In the early 20th century, Behaviorism was on the rise in Europe and the U.S., as psychology attempted to make its image more “scientific.” John Watson was of the belief that he could make a child into anything by a series of paired associations, also known as classical conditioning. His legacy includes Little Albert, the baby who was trained to fear rats by a pairing of a rat with a loud, alarming sound. He also believed that affection was not necessary in a parent-child relationship, and indeed, it would spoil the child and produce negative effects.

Two researchers, working separately and continents apart, came to be particularly distressed by this approach to psychology and parenting. They developed two separate, yet eventually intersecting, lines of research to combat the approach. The first is John Bowlby, who observed many children in his psychoanalytic practice, including those orphaned after World War II, and began to develop his theory of attachment. He proposed that children who are separated from a primary caregiver (and in his view, the mother specifically) developed social and behavioral problems as a result of the separation. His work, steeped in ethology (the study of natural behavior, with reflection to evolutionary function), pointed strongly to the need for a child to attach to the mother – beginning with physical contact in infancy.

The second person was Harry Harlow, who trained as an experimentalist in animal behavior and performed all of his early research on rats. Once beginning a professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he found himself short a rat-research lab and had to think quickly about another test subject. He ended up developing an extensive primate center (Harlow Primate Laboratory) to research rhesus macaques. While breeding a local population of these monkeys on whom he could perform his learning and motivation experiments, the monkeys were isolated from one another to avoid spread of infection. These monkeys, reared without a mother, were then noted as having major difficulties interacting socially with other monkeys when the opportunities arose. His ensuing research ultimately showed that monkeys reared without mothers have severe and lasting deficits to social behavior – indeed, his isolated monkeys could not be rehabilitated despite his efforts to do so.

Meanwhile, there’s Watson whose advice regarding the need to limit parental affection was far reaching – consider Lucille Ball’s character in I Love Lucy, happy to have a son, who was most often tucked away in a crib somewhere as she went about her day. We don’t see Lucy doting over little Ricky and being affectionate. This view was beginning to spread into homes; Watson is notorious for influencing popular American culture of his time.

Why the huge difference in opinion? The easiest answer seems to be bias. All three men produced research that is still influential today, but it also shows their own biases. Bowlby and Harlow were adamant that the prevailing views of the psychological world as influenced by Watson was wrong, and they came to the conclusion that infants (human and monkey) need to have an attachment figure to develop normally. Such advice echoes today with current research.

However, there are also some biases that are starting to be overturned from these scholars. Bowlby was so certain that the infant need attach to the mother, that the father (and extended relatives) was practically washed away with the bathwater. Such a perspective has far-reaching implications – such as a judicial bias to grant parental custody to the mother in case of a divorce, even if the mother is the less desirable parent. Research has since shown that children thrive with more – not fewer – attachment figures, something that is overlooked by biasing the mother as the main figure in the child’s life. Further, anthropological evidence indicates that in most cultures, children interact quite frequently with a plethora of relatives and develop an attachment relationship with each. The idea of “it takes a village to raise a child” is so fundamental, that we really must take notice of it and begin to raise children within this context.

Harlow is rightfully well-remembered for his groundbreaking work on attachment in monkeys, but he hardly referred to the concept as attachment. He was steadfast in his beliefs about love – a word that caused him the rebuke of other scholars at the time. Even today, some psychologists have a hard time with the four-letter-word, asking questions such as – How do we define love, scientifically? How could we possibly measure love? Harlow’s own biased views about love, and his sometimes failed pursuits at finding love in his own life, shaped his own research questions and interpretations. He believed that love first occurs between mother and infant, but barring the failure of that love, people may never learn to love at all. This approach is well supported by current work on adult attachment relationships, which borrow more from Bowlby’s concept of inner working models – that the style of attachment we form with a caregiver provides the style that we form as adults in intimate relationships. However, there is still argument from people studying adult romantic relationships about whether the “love” we experience as parents is the same as the “love” we experience as lovers.

I think it is a mistake of researchers to assume that their work is not biased by underlying assumptions. We all run the same risk of mistaking what we believe should be with what we research as it is. By admitting these biases and values we hold, we can more easily move beyond them to unbiased research. To that end, I freely admit that I don’t believe mothers should raise children alone. I think those that are forced to (or opt to) do so are doing a disservice to themselves and their children. Now, lets see how that has shaped and continues to shape my research…..

So, should a parent cuddle their child or not? Is it a matter of degree rather than absolutes – a little cuddling is good, but otherwise tough love? Before you turn to parenting literature for this, or any question, it is a good idea to consider from where the person offering advice is coming.

Some great resources:

Blum, D. (2002). Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the science of affection. New York: Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1958). The nature of the child’s tie to his mother. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 350–373. Available online at: http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1988/A1988N971700001.pdf

Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13, 673-685. Available online: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/love.htm

Hazan, C. & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511-524.

van der Horst, F. C. P., LeRoy, H. A., & van der Veer, R. (2008). “When strangers meet”: John Bowlby and Harry Harlow on attachment behavior. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 42, 370-388.

Watson, J. B. (1928). Psychological care of infant and child. New York: W. W. Norton.

I have several heroes. Through graduate school at the University of New Hampshire, I got to work closely with Becky Warner. Other-oriented behavior (quietly) radiates from Becky all the time. I could not have had a more supportive and helpful mentor. Exemplary. When I moved to Oregon in 1997, I was fortunate to work in the psychology department at Western Oregon University. This was the kindest, funnest, most easygoing, capable, and supportive group I’d ever seen. Years later, this is still true. All the faculty there impressed me deeply. The person I worked most closely with was Vic Savicki. Also an understated person, Vic was capable of teaching 14 classes a year, publishing 5 or so articles a year, sailing the Puget Sound regularly, and always making time for others. With a smile.

Not surprisingly, I also have heroes in the field of evolutionary studies. I stand in awe of pretty much everything that David Sloan Wilson does – and Gordon Gallup, of course, makes Superman look like chump change. Having David and Gordon’s support has been enormous for my own development. These guys are heroes.

Over the past several years, I was extremely fortunate to work closely with Maureen O’Sullivan of the psychology department at the University of San Francisco. Just like Becky, Vic, David, and Gordon, Maureen was simply awe-inspiring in how she worked and in how she treated others. I still remember the day when she and Paul Ekman agreed to contribute a chapter to my first book (on the topic of measuring emotional intelligence). Maureen took the lead on this chapter. Two things stood out for me in working with her on this. First: Wow, she was razor-sharp! You had a question of her, and she was right back in your inbox – usually that same day – with everything you asked for – and more. And, as a plus, everything was delivered with exceptional humor. Second, Maureen and Paul’s chapter in my book turned out to be fantastic. It’s critical of the whole idea of emotional intelligence – but it’s critical in a productive manner. In academia, it’s easy to be critical. And it can be uninteresting, to be honest. Being critical while also being productive and respectful, now that’s something.

As anyone who knows Maureen will vouch for, she was fun to work with. A day with Maureen in the inbox was a good day. I remember a particularly tough week for me – in the span of a few days, I’d learned two depressing facts about my demographic group from the empirical literature. First, once a male gets past 30 (and I was 34 at the time), he tends to be rated as less physically attractive. Second, as a bonus, he also tends to score lower on standard measures of intelligence. Ouch! Looking for sympathy, I shared this news with Maureen – who quickly told me that I might be getting dumber and worse-looking, but that I had a long way to go before reaching the gutter! I needed that! I have that email printed and saved, as evidence in case I need it.

In seeking collaborators for my second edited book (on the topic of mating intelligence, co-edited with Geoffrey Miller), I immediately put Maureen near the top of the list of folks I’d ask to contribute. As luck would have it, Maureen and I had extremely parallel research trajectories. She got her PhD back in the day working with Guilford on the structure of intellect model of intelligence. Her research interests included intelligence, social intelligence, emotional intelligence, evolutionary psychology, deception-detection, and human mating. These are almost precisely my research interests! Maureen quickly agreed to be part of this new book – and she had a chapter based on data from hundreds of young adults on the topic of self and other deception in the context of mating. It turns out there’s lots of deception in the mating domain! Her chapter was fantastic – and it really played a pivotal role in getting the idea of mating intelligence cited in all sorts of media outlets.

Always fast to respond, always helpful, always kind. In a world where these qualities are all rare, Maureen was just unbelievable to work with. She and I had talked generally about future collaborations. Just the thought of future collaborations with Maureen made me happy.

And Maureen embraced evolution fully. Her work on emotion and deception-detection, largely done in collaboration with Paul Ekman, stands as some of the most important evolutionarily informed research in all of psychology. In fact, while many talk about how “new” the whole field of evolutionary psychology is, anyone paying attention knows that Paul and Maureen were doing this stuff for decades. The psychology of deception-detection was shaped by significant evolutionary forces across human phylogeny, and Maureen O’Sullivan knew more about this than did anyone in the world. Maureen was an evolutionary psychologist sine qua none. And she was the world’s leading expert on the topic of “truth wizards” – a highly appropriate topic of study for such an honest and genuine person.

The world of academia (let’s face it!) has its share of stuffiness and ego. In such a world, Maureen was a gem. Zero pretense. Zero arrogance. And a consistent and genuine kindness that made others feel good about themselves. Further, as a native New Yorker, Maureen totally had this “let’s get real” way about her. It’s sort of hard to not appreciate someone with this special constellation of traits.

