Pivoting around Smartphones & Cigarettes: Evolved to Play in Extrastructural Interludes

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Christopher Lynn

I drew this especially for this post. Remember that viral video of the 2-yr-old Indonesian kid smoking a cigarette? Here he is in his extrastructural boredom thinking of his next pivot.

Smartphones are like cigarettes are like junk food are like chewing your nails or doodling.  Right.  What do they have in common?  Easy.  Things we do when we’re bored.  Bored in my class?  Doodle.  There were some amazing Jurassic landscapes drawn on quizzes in my “Evolution for Everyone” class last semester.  Can’t sit idly waiting for the red light?  Chew your fingernails until the edges bleed.  Commercials got you down?  Good you keep a bag of chips handy & a bowl full of M&Ms.  Is our conversation too much of me talking & not enough about you?  Step outside & have a smoke break in the monotony of our friendship.  Does the naked space of your own mind & the world around you send you screaming into oblivion when you walk across campus, across a street even?  Pull out your smartphone & check your email again–that car will swerve around you.

I am being facetious…& of course I am not.  All these little things we compulsively do when it would be nice if we were paying attention are annoying when you’re on the other end of them, but this isn’t one of those preachy what-has-the-world-come-to those kids with their smartphone-doo-hickies I-remember-when-we-thought-a-rotary-dial-was-newfangled rants. ( I am currently desperately seeking to upgrade to an iPhone myself.)  No, no, I’m far more interested in how smartphones “superstimulate” our evolved compulsion to “play” at all the “extrastructural” interludes of our lives–i.e., when we’re “bored.”  I love the concept of cultural  structures or objects superstimulating our cognitive architecture because it simultaneously stimulates a variety of mechanisms that evolved for other purposes.  Pascal Boyer uses this concept to outline the by-product model of religion (read a 2008 summary article in Nature here).  I think many successful memes are so because they simultaneously please us in so  many ways.  Television superstimulates us, as do computers (with high-speed internet), & now smartphones.   Smartphones do so by both serving as a fantastic “prop” (Walton 1990) or “pivot” (Vygosky 1978)–”an object that facilitates the transformation into the space of play” (Stromberg, Nichter, & Nichter 2007:17).  Smartphones are pivots around which we can navigate extrastructural space–both real space & virtual space–while providing us with an assortment of other pivots.  And all the advertised features of smartphones are pivots on their own accord, from the phone to music to games  to books–they are all things we do in our “free” time, when we’re bored, or are otherwise subject to unstructured space.

“Extrastructural” space refers to what Stromberg et al define as “social situals that lie outside the structure of the mundane and everyday” (2007:5).  For instance,

Parties, stress, and boredom are all instances of peculiar moments in social life that lie outside the demand strcuture of everyday life…[whereas] on most days we enter and exit institutions that contain fairly circumscribed activity domains such as jobs or classes.  Then there are other, often less structured, contexts that nevertheless impose, for reasons of function, tradition, and so on, demands on actors: eating and sleeping, engaging in entertainment activities, or studying.  However, there are also situations that lie significantly outside the structure of the everyday and are often recognized as such: the break, the vacation, the celebration, the moment in which there is nothing to do, the situation when demands are so great that one’s unthinking compliance to the routine begins to break down. (2007:5)

It is in response to such unstructured time that unscheduled play enters the picture in “improvisational forms” (2007:6).  Play typically involves some rules, particularly in the case of certain games, & thus extrastructural situations are not wholly without structures, as play imposes structure on the interstitial space “to substitute for that which is missing” (2007:6).

I began riffing on this halfway thru this past semester when (1) either the smartphone texting came to a critical mass in the midst of my lecturing or (2) I started to take more notice & umbrage.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been growing the course, maybe it’s attracting a less interested general audience, maybe it’s me…No, no, it’s the “Anthropology of Sex.”  It’s hard to kill the interest in that class.  I have my days, but not EVERY day…I had brought up Peter Stromberg’s 2007 Culture, Medicine, & Psychiatry article with Mark & Mimi Nichter, “Taking Play Seriously: Low-Level Smoking among College Students,” in an Honors seminar I teach called “Primate Religion & Human Consciousness,” made a smartphone connection, & then noticed them popping up like so many Bics being flicked at  a golden oldies reunion concert.  ”Youth live in an age of increasing time compression, greater opportunities for arousal and diminishing tolerance for boredom, and the proliferation of products that promise instant gratification (Starace 2002),” the authors point out (2007:7).  As I say, I have resisted the “these young people today” sentiments, but perhaps there is something to it.  Stromberg, who has written the book Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You & writes a blog for Psychology Today called ”Sex, Drugs, & Boredom,” draws on the evolution of play literature to frame young adult cigarette smoking behavior as “play,” & I find myself quite taken with this idea.

Developmentally, play is how we build & test social contingencies or “scenario-build,” as Richard Alexander laid out in his seminal article “Evolution of the Human Psyche.”  Playing is how we superficially test scenarios & test the boundaries of safety, both in social relationships & reality.  So I am pose the question, what do you like to play?  Would anyone say, “I like to play with smoking cigarettes”?  What is the difference between saying, “I like to play knife- & ax-throwing” (which I had just done at a Renaissance Faire-type event) & “I like to play cigarette smoking”?  Both are adult forms of boundary-pushing, safe in moderation & controlled settings but potentially dangerous.  Both can make a person look cool if done right or a ridiculous caricature if not.  And then if I’m a knife-thrower, when I’m not throwing my knives, what do I do with them?  I may try to keep them safely in my…(what? pants pocket?)…er, I may find myself picking my teeth with them, cleaning my nails, even while I talk to you.   Thru obtaining some mastery of them, they now become my props with which I pivot around social space.

