincerity and honesty of purpose." Even after he was earning $10 mn a year in dividends from his Standard Oil monopoly by age 40, he avoided the ostentation of other magnates, preferring to spend his money creating institutions such as the Rockefeller Instt for Medical Research and the University of Chicago (which incidentally appointed Theodore Veblen as one of its faculty). After age 50, he spent more time researching his charity than minding his business, and managed to give away much of his billion-dollar fortune to intelligently chosen causes before dying at age 93. The Rockefeller Foundation was his peacock's tail. 317
Language
In the descent of man, Darwin proposed that language evolved gradually
through sexual selection, as an instinct to acquire a particular
method of verbal display similar to music. 343
The language theorist Noam Chomsky and other 'nativists' fought hard
against the social science dogma that all human mental abilities are
the product of learning. Chomsky and the nativists won. Steven
Pinker's The Language Instinct lists the features why Language is an
adaptation:
Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the
child spontaneously without conscious effort or formal
instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying
logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is
distinct from more general abilities to process information or
behave intelligently.
These features are common of all human adaptations -
depth perception, face recognition, sexual attraction, autographical
memory, and social planning are all specialized skills, spontaneously
learned, unconsciously deployed, and universally enjoyed.
But why did these functionalities evolve?
He offered convincing arguments that children could not
possibly learn the fundamental syntactic principles of language
through parental feedback or formal instruction. This demonstration
undermined the 1950s Behaviorist view of language as a learned
cultural invention.
But Chomsky rejects a Darwinian evolutionary basis for the language
faculty, and has speculated that any sufficiently large brain (such as
that of a mammoth? [seven tons, five times human brain size]), might
automatically develop the capacity for language, as a mysterious
side-effect of packing 100 bn cells into a small volume. 344
Language As Altruistic Act
Beneficiary of language: speaker or listener? If listener, then why
would speaker expend energy on the speech act?
Fifty years ago, Konrad Lorenz - communication was for the good of the
species.
Anthropologist Chirst Knight: Human language is especially vulnerable
to deception because it depends so much on 'DISPLACED REFERENCE' -
things distant in time and space - e.g. "there's a river beyond that
hill." - hard to verify. No theories of animal signalling can justify
evolving reliable displaced reference, given conflicts of interest
between signaller and receiver.
Bee dances also indicate 'dispalced reference', but bees in the same
hive are sisters. 348
Language altruism - same mechanisms as moral altruism - kinship,
reciprocity or sexual selection.
[Kinship - not relevant
IDEA: Language as Game Reciprocity - build trust over repeated
interactions - IPD -> MAIN mechanism?]
If language evolved for information transmission, it benefits the
listener more than the speaker. Then most of us should be more keen
to listen and reluctant to talk. Does not hold up in conversation -
most people are competing to say things. When they appear to be
listening, they are often mentally rehearsing their next contribution
to the discourse rather than absorbing what was just said by others. 351
Ernst Haeckel, 19th c biologist: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
Perhaps the awkward, uneven, sometimes witty verbal courtship of
teenagers may not be such a bad model for the verbal courtship of our
ancestors during the evolution of language. 352
Language Evolution Theorists 354
Robbins Burling, 1986 paper: excessiveness of our baroque syntax and
enormous vocabulary with the communicative sufficiency of simple
pidgin languages for trade, hunting, tool making etc. Language
evolved through male orators competing for social status - links
in tribal societies between verbal skills (storytellers), status,
and reproductive success. "All that is needed for the mechanism
to be effective is that the average leader in the average society
have slightly more verbal facility and slightly more average
children than other men."
John Locke, Cambridge Linguist: looks at linguistic evidence - role of
'verbal plumage'. Quotes from a study - African American male in LA:
"Yo' rap is your thing... like your personality. Like you kin
style on some dude by rappin' better 'n he do. Show 'im up.
Outdo him conversationwise. Or you can rap to a young lady, you
tryin' to impress her, catch her action - you know - get wid her
sex-wise.'
the teenager alludes to both classic processes of sexual selection -
male competition for status, female choice based on male displays.
Jean-Louis Dessalles - listeners award higher social status to speakers who
make relevant interesting points in conversation. Language may have
evolved through social selection to permit these 'relevance' displays.