On May 10 of this year, any possible future collaborations with Maureen came to a halt – as the world lost her to cancer. Maureen was an exemplary teacher, scholar, psychologist, and evolutionist. But more importantly, she was an exemplary person. And she will be missed sorely.

I end with a phrase that doesn’t seep into the evolutionist lexicon very frequently: God Bless you Maureen O’Sullivan.

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973). The American Biology Teacher, 35(3), 125-129.

How Does Creationism Harm African Americans?

American society has been remarkably consistent concerning its general resistance to evolutionary thinking across the 20^th century.  The data below illustrate this fact.

The data indicate that the majority of Americans accept a Biblical account of the origin of the human species.  Even more striking is the fact, that of those who accept Biblical accounts, 77% of these individuals accept a literalist interpretation of the event occurring over six 24 hour days.  As an African American scientist, I had always suspected that the response to this question amongst those of my own ethnicity would be even higher.  To address this suspicion I recently contacted the Peter Hart and Bill McInturff polling organization and asked for the response percentages for African Americans.  Their data showed the following:

16% Evolution

80% Biblical Account

61% God created world in six days

19% God was divine presence

2%  None of the above

3%  Unsure

These data validate what I have always known, African Americans are ½ as likely as the general population to accept evolution as a valid explanation and 1.4 times more likely to accept the Biblical account. Finally within Biblical account, the literalist explanation (6 days) was 76% about the same as the general population (but remember a larger percentage of African Americans reject evolution.)  Why does this happen?  The majority of African Americans belong to Protestant denominations that are fundamentalist.  The National Baptist Convention for example claims that every bit of the Bible is factually true.  Ironically, unlike the Southern Baptist Convention (which is predominantly European American and was founded on segregationist principles), the NBC hasn’t invested a great deal of energy in the Evolution/Creation debate.  This may be in part, because the NBC has always been more concerned with issues of social justice.  Despite its relatively progressive stance compared to the SBC, I argue here that the fundamentalism of the NBC is causing harm to the African American community.  Specifically its fundamentalist views make it more difficult to attract talented African American students into careers in science (specifically those disciplines in science that may contradict fundamentalist doctrine, e.g. Archaeology, Anthropology, Human Genetics, or Evolutionary Biology.) 

Ironically one of the places in which it is easiest to expose the fallacies of special creationism/fundamentalist doctrine is in regard to the concept of human genetic diversity.  The logic of the fundamentalist concept of race fails miserably to explain the genetic diversity that we observe amongst modern humans.  If we were to read Genesis literally, as fundamentalists do, it predicts that modern humans are ~10,000 years old and that the original humans had physical characteristics similar to modern day Middle Easterners.  In this vein, Biblical fundamentalism is no different from any of the other religious narratives of creation.  For example, American Indian creation narratives claim that their great spirit created their people on their ancestral tribal land.  Modern American Indian traditionalists vehemently reject the notion that they are derived from or share ancestry with any other human populations (especially Africans.)  For example, some American Indians of the Northwest claimed that they should have sovereignty over the remains of the Kennewick man fossil under the assumption that because the bones were found in territory that their tribe once inhabited, that the remains had to be one of their tribal ancestors¹. For the American Indians tribes, the anatomical or genetic evidence concerning Kennewick man was irrelevant.  They argued that neither of these could be used to determine the cultural identity of the individual in question.  They claimed this despite the fact that the Kennewick fossil had anatomical features there were significantly different from modern Amerindians².  Eight prominent anthropologists disputed the claim of the American Indians by arguing that there was no evidence supporting the claim that these remains had cultural continuity with those of modern American Indians.  This is a clear example where the methodologies of religious and scientific thinking were in conflict.  For the American Indians involved, their rejection of the Bering Strait theory is primarily due to its conflict with their traditional religious beliefs and oral histories.  In addition, they are suspicious of how the scientific claims may be used to weaken their land rights under treaty with the United States government (and certainly given the US government history of breaking treaties this is a legitimate concern³.  Indeed some of the claims of the Havusupai Tribe against Arizona State University stem from the former’s resistance to their DNA being used to support research that claims a non-North American origin for their people⁴.

In this instance, the Amerindian religious objections are no different from those of Biblical fundamentalists. Both groups reject the scientific evidence primarily on the grounds that it contradicts their religious story of human origins.  This is a common feature of religious creation narratives, all are constructed to explain the origin of the people who believe in the religion or deity.    Thus, Kenyan creation narratives speak of how the Gods created them in their home land, as do Japanese narratives speak of how the Gods created humans in Japan.  However, the scientific evidence only supports those creation narratives that claim that humans first originated in East Africa.

It may seem that due to the religious/supernatural character of these narratives that they cannot be subjected to scientific test.  However, most fundamentalists do not dispute that DNA is the genetic code of life.  What they dispute is that DNA as the genetic code can evolve to found new species.  Many creationists will accept microevolutionary changes within species as legitimate.  The concession that microevolutionary changes occur within species results from the fact that these changes have been observed in historical time.  There are also many genetic mechanisms that have been observed and by themselves are not required to have resulted from an evolutionary mechanism.  For example, crossing over is consistently observed during meiosis (gametogenesis.)  This results because portions of the DNA that have high sequence similarity line up with each other during meiosis and often exchange pieces.  Evolutionary biologists argue that crossing over is an important source of new variation for natural selection to operate on, however the fact that crossing over exists is not a requirement for evolution and crossing over could exist without resulting from an evolutionary process.

How does crossing over invalidate creationist claims of origin?  One of the results of crossing over is that genetic linkage groups (genes that are inherited together due to close proximity on a chromosome) are disrupted over time.  This has been observed in laboratory populations and in domesticated mammals⁵.  It has also been observed that newer populations have larger linkage groups, and that due to crossing over, the average size of these groups gets smaller through time.  Thus we can “age” populations by the average size of their linkage groups.  This provides us with a way to estimate the age of human populations that is not necessarily linked to a macroevolutionary process.  Studies that examine the size of linkage groups have been accomplished in modern humans.  They all concur that sub-Saharan Africans have the smallest linkage groups on average, followed by Middle Eastern populations, Europeans = East Asians = Pacific Islanders, followed by American Indians.  This result vitiates the fundamentalist Biblical claim that Middle Eastern populations were created first or that modern Africans are descended from Middle Easterners.  The evidence shows that it was the other way around (if one is a monogenist.)  Monogenists believe that there was one single creation event, and that all humans are descended from an original pair.  Polygenists, on the other hand, claim that there were multiple Adams and Eves.  Some of them adhere to the idea of pre-Adamite races; they used this notion to assert that superiority of the progeny of Abraham (which includes the Europeans) and to claim that Africans were a separate and inferior species⁶.  Also notice that this result doesn’t invalidate the Amerindian creation narratives.  The Amerindians don’t assume that there was only one God.  Thus, the African and European Gods could have created populations of humans at different times.  Table 1 states a number of Christian fundamentalist claims concerning human origins.  It also states claims that follow logically from polygenist as well as evolutionary theory.  Table 2 reports what modern genetics and fossil evidence reveals concerning human diversity.  Table 2 suggests that all of the monogenist claims concerning human diversity are falsified, in the case of polygeny 2/5 predictions are supported, and finally for evolutionary theory 4/4 are supported with 1 claim not relevant since evolutionary theory makes no specific prediction for the phenomenon.  From these results we would have to logically conclude that there is no physical evidence that supports monogenist creationist claims concerning the origin of humans.  Thus if one wishes to adhere to special creationism while insisting that there be physical evidence for it, you would have to become a polygenist.  Of course, the body of physical evidence also suggests that polygenism is false and supports that modern human evolved with their place origin located in Sub-Saharan Africa.

*Fossils of anatomically modern humans are first found in sub-Saharan Africa in this time frame, they are not found outside of this region until around 100,000 ybp.

** Lohmueller, K.E., Indap, A.R., Schmidt, S., Boyko, A.R., Hernandez, R.D., Hubisz, M.J., Sninsky, J.J., White, T.J., Sunyaev, S.R., Nielsen, R., Clark, A.G., Bustamante, C., Proportionately more deleterious genetic variation in European than in African populations, Nature Genetics Vol. 451: 994-998, 2008; Barreiro, L.B., Laval, G., Quach, H., Patin, E., and Quintara-Murci, L., Natural selection has driven population differentiation in modern humans, Nature Genetics, 40(3):340 – 345, 2008.

How Does Creationist Thinking Cause Harm?

While the evidence for the African origin of modern humans is overwhelming, with regard to convincing people of the utility of evolutionary biology, it is more important to emphasis evolutionary thinking in action.  Thus, the most important test of any worldview is does it explain reality.  And if it does, what prescriptions does it suggest for human activity?  For example, prior to the germ theory of disease, it was a common belief amongst European Christians that many illnesses were caused by demonic possession.  If the former theory is true than disease can be cured by medicine and if the latter were true than you need to consult a priest for an exorcism.  In the present day, few religious people subscribe to the demonic possession theory of disease.  Yet and still, religious explanations of important social issues still exist and in the United States these have significant traction with regard to influencing public policy.  For example, the majority of Christian fundamentalists see homosexuality as a deviant behavior that is a sin against God.  They claim that they love the sinners, but despise their sin.  Due to the influence of this group on American politics, legal protections against anti-gay discrimination are very weak.  The problem with this thinking is that increasing evidence demonstrates the homosexuality is biologically based (resulting from genetic, environmental, developmental, and chance factors⁷. This evidence has caused at least some Christians to re-evaluate their views on homosexuality.  If this behavior is biological/genetic and therefore is not the result of a choice to disobey God’s law, then it cannot be considered sinful.  It should be remembered here that the creationist believes that everything that occurs within humans is the result of God’s design.  This example graphically illustrates how two different world views describe reality and in turn what those views would prescribe for human social action. 

There are several examples of how fundamentalist/creationist belief harms African Americans who adhere to its tenets.  Certainly, in the above case, the religious fundamentalism of African Americans had led them to disproportionately shun homosexual members of the African American community⁸. The harm that has resulted has included higher rates of suicide amongst these homosexuals as well as them engaging in more risky sexual behavior thus infecting non-homosexuals as well.  In addition, efforts to stem the tide of HIV infection as well as teen pregnancy rates suffer from fundamentalist ideology.  For example, two of the most pressing problems in the African American community today are the HIV epidemic, the increasing percentage of teen pregnancies and the disproportionate rate of underweight babies.  The age of mother is an important variable influencing low birth weight (as is poverty.)  Evangelical and literalists in African American community argued for and have succeeded in implementing abstinence only programs to deal with teen pregnancy.  For example, 78% of African Americans belong to fundamentalist congregations, and this percentage may have been even higher in the past.  The abstinence theme is undoubtedly heard by millions of African American teens, far more than heard by European American teens whose churches aren’t as literalist.  Yet the data clearly show that HIV and teen pregnancy rates are much higher in African Americans. The African American rate is twice the European American rate.  The National Center for Health Statistic reported that the birth rate rose by 3 percent between 2005 and 2006 among 15- to 19-year-old females, after plummeting 34 percent between 1991 and 2005.  There is also a nine times higher percentage of Chlamydia and HIV infection in African Americans despite the fact that this group is far more likely to hear abstinence preached in their churches.  These increases occurred despite the fact that in this period, abstinence-only sex-education programs, received about $176 million a year in federal funding.  Despite their gross failure to stem the tide of teen age pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases, the proponents of abstinence education continue to defend the programs, and instead blamed the increases on the rise on the ineffectiveness of conventional sexual education programs that focus on condom use and other contraceptives, as well as the pervasive depiction of sexuality in the culture⁹.

Evolutionary biologists would approach this problem entirely differently.  Under the evolutionary paradigm the core behavioral activity of all species is reproduction and humans are not excluded from this.  For this reason, abstinence programs are fool’s errands.  Human adolescents face a rush of hormones that are preparing them to engage in reproductive behavior.  Abstinence only programs assume that by “will” alone these young people will be able to control the urges to engage in sexual activity.  Evolutionary theory would suggest that a significant number of adolescents will engage in sexual activity and for that reason it is best to provide them sex education, safe-sex training, contraceptives, and relationship counseling. 

Creationist ideology causes harm by limiting desire to pursue scientific careers

Reason suggests that students who are hostile to the methodologies of science should shun science careers.  Several studies have demonstrated a negative relationship between student religiosity and likelihood to choose science as a career.  These studies are suggestive however.  None of them have really examined enough students to establish a differential impact of African American religiosity, particularly fundamentalism on the choice of specific science careers.  For example, North Carolina A&T State University (NCATSU) produces substantial numbers of African American engineers, but virtually none who pursue degrees in biology with an emphasis in evolution.  Clearly there is a need for additional studies with substantial sample sizes and conducted in a variety of academic settings to evaluate the influence of creationist ideology with regard to science careers.  One way that we will be hoping to make a difference in this trend is through our NSF funded Science and Technology Center: Biocomputational Evolution in Action (BEACON.)  BEACON is a consortium that includes Michigan State University, as well as the universities of Idaho, Texas, and Washington, along with NCATSU.  This will unite faculty and students interested in both biological and computational evolution and encourage students to pursue careers in these disciplines.

References

1. Tall Bear, Kimberly, DNA, blood, and racializing the tribe, Wicazo Sa Review, Spring 2003, pp. 81- 107.

2. Svedlund, A. and Anderson, D., Gordon Creek Woman meets Kennewick Man: New interpretations and protocols regarding the peopling of the Americas, American Antiquity 64(4), 569-576, 1999. Chatters, J., The recovery and first analysis of an early Holocene human skeleton from Kennewick, Washington, American Antiquity 65(2), pp. 291-316, 2000.

3. Tall Bear, 2003.

4. Michelle M. Mello, J.D., Ph.D., and Leslie E. Wolf, J.D., M.P.H., The Havasupai Indian Tribe Case — Lessons for Research Involving Stored Biologic Samples, New England Journal of Medicine, June 2010, 10.1056/nejmp1005203.

5. Clegg, M.T., Kidwell, J.F., and Horch, C.R., Dynamics of correlated genetic systems V. Rates of decay of linkage disequilibria in experimental populations of Drosophila melanogaster, Genetics 94: 217-234; Betancourt, A.J., and Presgraves, D.C., Linkage limits the power of natural selection in Drosophila melanogaster, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 99: 13616 – 13620, 2002; Amaral, A.J., Megens, H.J., Crooijmans, R.P., Heuven, H.C., and Groenen, M.A., Linkage disequilbrium decay and haplotype block structure in the pig, Genetics 179 (1): 569-79, 2008.

6.  Graves, J.L.  The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, soft cover edition, 2^nd printing with a new preface by the author, Rutgers University Press, 2005a.

7.  Hamer, D. and Copeland, P., Science of Desire: The Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior, (New York, NY: Touchstone), 1995. Roughgarden, J., Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 2004; Ciani, A.C., Cermelli, P., Zanzotto, P., Sexually Antagonistic Selection in Human Male Homosexuality, PLoS ONE 3(6): e2282.  

8.  Stokes, J.P. and Peterson, J.L., Homophobia, self-esteem, and risk for HIV among African American men who have sex with men, AIDS Education and Prevention, 10 (3): . 278-292, 1998; Battle, J. and Bennett, M., Research on Lesbian and Gay Populations in the African American Community: What Have We Learned?, Perspectives pp. 35 – 46., 2000; Fullilove, M.T. and Fullilove, R.E., Stigma as an obstacle to AIDS action: The Case of the African American Community, American Behavioral Scientist, 42(7): 1117-1129, 1999.

9.  Brazelton, E.W., Frandsen, J.C., Mckown, D.B., Brown, C.D.; Interaction of Religion and Science: Development of a Questionnaire and the Results of Its Administration to Undergraduates, College Student Journal, Vol. 33, 1999. Mazur, A., Believers and disbelievers in evolution, Politics and the Life Sciences 23(2): 55 -61, 2005. Harrold, F.B. and Eve, R.A., Cult Archaeology and Creationism: Understanding Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past, (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press), 1995. Graves, J.L. and J. Leigh (1994) Materialist philosophy, Evolutionary Biology, and African-American Students II: Empirical Evidence, in: Race in a Global Society; University of Oklahoma Symposium in African-American Studies, November 1993.

Consider how a Darwinian approach can benefit the area of applied psychology:

Imagine, for a moment, a mental health client who’s a young adult male complaining of social problems, general frustration, and anxiety in social contexts.

A traditionally trained mental health counseling approach might, for instance, pertain to how a client’s frustrations, recent confrontational history, and social problems need to be understood in a specific family context. The client’s familial relationship history would likely be recorded and analyzed with an eye toward helping this client. Taking the cultural norms of that family into account is broad and such an approach has the capacity to help a lot of people with diverse situations. However, I must say that, devoid of evolutionary principles, this theory is a bit narrow.

Evolutionary mental health counseling would go a step farther – perhaps a great leap further. Evolutionary mental health counseling focuses on how some behavioral problem would have functioned under ancestral conditions – with a goal of possibly seeing if said behavioral problem would have had the effect of increasing reproductive success under ancestral conditions.

Such an analysis differs from the prior in that it is rooted in Darwinism. Thus, it thinks about problems in terms of Darwinian questions, to help understand (a) why the behavioral pattern evolved under ancestral conditions, (b) what factors in the situation encourage such behavior – and, perhaps, (c) what factors mobilize actions in a way that they would increase reproductive success.

An EP counselor, looking at this situation, sees things very differently from a traditionally trained counselor. The client is a single man of reproductive age – and is, at 20-some years, a prime candidate for young male syndrome (Daly & Wilson, 1983) – a time in the life of every man when he’s willing to take particularly high risks to unconsciously gain access to mates. Confrontational, risky behavior is typical from individuals in this demographic – and its ultimate goal is to try to attract mates – just as efforts among adult male caribou during mating season are designed to defeat competitors and gain access to females. The counselor works, thus, to help the client develop non-dangerous skills that are attractive to others and that help build social connections.

These two explanations for the client’s frustration and aggressive outbursts are not particularly incongruous. To some extent, they explain the behavior at different levels, with the non-EP version focusing on proximate causes (such as the immediate familial context) and the EP version focusing on distal, ultimate causes, such as how the pattern may bear on reproductive success.

Given the unmatched power of Evolutionary Theory as a tool in unlocking the mysteries of the world, it makes exquisite sense to apply evolutionary theory to academic fields with stated goals of helping others (Keller & Nesse, 2006). To the extent that the goal (helping others) is important and valued and that the evolutionary explanation opens new insights into how to move toward the goal – including implications of specific actions that can be taken, the evolutionary approach has merit.