That is why people compete to offer good ideas and insights when talking
in groups.
In the first three months of courtship (until conception of a baby) a
couple talks about a million words each - [2 hours/day, 3 words per
second. 3x7200x90 = 2m] about the size of six books like this one. 355
[approx 0.3m words / mo at 2 hours of converse time]
To build an adult vocabulary of 60,000 words, children must learn an
average of 10 to 20 words per day between the ages of 18 months and 18
years. Of the 60K the most frequent 100 constitute 60% of all
conversation. The top 4000 constitute 98% of speech. 369-371
[When it comes to explaining how children end up learning thousands of words
each year, the only possibility is that they learn most of them through
linguistic context (Sternberg 87: Most vocab is learned from context).
Nagy and Herman: even students who read relatively little, and only during
the school year, will read about half a million words a year and be exposed
to about 10K words a year that they do not know. This is many times more
than what they would be exposed through conversation since conversation is
often between children the same age who have roughly the same vocabularies.
Basic English
Cambridge philosopher CK Ogden with IA Richards: 850 words which are sufficient for functional communication (as language for global peace). Only 18 verbs. Example of BE: 'It is possible to say in Basic English anything needed for the general purposes of everyday existence -- in business, trade, industry, science, medical work -- and in all arts of living, in all the exchanges of knowledge, desires, beliefs, opinions, and news which are the chief work of a language.' 371 Most pidgins have small vocabularies, like BE, and minimal grammar. However, children brought up learning a small-vocabulary pidgin tend to transform it into a larger vocabulary 'creole', which is a full-sized language. Language researchers take 'creolization' as evidence that small-vocabulary pidgins must have been insufficient for pragmatic communication in some respect. ... But perhaps creoles emerge as verbal ornaments... 371
Vocabulary and intelligence
Genes more strongly correlated to vocabulary - identical twins raised separately have similar vocabulary size (correlation 75%), whereas parenting accounts for a zero percent variation in adult vocabulary size. 373 General intelligence 'the g factor' correlates about 20 percent with body symmetry 373 Vocabulary and IQ - WAIS-R intelligence test IQ of 80 - typically know fabric, enormous, conceal IQ of 90 - also know sentence, consume, commerce higher - also designate, ponder, reluctant. 374 Cyrano de Bergerac, Edward Rostand: Cyrano (w a big nose, a big sword, and a big vocabulary) - wins over Roxane by improvising a ballad of rhyming alexandrines, including three eight-line stanzas and one quatrain, while sword-fighting his sexual rival the Vicomte de Valvert, all timed perfectly so that the last word coincides with the Vicomte's death. 357/377 (transl. Anthony Burgess, 1993) [Alexandrine: (in prosody) a line of verse that has six iambic feet] Sexual selection shapes language's content more than its form... we prefer the Zen master who utters an enlightening and memorable 17 syllable haiku once a day to a superficial chatterbox. 358
Failed Conversation
Tommy Snookes and Bessy Brookes Were walking out one Sunday Says Tommy Snookes to Bessy Brookes "Tomorrow will be Monday." - Nursery Rhyme 360 Linguistics focuses on grammaticality judgments, but people are less interested in syntax as in normative judgments about whether a speaker is truthful, relevant, interesting, tactful, intelligent, and sympathetic. Traditional linguistics has exiled all such question to the underfunded discipline of 'sociolinguistics'. 361 LIFE STORIES - storytelling may contain useful insights - converting negative events into stories that become indicators of our fitness. 364 Jennifer Freyd, Psychologist: demands of verbal 'shareability' - leads us to perceive naturally continuous phenomena in discrete ways 366 [Shareability: the social psychology of epistemology, Cog Sci v.7:191-210, 1983] GOSSIP novel information may be courtship behaviour, indicative of higher social status of speaker Robin Dunbar, evolutionary psychologist, analyzes content of ordinary human conversations - Personal relationships 55% of male conv-time, and 67% of female. - Talking about one's own relationship - 65% of male speech, 42% of female Female conversations can be seen to be directed mainly towards social networking (ensureing the smooth running of a social group). whereas males conversations are more concerned with self-promotion in what has all the characteristics of a mating lek. This is particularly striking in the two university samples where academic matters and culture/politics, respectively, suddenly became topics of intense interest to males when females are present. [Dunbar, Marriott and Duncan, 1997, Human conversational behavior, Human Nature, v.8:231-246] 368 WOMEN HAVE HIGHER VERBAL ABILITY Most tests evaluate language comprehension, not language generation. Peacocks can grow larger tails, but peahens may be better at judging tail length. 