Thus, Darwin’s lesson to the graduates is this: Don’t be afraid to apply a new way of thinking to an old problem – even if people in the field are saying “oh no, that’s not needed – really – no – really – I mean it!” In a chapter on the power of evolution, Wilson (2007) talks about “teaching the experts” – essentially arguing that students with a strong background in EvoS have cognitive skills used to make important contributions in all kinds of fields – simply because evolution often provides a new and profoundly useful way of thinking about problems. When Daly and Wilson (1988) decided to examine differential filicide rates as a function of status as a step versus biological parent, the data sorted themselves out – nearly diving like lemmings into the appropriate and predicted statistical cells. Evolutionary theory was brought in to address this issue – and the light was turned on in the room as a result.

Graduate, you’ve learned many new skills during your time in college. You’ve learned different perspectives – and you’ve learned that these perspectives don’t always go well with one another (e.g., Geher & Gambacorta, 2010). That’s fine – and I’m glad you saw that in your education. But each perspective you learned about gave you a toolbox. A unique set of ways of thinking about some set of phenomena.

Using evolutionary psychology to understand counseling psychology makes so much sense to me as I’m in a department with a strong counseling program and I’m personally very focused on EP. So I’ve recently become intrigued by applied evolutionary psychology and am currently doing a bunch of scholarship to progress the work of this field.

But I’m not that special. You can do the same. Learn about the principles of evolutionary theory. For instance, think how these ideas may help us understanding democracy – understanding how people vote and for whom they vote. Understand what kind of issues people take on. Understand what kinds of things lead to moral outrage – and why? And what is the function of moral outrage? And how common is it? And what triggers it? And what function does this behavioral pattern serve – either for individuals or, perhaps, for the broader group? This is, of course, just a sample of questions that follow from thinking like an evolutionist. Once you learn to think like an evolutionist, the number of questions to ask is endless!

I’m focusing on how evolutionary principles can help us yield new insights into different areas of inquiry – but you can progress along a different path – other intellectual paths surely have merit. How can social constructionism help explain the pieces of your world? How can hypothesis testing, learned in boring-old-stats class, help you understand the behavior of people at a small bar on a Saturday night?

How can learning about the history of the social sciences help you predict what your future might look like 10 years from now?

Thus, this post isn’t really about how Darwinism can help you better understand the world (not fully, anyway) – it’s, rather, about how the many wonderful (and even less-than-wonderful) sets of ideas you’ve been exposed to during your tenure as a student can help you understand the world beyond how you might imagine.

Darwin’s lessons to the graduates are, thus, in my mind, considerably beyond the lessons of evolution. Here is a sample of Darwin’s lessons:
1. Keep an open mind – Darwin did – and he changed the world forever as a result.
2. Collect data – don’t accept premises that have no substance behind them.
3. Realize that all the sciences and humanities are strongly interconnected.
4. A set of ideas originally designed to explain X, may well provide an exceptional explanation of Y and Z.
5. If you like intellectual approach Q, and see its predictive merit, don’t be afraid to apply Q in new domains – you may stumble upon something that no one ever dreamed of.
6. Finally, a specific implication of Darwinism for college graduates is this: Hear that robin singing in the morning? Smell the white blossoms on the natural rose bushes near the woods? See the turkey vultures soaring high – in communicative harmony with one another? Note this: The same forces accounting for these examples account for everything you see when you look in a mirror. You are part of this magnificent natural world. This insight is, for my money, what makes Darwinism a truly spiritual approach to the world. “There is grandeur in this view of life” (Darwin, 1859).

Congratulations graduates. Along with my professorial brethren, I wish you the very best in your future. Make us proud. And remember, your success is our success.

And for more information about the exciting new field of “Applied Evolutionary Psychology,” check out the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society (AEPS – yes, from APES to AEPS)!

References:

Darwin, C (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1st ed.). London: John Murray.

Geher, G., & Gambacorta, D. (2010). Evolution is not relevant to sex differences in humans because I want it that way! Evidence for the politicization of human evolutionary psychology. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 2, 32-47.

Keller, M. C., & Nesse, R. M. (2006). The evolutionary significance of depressive symptoms:
Different life events lead to different depressive symptom patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 316-330.

Wilson, D. S. (2007). Evolution for Everyone. New York: Delacorte Press.

Wilson M, Daly M (1993) Lethal confrontational violence among young men. Pp. 84-106 in NJ Bell & RW Bell, eds., Adolescent risk taking. Newbury Park CA: Sage Press.

Wilson M, Daly M (1998) Sexual rivalry and sexual conflict: recurring themes in fatal conflicts. Theoretical Criminology. 2: 291-310.

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973). The American Biology Teacher, 35(3), 125-129.

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw…

This line comes from the poem: In Memoriam A.H.H. by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  It was completed in 1849 and it is a requiem for the poet’s Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna in 1833. I use this line in all of my introductory lectures about natural selection.  It drives home the salient point that all individuals, and by extension species, operate in self-interest.  This expression is a six word refutation of natural theology; and at the same time an excellent illustration of the problems entailed in the naturalist fallacy.

Natural Theology held that the beneficence of the creator could be seen in the acts of creation.  This thinking goes back at least to Sir Thomas Aquinas (1225/7 – 1274), who wrote in the fifth argument of his Summa Theologie that the existence of God is proved by the order and harmony of the world that there must be an intelligent being in charge.  This view was further developed by John Ray’s The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691) which relies on argument from design utilizing somewhat sound natural history.  Over a century later, Natural Theology would develop its highest form in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1803) and Bridgewater Treatises (1832 – 1840.)  These works influenced all of Darwin and all his contemporary scholars.  Indeed the structure of on the Origin of Species was designed to counter much of the thinking of natural theology. Natural Theology failed because it cannot explain adaptation. Certainly, somewhat obvious adaptations seem readily explained by “an intelligent being.”  Fish, Ichthyosaurs, Dolphins all have torpedo shapes.  This shape is hydrodynamic, so there is no challenge to Natural Theology here.  However, why create an organism whose chief adaptation, intelligence is made possible by a large head (which makes its infant more difficult to pass through the mother’s birth canal?)  Real intelligent design would have altered the infant head growth program to make birth easy, and accelerated its growth after to birth to make learning easier. Numerous other examples abound in nature of suboptimal designs, for example why not design humans with eyes in the back of their heads?  Or why design so many microbial life forms that easily infect and often kill these same humans? Attempting to unravel adaptation and organismal diversity using this paradigm quickly became unmanageable.

Closely aligned to Natural Theology is that naturalist fallacy which proceeds from the notion that “all things natural are good.”  As a corollary to this thinking, those who operate under the naturalist fallacy assume that humans would be better off if we simply left nature alone.  Certainly, if we use the current example of the oil spill going on in the Gulf of Mexico, the naturists might have a point.  British Petroleum should have understood that offshore drilling at that depth was fraught with danger.  Thus this particular accident and the damage it is producing could have been avoided if we simply did not “mess with mother nature.”  However, this line of reasoning is fallacious.  It is an example of hasty generalization and selective memory.  How about all the other oil platforms around the world that are operating without major accidents?  And even if major accidents are inevitable when drilling for oil at these depths, what is are the benefits that result from this enterprise and do they outweigh the costs?  Indeed, don’t get me wrong here, what I am not saying is that oil drilling or ongoing fossil fuel use is okay, what I am saying is that the naturalist fallacy is not the way to critique or reject this practice.

Case in point, a colleague of mine who I respect a great deal, suggested that humans should treat other animals utilizing the same ethical and moral principles that we apply to other people.  Certainly the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) would agree with that notion.  Yet I argue that this sort of thinking flows from the naturalist fallacy, as well as anthropomorphism.  Charles Darwin remarked in The Origin of Species that if any species could be found, whose behavior solely benefited another species, than his theory of natural selection would be false.  Indeed Darwin was absolutely correct.  The vast majority of animal species are parasites and many are predatory.  Biological communities do show species associations were both species benefit (ants and acacia trees, lichens are algae and fungi, mutualism, +, +); however no species associations have ever been found which show a pattern of a species devoting its energy to the well-being of a second with no benefit coming in return.

Generally, all individuals attempt to maximize their fitness, resulting in their species increasing its abundance and geographical distribution.  This often has the impact of decreasing its competitors.  This may occur intentionally or unintentionally.  Consider the case of our hominid relatives.  Modern humans are descended from a lineage that occupied the world with other intelligent hominids.  For example, 200,000 years ago the world included the  Australopithecines, as well as H. neanderthalensis, H. erectus, and possibly a dwarf human species, Homo floresiensis, found in Java, Indonesia.  Archeological evidence exists that suggests that modern humans entered Europe around 55,000 ybp.  At that time, their skeletal dimensions suggested that they had tropical physical features, including the possibility that they retained their original dark skin.  That evidence also suggests that H. neanderthalensis had temperate/arctic physical features and the MC1R (red hair, light pigmentation gene) has been isolated from Neanderthal DNA.  Artifacts associated with both species suggest that H. sapiens was more culturally advanced.  New DNA analysis suggests that between 1 – 4% of the DNA of modern Europeans may have originated in Neanderthals¹.  This means that there had to have been some interaction between these species.  We cannot infer that the interaction was aggressive or warlike; however shortly after modern humans arrive in Europe the Neanderthals went extinct.  The hypotheses revolve around the competitive exclusion principle of ecology (Gause 1932.)  That is, two species which are very close in resource utilization cannot coexist in the same environment.  The human/Neanderthal interactions could have included direct warfare, competition for scarce resources, disease, or just chance.  Given the ice age conditions of Europe at that time, it is hard to image that there wasn’t some competition; especially since both species would have been hunter gatherers.  One model suggests that the modern human capacity for trade to augment scare resources might have given our species an edge in the competition with the Neanderthals². 

One can ask would it have been possible for modern humans and Neanderthals to have treated each other in an ethical manner. Possibly, especially when one considers that they might have been able to communicate via sign language or gestures (we do not know if Neanderthals had speech.) The FOXP2 gene is shared in both humans and Neanderthals; however the anatomy which allowed full speech did not appear until about 50,000 ybp and is never found in Neanderthal fossils³. The idea that humans might as a whole treat other species in an ethical fashion is undermined by our own history of unethical and immoral treatment of each other.  Indeed, it is argued that the domestication of animals was a key event in the creation of patriarchal societies in our species.  Certainly we do have a consistent history of ethical/moral behavior towards human outsiders; indeed such actions have been the exception and not the rule.

What has been the history of the interaction of humans with non-human species?  This is no different from the interactions of any other species in the web of life (e.g. eat or be eaten.)  For example, many large bodied predatory mammals were direct dangers to our ancestors (leopards, lions, hyenas, bears, wolves, etc.) For over 95% of our existence, these species dined on many unfortunate humans. In turn, our ancestors dined on smaller or less dangerous mammals (although one has to wonder about the sanity of the Pleistocene humans who hunted the great Mastodons!!) With the domestication of animals and the development of stable agriculture our reliance on hunting declined.  Also as our technological abilities grew (smelting of metal, development of projectile weapons) our ability to defend ourselves against large predatory mammals increased.  Ancient societies began to breed animals for food.  In modern industrial society, humans now breed animals for food on a massive scale.  For example, in 2008 the United States beef industry produced 26.56 billion pounds of beef, resulting from the slaughter of 34.4 million head of cattle! Most of this beef is consumed in the United States, that same year only 7.1% of the production was exported.  The average American pet receives more animal protein per day than that available to the vast majority of the world’s people! American pets are so well fed, that 25 – 40% of dogs and cats are obese. Thus for most of the world, as the comedian Chris Rock once exclaimed: “Don’t eat no red meat…no, don’t eat no green meat!”  Vegetarianism is a luxury that most of the world’s poor and hungry people cannot afford. Case in point, it is hypothesized that the HIV virus may have entered the human population through the practice of butchering “bushmeat” in central Africa.  Bushmeat is derived from various monkey species captured, butchered, and sold for consumption. Ironically, bush meat is considered a delicacy by some, and one recent examination of bush meat smuggled in the US has found it contaminated with a HIV-like virus.

Is carnivory a moral choice?

For the vast majority of organisms this is not a question.  As Dr. Allan Grant stated in the film Jurassic Park, “the other kind, do what they do.”  He was referring to the behavior of Tyrannosaurus rex, which evolved as a stealth/sit and wait predator and wasn’t making moral choices when it attempted to eat Lex and Tim.  Throughout the history of life, such predators had no other means of survival.  Humans evolved as omnivores.  It is hard to reconstruct Paleolithic diets; however we suspect that our ancestors ate whatever they could find including animals, edible plants, especially fruits and nuts. This fact is important in understanding how modern pseudoscientific diet fads are contributing to disease⁷.  Carnivory is not a moral choice for other animals because they do not have the mental capacity to make moral choices. In the words of another movie character, Matt Hooper: “Sharks swim, eat, and make baby sharks.  That’s all they do!” Humans on the other hand can decide that they do not wish to eat other animals.  Vegetarian diets are possible, although to remain healthy they require planning, since there are some essential amino acids that are hard to get from plants. However, is choosing to be a vegetarian or vegan a moral choice?

Moral reasoning involves making decisions about what we ought to do.  What we ought to do depends upon one’s values.  Philosophers claim that moral values are those that are worthwhile for their own sake.  Our ability to make moral value judgments results from the way our brain evolved and thus were ultimately produced by the selective pressures that made human social life and structure possible.  These selection pressures are classically thought of as kin-selection (altruism favoring closely related individuals) and reciprocal altruism (altruism that occurred between unrelated allies that benefited both parties.)  While our moral reasoning capacity evolved via genetically based selection, our moral norms evolve via cultural evolution⁸.  For example, some cultures have no problem eating dogs and cats (a practice abhorrent to Americans.)  Yet, our consumption of beef cattle is abhorrent to many Hindus.  Some Alaska Native tribes still hunt whales for cultural and food purposes.  Japan, Norway, and Iceland maintain high volume whaling industries for food consumption.  In 2005, Japan was taking 440 minke whales a year from Antarctic waters⁹.  If whale consumption is not abhorrent enough, some cultures have practiced cannibalism.  Mostly this practice had shamanist significance, although it is thought that our cousin species the Neanderthals might have eaten their old and sick for survival purposes. With all this said, when does the consumption of other species become a moral choice?

As shocking as this may sound, one species eating another is not a moral issue.  One can even argue that people eating other people is not a moral issue (so long as the human bodies involved were not murdered.)  In extreme survival situations, this has often occurred.  For example, the story which inspired Herman Melvin’s Moby Dick, is based on a real case. In 1820, an American whaling ship (the Essex, captained by George Pollard out of Nantucket, MA) was sank by a sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean.  The survivors were stranded on Henderson Island with inadequate food and water.  Eventually some took to their boats in an attempt to be rescued.  With only four men left in Captain Pollard’s boat (Coffin, Ramsdell, Ray, Pollard) they decided to draw lots to see which of them would be sacrificed to allow the others to live.  Charles Ramsdell shot his friend Owen Coffin, and the remaining three lived off his body.  After Ray died, Pollard and Ramsdell gnawed the bones of the two skeletons until picked up by Nantucket ship Dauphin 95 days after the sinking of the Essex⁹.

Might the day after arrive where carnivory might become a moral issue for humans?  Possibly, should we ever develop the technology to fully supply the proteins required for human life without the consumption of animal tissue.  One can even argue that there are moral (if not scientific) issues concerning how food production is currently achieved.  For example, is it morally wrong to feed grain to cattle so that they can be slaughtered to feed the wealthy?  I would argue yes, especially if more people can be fed with the grain you gave the cattle.  Cows are capable of converting cellulose to protein, so they don’t need to be fed grain.  There are range lands that are only suitable for growing cows, sheep, or goats.  These animals can produce protein for human populations that are protein limited.  It is inefficient to feed grain to livestock.  There are other moral concerns in food production; including how mass housing of cattle requires the use of antibiotics to maintain cattle yield. The increased yield comes at the cost of producing more antibiotic resistant bacteria, which endanger human life.  The immoral part of this process results from the profit motive associated with this means of producing meat.  These are acceptable moral reasons for criticizing the industry, but they do not amount to a moral argument for vegetarianism.

References

1. Green, R., Krause, J, Briggs, A.W….Paabo, S., A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal genome, Science 328: 710-722, 2010.

2. Horan, R.D, Bulte, E, Shogren, J.F, How trade saved humanity from biological exclusion: an economic theory of Neanderthal

Extinction, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 58(1): 1-19, 2005. 

3. Lieberman, P, The Evolution of Human Speech: Its Anatomical and Neural Bases, Current Anthropology  48 (1): 39-66, 2007.

4. http://www.ers.usda.gov/news/bsecoverage.htm

5. Laflamme, D.P, Understanding and Managing Obesity in Dogs and Cats, Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice 36(6): 1283- 1295, 2006.

6. Stonington, J., Bushmeat Presents Latest Food Scare: Researchers Find Strains of a Virus Related to HIV in Illegal Imports of Primate Flesh, a Delicacy to Some Africans, Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2010:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304604204575182463352698780.html

7. Lindeberg, S, Food and Western Disease: Health and Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective, (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell), 2010.

8. Ayala, F.J, The biological roots of morality, Biology and Philosophy, 2(3): 235-252, 1987.

9. Gales, N.J, Kasuya, T, Clapham, P.J, and Brownell, Jr, R.L, Japan’s whaling plan under scrutiny, Nature 435, 883-884, 2005.

10. Philbrick, N, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, (New York, NY: Penguin Publishers), 2001.

Humans possess relatively few, if any, skills that can be performed naturally, without practice. Even walking, once believe to just happen is now known to occur only after the infant has the chance to acquire other skills including balance and the coordination of upper and lower body. But walking is a skill that every normally developing infant eventually acquires, whereas mothering is not a skill that all women are willing or able to acquire – and there is much more variation in the outcome. Even still, a person can hardly think of a woman without picturing her as a mother. In fact, when men or mothers meet a married woman of reproductive age who has chosen not to have children, who among them doesn’t ask “why?” We even have many names for childless women, all pejorative (e.g. spinster, old maid).