375 Literary scholar John Constable: meter is a kind of handicap in the Zahavian sense. Metric line - regular num of syllables - Across different styles, languages and cultures, 6-12 syllables. On average, shorter words when writing metric poetry (easier to fit together). Meter imposes a measurable cost on the writer must have spare verbal capacity - makes it a good verbal handicap. 379 MEN INCAPABLE OF ARTICULATING FEELING Women's magazines - much written about men's inability to articulate thought or feeling. But may have talked during courtship [?? WEAK] 382 Male mate choice - strong in later stages of courtship when male may decide to leave for another woman. Female courtship efforts - Scheherazade story - sleep with a virgin every night and kill her in the morning. Until Scheherazade, who kept herself alive by telling stories that were so enthralling that the king relented to one more day... and so on for 1001 days, by which time 3 sons were born to her. Then she displays her sons to the king, but the king says that by now he is already in love with her for her creativity, eloquence, intelligence, wisdom. Language developed as much to display our fitness as to communicate useful information. To many language researchers and philosophers, this is a scandalous idea. 399 Sexual Personae - dramatic role-playing - changing under the influence of different lovers 419
Other reviews: William A. Spriggs
excerpts from http://www.evoyage.com/BillsEssays/HumanPenis.html In 2000, an obscure cognitive psychologist by the name of Geoffrey Miller published The Mating Mind. that has revisited Darwin's stepchild theory of sexual selection, and, as a result, through his careful analysis has resulted in theories that have created quite a stir in the evolutionary community. What Miller is arguing is that all the "stuff" you see around you in our complicated human world, such as art, music, architecture, SUV's (Sport Utility Vehicles), million-dollar mansions, professional football teams, etc., etc., are not really needed for survival in the evolutionary world. Our brain's architecture was set in the Pleistocene era 100,000 years ago where none of this "stuff" existed. His basic argument, and those of some theorists before him, but never argued as eloquently as Miller, is that all this "stuff" is similar to the peacock's tail designed to attract the attention of the complicated, modern human mind -- ornaments designed to attract the opposite sex in the overall plan to copulate and pass one's genes. Well, you might admit that this argument appears to be quite a leap in attempting to convince you that erect human penises are equal to large SUVs (although some human males today might place equal importance to the two), but it is not that hard to convince you that mentally, the human mind "attaches" importance to anything that it wants, and that is exactly what has occurred when we begin to exam human penises and breasts as ornaments designed to appeal to the cognitive parts of our brains. For an excellent reference to this mating dance, the sexual passions, jealousies, and emotions that hold sway in 37 cultures from an evolutionary perspective, I highly recommend, David Buss' The Evolution of Desire. Miller's main theory in his The Mating Mind, is that these "traits" of good conversation, artistic ability, wooing techniques, and etc., that begin as "micro-innovations," then lead to "ornamentation," which then leads to fitness indicators. Once again, Miller: "As we shall see, many fitness indicators advertise fitness by revealing an animal's condition. They are "condition-dependent" -- very sensitive to an animal's general health and well-being ("condition"), and very good at revealing differences in condition between animals. This sets up a chain of relationships that will prove absolutely central to many arguments in this book: genetic mutations influence fitness, fitness influences condition, condition influences the state of fitness indicators, fitness indicators influence mate choice, and mate choice influence evolution." (p. 111 in MM) Now we get to the interesting part of this essay: how is the shape of the human penis determined? Miller states that the search begins with taxonomitists. These are those gleeful people who spend their lives classifying different variants of a species and give us those complex Latin names that everyone in biology is required to know but can never remember, pronounce, or spell -- (except those people who don't have a life -- I'm only teasing -- I'm just jealous because I have difficulty with all three). The prevailing method is that if you are having trouble telling the difference in a classification, then you look at the color pattern, what "weaponry" has evolved, and finally, one looks at the genitals. Miller informs us that William Eberhand, in his book, Sexual Selection and Animal Genitalia, tells us that the one of the first things that begins to diverge when one species splits off into another species is the penis shape. And what force makes the penis change shape? To quote Miller: "In Eberhard's view, this is because female choice focuses on the details of penis shape, and female choice apparently drives most micro-innovation." p. 169. Now, stop the presses. You mean, that science -- which is dominated mostly by white males of European descent have declared that the human penis has been selected to be