Among hunter-gatherer groups, older sisters are often employed throughout the day to assist in childcare of younger siblings (Sear & Mace, 2008). In a Western context, we can see this practicing in the pretend play of (predominantly) girls with their dolls and accessories. Among the upper-class “founding mothers” generation of the U.S. colonies, upper-class teenage girls would often be apprenticed to new mothers to learn how to become mothers when their turns were up (Roberts, 2004). Even in other primate species, adolescent females yearn to get exposure to new infants, though humans alone among the great apes will share their very young infants with group members (Hrdy, 2009). Common chimpanzees will not share the infant until it is around 3.5 months, orangutans around 5 months – whereas in humans, it is mere minutes after birth. Women need training in all elements of parenting – from breastfeeding, which likewise does not just occur “naturally” (Volk, 2009) to dealing with a hormonal teenager. Feel free to leave a comment if you have tips about the latter!

Mothering can at times be overwhelming, especially when a mom finds herself with little to no help during most of the day. For those who have full-time careers, finding time to excel at work and raise a child can be daunting. Likewise, for mothers who stay at home with the children, dedicating yourself to the child at the expense of yourself, trying to complete daily tasks such as cooking and cleaning while tending to and entertaining a child, and trying to maintain a schedule that works for both you and the child (as in 5 am is too early, kids!) can be an exhausting challenge. This truth is inescapable.

Given the overwhelming nature of raising one of the most helpless and needy infants among primates, human mothers need others. In our modern world, we can see examples in Facebook, which has the support group Circle of Moms, where one can tag her friends who are also moms, and there are many mothers’ groups for finding playmates for mom and her child(ren) (such as the national group Las Madres). When new mothers were given support in the form of only 21 visits by RNs over the course of two years, their children benefited in many ways for at least the first 15 years of life, including cognitively (Hrdy, 2009). So, then, it is possible that when ‘others’ are around and help mothers hone their skills, both the mother and the infant benefit. In the Sear and Mace (2008) study cited above, for those infants who had older sisters to help in the childcare, they saw marked decreases in mortality. In other words, moms and infants both need moms who have help and support so that the moms may perfect their skills.

Switching from a natural mothers to practiced mothers perspective can be a real relief for modern moms. Perhaps a not so recent challenge is the feeling of isolation by being literally geographically isolated from friends and family. [I say not so recent because there are many times in history when women have been isolated from childhood friends and family by migrating due to marriage, and perhaps even woman have traditionally been the sex to migrate out of the group. I’ll save that for a future post]. Raising a human is at least the longest commitment among the great apes, if not the most challenging as well – humans are born completely helpless, unable to even cling to the mother; and require care well into adolescence. In fact, recent research suggests they need it much longer – humans don’t begin contributing as many nutritional resources as they consume until into their 30s (Kaplan, 2009). Accepting that mothering is a skill that takes practice can alleviate some of the stress of feeling like a fish out of water.

Similarly, accepting the practiced mothers perspective allows a new mother to accept help more readily. More often than not, mothers, mothers-in-law, and friends are offering help with childcare or advice because they’ve been there before and know how difficult transitioning from carrying a 25-pound bag of baby etc. in your uterus to caring for a 6-pound lump of baby can be. If a mother feels as if she should be a natural, then asking for help can be really intimidating.

So, are women natural born mothers? All signs point to no. Yes, their anatomy allows them to bear children, but that does not mean that they will be great mothers from day one, or ever. If you give a teenager a car, chances are through trial and error they’ll learn how to make it move – but that doesn’t mean that they’ll instantly be good drivers, and some might never even take the time to learn. So too, we need to remember that when it comes to mothering, perfection is not bred but requires a lot of practice.

References

Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Kaplan, H. (2009). Learning, menopause and the 70-year lifespan. Keynote address of the 21^st Annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society Conference, Fullerton, CA.

Sear, R. &  Mace, R. (2008). Who keeps children alive? A review of the effects of kin on child survival. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29(1), 1-18.

Roberts, C. (2004). Founding mothers: The women who raised our nation. New York: William Morrow.

Volk, A. A. (2009). Human breastfeeding is not automatic: Why that is so and what it means for human evolution. Special Issue: Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society. Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, 3(4), 305-314.

“See the lilies of the field…their genomes are 36 times larger than ours…”

Those with a naïve understanding of evolution would have a difficult time understanding how a flowering plant could contain 36 times more DNA than humans. After all, DNA is the code of life.  DNA codes for proteins and thus one might think that more DNA would mean greater biochemical complexity.  Indeed, those who think of evolution as inexorably leading from simplicity to complexity would have a hard time fathoming how this could be true.  For example, it is true that prokaryotes have much less DNA than Eukaryotes.  The bacterium Escherichia coli contains 4.6 x 10⁶ base pairs (bp); whereas the fungus Nuerospora crassa has 3.99 x 10⁷ bp and animal Homo sapiens sapiens (humans) contain 5.93 x 10⁹ bp. However there is a greater than 200,000-fold genome size diversity in Eukaryotes and this variation has no relationship to organismal complexity¹. 

A decade ago this disparity was called the c-value paradox².  The c-value refers to the haploid genome size of an organism.  If the mean genome size of groups were plotted, it would occur in this order: bacteria (~10⁶ bp); algae and fungi (between 10⁷ to 10⁸ bp); worms (10⁸ bp); insects (10⁸ – 10⁹ bp); echinoderms (10⁹ – 10¹⁰ bp); fish (10⁹ – 10¹⁰ bp); reptiles (10⁹ – 10¹⁰ bp); birds (10⁹ – 10¹⁰ bp); mammals (10⁹-10¹⁰ bp); amphibians (10⁹ – 10¹¹ bp); flowering plants (10⁹-10¹⁰ bp.)  There is no clear or easy way to make sense of these numbers.  For example, this order doesn’t correlate with organismal complexity or even age in the fossil record³.  The genome sizes within more narrow groups defy easy explanation as well, for example the genus Pinus (pines) has a range from 1.8 x 10¹⁰ to 4.0 x 10¹⁰, which is generally larger than flowering plants⁴.  The flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana has a tiny genome in comparison, only 1.57 x 10⁸.

What is really interesting however is what percentage of the DNA of Eukaryotes actually codes for proteins (or has a known function relating to the coding of proteins.) For example, in humans only 3% of the genome codes for proteins, and maybe another 10% have an identified role in regulating gene expression⁵.  In this sense, humans are typical and this means that at least 85% of eukaryotic DNA does not directly influence protein coding.  So what are the characteristics of this non-coding DNA?  How did it get there?  How is this non-coding DNA maintained through evolutionary time?  Is it really junk-DNA, as described by many early researchers?

The recent sequencing of a large number of eukaryotic genomes has provides a more accurate understanding of their DNA content and type. These are shown below:

Explaining the existence of structural genes is simple.  Clearly, all organisms require proteins to carry out the biochemical properties of life.  Some of these proteins must be produced in large amounts and so the existence of repetitive structural genes is also easy to explain.  How then do we explain the rest? This problem has been recently called the c-value enigma.

There are five main theories addressing this problem; junk-DNA, selfish-DNA, nucleoskeletal-DNA, nucleotypic-DNA, genome protection⁶.  The first two theories can be lumped together as mutation pressure theories and the last three are optimal DNA content theories.  The junk-DNA hypothesis says that the accumulation of genetic material in various organisms occurs by random process (genetic drift.)  If this hypothesis were true is would predict that there are no grand-level correlations between DNA content and organismal complexity. However, there do seem to be correlations between cell volume and genome size.  Junk-DNA would address this as a result, not a cause.  In other words, since there is more DNA, the cells of that particular organism must get larger.  It fails to adequately explain however the fact that there are some correlations between DNA content and life-history features within lineages, it assumes that cells cannot delete excess DNA, and there is no evidence of a steady accumulation of DNA content through evolutionary tine (which would be required by a drift mechanism.)

Originally, it was thought that the c-value paradox could easily be explained by selfish-DNA.  Selfish genetic elements can copy themselves and in theory have no impact on the host organism’s fitness so long as they replicate in non-coding regions of the genome.  Clearly, replication in the coding regions would result in massive mutation with major impacts on fitness.  Several human diseases result from transposable genetic elements replicating in a coding region.  For example, the alu elements are short interspersed elements (SINES) that have DNA recognition sequences that react to the restriction endonuclease AluI.  They are 200 – 300 base pairs long and can be present in the genome up to 900,000 times.  A common alu insertion occurs at the angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) locus results in a polymorphism that affects the activity of this enzyme. The D-allele is characterized by an absence of these alu insertions, and thus has higher enzymatic activity than the I-allele which has the alu insertion. The frequency of the D and I alleles are similar in persons of African descent found in Nigeria, Jamaica, and the United States.  However individuals with the D-allele are more likely to develop hypertension only in the Western hemisphere (indicating gene x environment interaction.) Another 306bp Alu insertion polymorphism occurs in the progesterone receptor gene (PROGINS on chromosome 11) is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. The insertion was found at a frequency of 5%, 10%, and 14.6% in East Indian women with endometriosis, uterine fibroids, and breast cancer.  The control group (women w/o these diseases) had a frequency of only 5.5% Thus, only the breast cancer group showed a statistically significant difference⁷.  The frequency of this insertion polymorphism differs widely in human populations:

European American, 0.208, N = 72

African American, 0.021, N = 71

Hispanic American, 0.164,  N = 76

Mvskoke (Creek), 0.041, N = 37

Pakistani, 0.09, N = 55

East Indian, 0.055, N = 490

From this we would include that all factors being equal, PROGINS associated breast-cancer should be 10 times more frequent in European American women as African American women. The fact that transposable genetic elements do cause disease indicates there should be serious selection for means to regulate their insertion sites away from exons.

Overall transposable genetic elements make up approximately 51.3% of the human genome (SINES 16.1%, LINES 22.3%, LTR retrotransposons 9.3%, DNA transposons 3.6%.) This figure varies widely across phylogenetic groups (F. assyrica, lilies 95-99%, Zea mays, corn 60%, A. thaliana, cruficer 14%, T. negroviridis, fish 0.14%, T. rubripes, fish 2%, R. esculenta, frog 77%, X. laevis, frog 37%, D. melanogaster, fruit fly 15-22%, A. gambiae mosquito 16%.)  Again the selfish-DNA hypothesis suffers from not explaining the existing correlations between DNA content and life-history features, assumes that cells cannot delete excess DNA or regulate transposition, and would require a steady accumulation of DNA content across evolutionary time.  For example, how does it explain the disparities in TGE content between fish, amphibians, and mammals (all of whom share a common ancestor?) 

The nucleoskeletal hypothesis suggests that the increased amounts of DNA in eukaryotic genomes are a mechanism by which their nuclear size is selected to meet the needs of the cell for balanced growth.  This idea is supported by the strong relationship between cellular DNA content and cell volume.  Gregory (2000) showed a highly significant correlation between these variables for erythrocytes in 159 species of vertebrates (jawless fishes, cartilaginous fishes, teleost fishes (excluding lungfishes), lungfishes, urodele amphibians, anuran amphibians, reptiles, and birds⁸. One mechanism accounting for this relationship is the idea that the transfer of messenger and ribosomal RNA from the nucleus to the cytoplasm via nuclear pores is a limiting factor on cell growth.  Thus we can imagine cases in which we have smaller cells, with smaller transfer rates, but quicker growth versus larger cells with larger pores and slower growth rates.  DNA amount in the cell is seen as a way of “providing space for the nucleus” which in turn impacts the size of its connections to the cellular transport membranes.  The problem with this hypothesis is that it doesn’t explain imperfect scaling between cell size and DNA content in some groups.  For example imperfect scaling occurs in lungfish and salamanders where cell volumes scales in a strongly positive allometric fashion with changes in genome size and there is a negative correlation between C-value between both cell division and developmental rates⁹.  One extreme example of this is the relationship between very large genome size and neoteny in salamanders.  Neoteny is when juvenile characters are retained in adults.  Neotenic salamanders have the largest genomes in amphibians (and as you already know amphibians have some of the large genomes of all organisms¹⁰.)  It also cannot explain instantaneous reductions of cell size that occur following reduction of DNA content, and is incompatible with observation of quantum genome size shifts (as happens with polyploidy.)

The nucleotypic hypothesis states that DNA content directly affects cell size and cell division rate. There is strong evidence that DNA content has a strong negative correlation with rates of both meiotic and mitotic cell division in a variety of organisms¹¹.  The mechanism of this relationship results from the notion that more DNA should cause a greater duration of the S-phase of the cell cycle (DNA replication.)  This results from there being an imperfect relationship between increased DNA content and replicon number amongst other mechanisms. In addition all aspects of the cell cycle are increased with greater DNA content. There is some variation in the nature of the relationship between mitotic rate and DNA content.  For example in dicots the cell cycle is longer per amount of DNA than it is in monocots (although the scaling is similar.)  The relationship between meiotic rates and DNA content is more complex.  Animals tend to have longer meiotic rates than plants per DNA content and within animals mammals have longer rates than amphibians or insects.  The main problem with the nucleotypic hypothesis is that there is not yet enough data to fully test it and no satisfactory mechanism has been proposed to explain why it works.

Finally, Patrushev and Minekevich propose a unique optimal model to explain excess DNA content¹².  Under normal cellular conditions, endogenous chemical mutagens cause spontaneous mutations.  In a variety of biochemical reactions reactive metabolites are formed as intermediate byproducts which can wreak havoc on DNA. In substrate redox reaction involving oxygen free radicals are always formed and in aerobic organisms 4-5% of molecular oxygen is transformed during respiration to reactive oxygen species (ROS.)  In a typical human cell this can mean as many as 50,000 – 200,000 mutations daily! These authors argue that one role of the non-coding DNA is to act as a sink to absorb ROS.  Thus, by chance alone in the human genome size at 3 x 10⁹, there is a ~97% chance that a ROS damage event occurs in a non-coding segment, and a 87% chance it occurs in a segment that does not impact coding or regulation of coding. If there was no non-coding DNA, than 100% of mutations would occur in regions that impact the organism’s fitness.  Thus, under this model, there would be positive selection for genomes to allow the increase of TGE’s within non-coding segments of the genome.  The fact that there are variations in genome sizes amongst Eukaryotes would be predicted, especially if any of the other mechanisms mentioned above were in action.

In conclusion, the c-value enigma is a scientific question that requires more attention.  Genome sizes are distributed in a non-random fashion, but at present we don’t have a unifying theory that can explain the variation.  Mutation pressure theories explain some issues but fail at others.  Optimal size evolution theories suffer from some of the same difficulties as all adaptive program hypotheses.  My intuition suggests that genome sizes result from compromises between mutational and optimal forces.  We may not ever be able to develop a general c-theory, leaving us with only specific mechanisms that account for variation within specific groups.  What we know about genome variation does accomplish is the demolition of progression theories of evolution.  Lily DNA results from evolutionary issues specific to flowering plants as human DNA content results from those experienced by mammals.

Notes

1. Gregory, T.R, Coincidence, coevolution, or causation?  DNA content, cell size, and the c-value enigma, Biol. Rev. 76: 65-101, 2001.
2. Klug, W and Cummings, R, Genetics 5th edition, (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall), 1997.
3.  Genome sizes are provided by Klug and Cummings, as well as from Bionumbers. 
4. Morse, A.M. et al, Evolution of genome size and complexity in Pinus, PLOS One 4(2): e4332, 2009.
5. Patrushev, L.I. and Minkevich, I.G, The problem of eukaryotic genome size, Biochemistry (Moscow) 73(13): 1519-1551, 2008.
6. Gregory T.R. 2001 and Patrushev, L.I. and Minkevich, I.G. 2008.
7. Govindan, S et al., Association of progesterone receptor gene polymorphism (PROGINS) with endometriosis, uterine fibroids and breast cancer, Cancer Biomark. 2007; 3(2):73-8.
8. Gregory, T.R., Nucleotypic effects without nuclei: genome size and erythrocyte size in mammals, Genome 43: 895-901, 2000.
9. Cavalier-Smith, T, Skeletal DNA and the evolution of genome size, Annual Rev. Biophysics and Bioengineering 11: 273-302 and Gregory, T.R., 2001.

10.  Cavalier-Smith, Coevolution of vertebrate genome and, cell, and nuclear sizes. In Selected Symposia and Monographs U.Z.I., vol. 4 (ed. G. Ghiara et al.), pp. 51-86.

11.  Gregory, T.R. 2001.

12.  Patrushev, L.I. and Minkevich, I.G, 2008.

I’m not going to lie. If you follow my work at all, hopefully this isn’t a surprise – I try to stay honest – it’s a way to compensate for my deficits. Lots of folks I know – several of whom I consider good friends – report that they just can’t stand evolutionary psychology. Some seem to think it’s the devil – morally and scientifically irresponsible and reprehensible. I do my best to deal with things, but every now and then, honestly, I just shake my head. And sometimes I just have to write about it.

A few weeks ago, a really interesting discussion about the mating-relevant differences between Luke Skywalker and Han Solo emerged in my graduate course in social psychology. This was one of these moments when a thread of the fabric of American culture and the content of the course interfaced perfectly.

Luke is prototyipically non-masculine – whiny and wimpy throughout three episodes. Han is just macho. He plays it cool, doesn’t need anyone’s help, and has classic masculine good looks.

What’s attractive about Luke? What’s attractive about Han? The conversation touched on several themes relevant to evolutionary psychology – mate choice, optimal features of long-term mates, optimal features of short-term mates, morphological features of sexually attractive males, the handicap principle applied to high levels of testosterone, inbreeding depression, and so forth. It was an exciting class discussion that put a face to many of the concepts from the readings of the week.

About a week later, I had a passing conversation with a long-time academic friend – who’s, notably, not a huge fan of evolutionary psychology. Somehow, I briefly mention this great class discussion – and my friend sort of scoffs – saying something like “can’t it be just that Han Solo would be way better in bed? It’s not like I’d want to have babies with him!”

I’ve learned to not bother arguing about evolutionary psychology in certain circles – but my mind immediately went to a conversation I’d had with David Schmitt when he visited New Paltz last year (to give a talk about mating psychology on Darwin’s 200th birthday). David is, of course, a leading thinker and researcher in the field – and the only thing as substantial as the academic rigor of his work is his reasonable take on things. An expert on the nature of psychological adaptations (see Schmitt & Pilcher, 2004), David introduced me to the distinction between “adaptation implementers” and “fitness optimizers” (a conception that he attributed to his mentor David Buss, a luminary in the field).

If we think of organisms as designed by evolutionary forces to propagate their own genes (Dawkins, 1976), we can have two general ways of understanding organisms. Perhaps (a) organisms are “fitness optimizers,” designed to consciously do whatever it takes to successfully produce viable progeny. On the other hand, perhaps organisms are “adaptation implementers,” designed with a battery of specific adaptations that, on average, had the effect of increasing the reproductive success of the organism’s ancestors compared with conspecifics without said adaptations.