this oversized shape because the female wants it to be that big. Now, I am a true believer that once our sisters have found conditions suitable for finding the best suitable mate in her local environment, she goes through a mental transformation in preparation for child birth by enjoying sex in abandon as much as any male. Since the human female does not display the bright pinkly colored fluid-filled anogenital sac that her chimpanzee cousin displays while in estrus, the human female expands her copulatory stimulations opportunities to any time of the month she chooses, including during their menstrual cycle. And as Miller points out, can judge the long-term potential of their mates for their love-making skills. Miller also makes his most convincing argument for female choice in human penis shape: "If efficient sperm delivery were the only point of copulation, a single thrust would be sufficient...Copulatory thrusting seems designed to maximize the intensity, duration, and rhythmicity of tactile stimulation delivered to the female genitals." p. 235. And finally: "Female hominids may not have preferred thicker, longer, more Flexible penises per se. They may simply have liked orgasms and larger penises led to better orgasms by permitting more varied, exciting, and intimate copulatory positions. This rather contradicts the view of the penis as a symbol of male domination. If we were a species in which males dominated the sexual system, we would have one-inch penises like dominant gorillas. The large male penis is a product of female choice in evolution." p. 236. So, if you add all of Miller's arguments together, he gets my vote that the female has had the most influence on forming the shape of the human penis. But, not so fast; I'm going to put a roadblock in front of his arguments and argue something else that I feel has had an effect on the size of the human penis. I feel that penis size could also be the result of "limited selection" fitness pressure by males placing restrictions upon other males. I argue this because males, who most likely bonded into alliances surrounding alpha males and became the dominate influence on physical strength determinations in their local environments, perhaps equated large penis size with "manliness," and restricted other males whose penises were "not up to manly proportions." I argue that male-bonding is so essential to the social group of our ancestral hunter gatherers that part of the daily ritual would be the constant exclusion of "loser" males having access to fecundate females. This then, limited the selection "choices" available for the female. [BILL: . . . the sexual passions, jealousies, and emotions that hold sway in 37 cultures from an evolutionary perspective, I highly recommend, David Buss' The Evolution of Desire. ]
Miller : Sexual selection and the Mind
from interview at edge.org. EDGE: What biologists are at odds with your set of ideas? MILLER: Unfortunately there are a great number of biologists who shy away from applying evolutionary theory to the human mind. A large part of it is a failure of nerves - that they're comfortable getting grants to do research on animals, and those grants might be threatened or compromised if the public understood that the theory that they're using for animals applies equally for humans... It's very comfortable for biologists to write about evolution in general but to draw a line around the human mind ... MILLER: Science is... powerful at what it does, but people credit it with far too much ideological importance. Basically people believe what they want to believe politically. There's even evidence from behavior genetics that mostly people's political ideologies are genetically inheritable. Whatever context you grow up in, to some extent the kinds of attitudes and beliefs you have about political issues and social issues, does not seem terribly much affected by the intellectual environment that you're exposed to - people pick up the ideas that fit with their preconceptions and they reject those that don't. It's a great mistake to credit science with too much importance in shaping people's attitudes ... Ideologues always pick up whatever science looks like it will fit their cause and they distort it and present it and support it and they'll try to use it to convince others... Let's take one rather provocative piece of research. There's some evidence from behavior genetics now, some evidence, not a lot, but a little bit, that happiness itself is somewhat inheritable. If you're extremely reactionary and conservative you could say Ah! See, we can't do anything for people, they'll just be happy or not as they see fit; there's no point in trying to improve people's lives. On the other hand you could be a radical socialist and you could take this as a profound critique of capitalist consumerism - you could say people have been duped into believing that the more stuff they acquire the happier they'll be. That is empirically not the case. You could take it either direction. You could also just say well, pragmatically speaking, if you want happy kids, marry somebody happy. Any different scientific discovery can be taken in a thousand different ideological directions for a thousand different purposes.
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