OK – so let’s put a face to all this. Think about pregnancy sickness, famously studied by Margie Profet (1992). If pregnancy sickness is conceptualized from a fitness-optimization perspective, then pregnant women are essentially framed as conscious of the deleterious effects of certain foods on their babies, and they make themselves sick to certain stimuli as a result. If women with pregnancy sickness are, instead, framed as “adaptations implementers,” then the fact that they tend to get sick in certain contexts (e.g., when eating certain foods that are likely to possess toxins) is the result of this psychological and physiological tendency (that we call pregnancy sickness) to have increased the fitness of ancestral women – regardless of conscious thought surrounding the reproductive benefits of pregnancy sickness.

As Dave put it to me, evolutionary psychology sees humans as “adaptation implementers” – not “fitness optimizers.”

This important construct can be applied, really, to any adaptation. Think about fear of heights – one of the most basic and culturally universal fears. On one hand, we can think of this fear in terms of “conscious fitness optimization” – with people thinking “I know that if I fall 100 feet, that’s it for me – and my entire genetic lineage – ouch!” OR we can think of expressed fear of heights as explicating “adaptation implementation.” In this way, we can think of a natural fear of heights as the product nature selecting for ancestors across generations who happened to, by chance – and likely unconsciously – fear heights. In this way, someone expressing a fear of heights is simply implementing an adaptation that, on average, across generations, gave the ancestors of people with a fear of heights a reproductive advantage over others.

This same line of reasoning makes it so that modern-day contraception is not a deal killer for evolutionary psychology. I’ve heard people argue essentially that “well if evolutionary psychology says we do everything to propagate our genes, but we use contraception and many of us CHOOSE to not have kids, doesn’t that just say that evolutionary psychology is all wrong?” No. Actually. It doesn’t. Such an argument does, however, suggest that the conscious fitness-optimization approach to evolutionary psychology is completely misguided. If we were designed to consciously maximize fitness regardless of any other factors, then maybe contraception would not be as prevalent as it is – and maybe more people would choose to have children. But, in fact, people who use contraception (and there are lots of us out there) are still products of evolution whose psychologies are filled with adaptations. Contraception users still fear heights, spiders, and snakes more than other stimuli. Contraception users still show nepotistic tendencies when considering whom to help in emergency situations. They still get angry at being cheated by others in their close social circles. Contraception users experience the basic emotions of joy, sadness, surprise, disgust, and anger – and contraception users can identify these emotional states accurately in humans from across the globe. And they still find spoiled milk totally gross. Contraception users are attracted to the same features in mates that non-contraception users are attracted to – they still prefer that a mate be kind, intelligent, witty, and attractive. And, back on task, female contraception users still find Han Solo more sexually attractive than Luke Skywalker. That is, they implement psychological adaptations – regardless of conscious efforts to reduce the likelihood of reproducing. And this is exactly what we would expect in organisms that are designed to implement a battery of fitness-increasing adaptations – as opposed to organisms with general-purpose mechanisms designed to consciously increase reproductive success regardless of environmental conditions.

Being a person who uses contraception and chooses to not have children does NOT make that individual a person whose behavior and psychology are unrelated to the evolutionary history of homo sapiens

Back to the Order of the Jedi: Think about the sexual attraction that a heterosexual woman may feel toward Han over Luke. I haven’t done a poll, but suppose we find evidence that more heterosexual women find Han sexually attractive than Luke – thus, corresponding to a non-random mate-choice situation. Is it accurate and comprehensive to just say that Han would probably be better in bed? I don’t think so! I think that such a response actually screams for a distinction between fitness optimization and adaptation implementation!

In the domain of short-term mating, there are reasons underlying why women are attracted to masculine-looking men – with muscular bodies, high shoulder-to-hip ratios, deep voices, and symmetrical faces (Shoup & Gallup, 2008). And an evolutionary perspective on why women are attracted to such Han Soloesque features does not need to presume that women want to have Han’s baby! When we think of adaptation implementation, this way of thinking, in fact, can be greatly elucidated. It’s not enough to say that a woman would rather sleep with Han than Luke, and that’s just that. Science is about addressing WHY – why would such a pattern typify short-term desires of most heterosexual women? From the adaptation implementation perspective, the answer is steeped in our past. Women with such desires in short-term mates were more likely to leave viable offspring in the future. Mating with such “cads” likely led ancestral women who utilized short-term mating strategies to bear healthy, fit, and attractive offspring who were effective at fending off parasites (Gangestad & Buss, 1993).

So, in short, my friend who made this comment about being more attracted to Han than to Luke was completely right – it doesn’t have to be about consciously wanting to have Han’s baby over Luke’s. From an adaptation-implementation perspective, the ultimate causes of differential attractiveness toward one potential mate over another need not have any bearing on consciously trying to reproduce whatsoever. Just as fear of heights can exist without one consciously thinking about how falling a long way will lead to sudden death. Even if you don’t think that, being on the edge of a cliff in the mountains is still scary! And that’s because such fears gave our ancestors survival and reproductive benefits over others. Similarly, being sexually attracted to a potential mate may not make one think about the fitness-relevant end-product (e.g., shared offspring) – it may simply put one in a state (a hot state!) that is likely to lead to increased likelihood of mating.

And to top it off, remember, Han might be more masculine, but Luke can use the force!

References

Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gangestad, S. W., and Buss, D. M. (1993). Pathogen prevalence and human mate preferences. Ethology and Sociobiology, 14, 89-96.

Profet, Margie (1992). “Pregnancy Sickness as Adaptation: A Deterrent to Maternal Ingestion of Teratogens”. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford University Press. pp. 327–365.

Schmitt, D. P., & Pilcher, J. J. (2004). Evaluating evidence of psychological adaptation: How do we know one when we see one? Psychological Science, 15, 643-649.

Shoup, M. L. & Gallup, G. G., Jr. (2008). Men’s faces convey information about their bodies and their behavior: What you see is what you get.
Evolutionary Psychology, 6, 469-479.

One theme to come out of this conference was that of the obstacles we, as evolutionary scholars, have to face. An obvious source of contention comes from Creationists, who believe that evolutionary theory is scientifically disputable – but that is old news. One area about which we might not usually think was addressed by Robert Deaner of Grand Valley State University. He analyzed textbooks from the social sciences not for the authors’ animosity towards evolutionary theory – but the errors presented in the name of evolution. All 17 major textbooks at which he looked misrepresented the facts of evolutionary theory, and some argued against the theory based on these misunderstandings. Not only are we facing dispute from a non-scientific sector, but our own colleagues who are teaching the same students as are we.

Similarly, Kilian Garvey of University of New England, spoke of the existential threat evolutionary theory poses. People don’t question any other scientific theory in the way that they do evolutionary theory – though most people don’t understand all the details of the other theories either (such as relativity, gravity, or geophysics). Most people don’t contest that dinosaurs existed, but for the existence of evolution by natural selection – that is clearly not the case.

Leslie Heywood, from Binghamton University, gave an inspiring talk about evolution and feminism. She contended that evolutionary psychologists are not everywhere accepted, or even understood – and so too is the challenge for academic feminists, who are separate from the political feminists more often portrayed in media (and likewise separate from the political straw-woman against which some EPists apparently stand). She presented the quotes seen on another EvoS Blog, by NEEPS President Glenn Geher – Kramare and Treichler (1996): “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people,” and Geher (2009): “Evolutionary psychology is the radical notion that human behavior is part of the natural world.” These notions are not incompatible, even in a scientific setting.

To these challenges, NEEPS 2010 also offered hope. David Sloan Wilson reported on the Binghamton Project, which employs evolutionary theory to improving the community life of the citizens of Binghamton. If evolutionary theory can be used positively to improve public policy (emphasizing that humans do, indeed, have a rich (pre)history of prosocial behavior!), then we stand to benefit as a field of scholars. Much like the Civil Rights movement, change often comes by first instating behavioral changes, only then does attitude change follow. By the time people realize they are already using evolutionary theory in their everyday lives, it may be too late – they may already accept evolutionary theory!

Likewise, the inaugural meeting of FEPS provides hope to a new generation of scholars. While some people are put off by our use of the F word, our uniting message was clear: we are interested in examining the active role women have played in evolution, not to the exclusion, but in addition to the well-studied roles that men have played. We are a diverse bunch that cannot be pigeonholed, as our forthcoming title and mission statement will present. And if along the way, we help share evolutionary theory with some fields that might initially be unreceptive, then I can’t see the harm in that!

NEEPS has yet again shown that science is collaborative, and highlighted the best of that assertion. We are a tight knit group that is critical in thought, but not in interaction. From this, we produce positive scientific collaborations and research – made richer by the feedback we receive from these meetings.

On a final note, we also raised money for the National Center for Science Education. This organization promotes the accurate teaching of evolutionary theory in our public schools, and certainly, if our incoming students have been presented a fair and truthful representation, we stand against one less obstacle to the lay (and scholarly!) understanding of evolutionary theory.

References

Geher, G. (2006). Evolutionary psychology is not evil! … and here’s why … Psihologijske Teme (Psychological Topics); Special Issue on Evolutionary Psychology, 15, 181-202.

Kramare, C., & Treichler, P. A. (1996).  A Feminist Dictionary. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.