What person lights his or her first cigarette saying, “I want to be a smoking addict & be compelled to smoke a pack or more a day despite the unpleasant breath, reduced senses of taste & smell, lingering odor, frequent sore throat, & higher risk for all forms of cancer & emphysema”?  But, in this day & age, who doesn’t know it comes with a risk when they first inhale?  The same is true of alcohol, drugs, sky-diving, driving fast cars–hell, playing football (sorta big in my neck of the woods)!  These are all obvious, intuitive.  Yes, we play football–”play” is in the very way it is expressed.  We don’t say, “I’m going footballing” (well, not in the U.S., at any rate).  You get my meaning.  So what is qualitatively different about smoking?  As Stromberg points out, not much.  We start off smoking even though we know it’s bad for us, because, well, probably there are a lot of reasons.  Smoking is, Stromberg & his colleagues point out, “socially engineered (advertised) to be an antidote for boredom (Mark Nichter 2003)” (2007:7).

I smoked because it looked cool.  I still think some people simply look cool holding & smoking a cigarette, & I thought I was one of them.  I stopped but not because I wanted to.  It just wasn’t worth it anymore.  Same with drugs.  Few people smoke a first joint & say, ”I want to die a drug addict.”  As the authors say, “both drinking and smoking served to structure the unstructured situation of the party through routines of consumption” (Stromberg, Nichter, & Nichter 2007:8).  I wanted to know what I was missing, how to be social like those people, how to feel light like they looked, how to feel more comfortable in my own skin, how to be bolder, better, more free, more laid, all that…And it worked.  That’s the magic of it.  And this is all the exact same thing as boredom.  When I’m not bored, I do not think about what I look like to other people or what I might be missing out on because I am busy doing.

Not only does the cigarette or other pivot structure an ambiguous situation, it “promotes social interaction, contributing to an atmosphere of egalitarian comaraderie” (Stromberg, Nichter, & Nichter 2007:9), a factor I also have found to be true.  Smoking provides an embodied feeling of belongingness, “something Csordas (1993) has described using the term ‘somatic mode of attention’” (Stromberg, Nichter, & Nichter 2007:11).  There was a Friends episode once where Rachel took up smoking so she could go out with her coworkers on smoke breaks, as obviously there was significant bonding & structuring of extrastructural time going on, such that decisions being made in favor of other members of the smoking club in her absence.  I distinctly remember this feeling of being part of something, both when I started drinking & smoking.  It takes a lot of work for some of us to socialize without a prop when much of the world is oriented around consumption.  When I played in bands, the long hours spent sitting in bars after load-in until showtime, including waiting for all the other bands to play, was incredibly fucking boring.  In my last band, I used to have to go take walks around the neighborhoods of whatever city we were in while the others sat in the club in some town we’d never been to & drank & smoked.  Extrastructural time.  What do you do with it?  My wife has recently taken up knitting.  I get it.

What is so interesting about smoking & drinking to fill these spaces is that they are not innocuous substances.  They come with great risk.  No one takes the risk without the promise of experiencing something.  Gosh, I remember doing incredibly stupid things & remember them with relish.  I would never want to take them back & not just because I’d be doomed to do something else stupid & might not be so lucky the next time.  Gloriously, ridiculously stupid acts have the potential to be so life-altering.  Life-altering things are important things, right?  Having kids was life-alteringly important.  Getting married was life-alteringly important.  And we play at both of those things before they happen.  ”Play activity is closely patterened after something that already has a meaning in its own terms” (Goffman 1986:40).  We play around them because they have tremendous potential import.

Of my late teens & early 20s, I am most proud of what some might have considered the most stupid things I ever did but that in testing the limits of my own capacities were, personally, incredibly important.  I used to take mulitple hits of acid to see how out of my mind I could get.  I remember once being in a predicament wherein I had to drive the half hour home at 4AM thru downtown Indianapolis even though I had lost a reflexive motor sense of how to put the key in, turn on the car, put it in gear, turn the wheel, etc.  I felt like I was in a hovercraft going 20MPH & the actions of the car had nothing to do with the actions of my hands & body.  Another time I remember walking across a rotted out train trestle in the dark my friends knew about.  The next day I saw it was about 100 feet up over a ravine.  I wouldn’t do it again, mind you, but I am pleased for that playful night.  When I moved to NYC, I used to get smashed drunk & pass out on subways, riding back & forth all night long.  One night I kept dozing off & missing my stop, crossing the platform at the next stop to the return train, missing it again.  Finally, the car was getting fuller & fuller with people & I ran into some co-workers on their way to work, & there I was still trying to get home.  Fortunately, I worked in the music industry where play like that was par for the course.  I always say, everything in moderation, even the extremes, which I believe expresses the same principle.

Smoking & drug use are obvious risk behaviors adults play with, but there are many others, more & less obvious.  Anything associated with “at-risk” behavior starts as a form of play–sex, body modification, joining gangs, skipping school (which I also did once or twice to play & have fun but was so nerdy at that point I ended up at the library working on a report so I wouldn’t get behind)–but so does joining a cult.  I experienced the same awkward nervousness upon entering a Pentecostal revival meeting in my first anthropological research endeavor but ultimately enjoyed playing at praying & the charisms, which make for fantastic pivots (if you can’t think of what to do or say, just shout “Jesus!”).  Not that I am calling Pentecostalism cultish, but they both provide compelling props to fill all manner of interstitial spaces & can really string you out & take over your life, for better or worse.  As Stromberg et al point out, play is what we do in those periods of our day that are not scheduled, wherein we have no plans for our minds or bodies.  These are the chunks that the religions like to get hold of, to give us some more structure/ritual, these are the “idle hands” moments.

Probably most of the time such pivotal exploration is adaptive, or it would not be so ubiquitous.  Sometimes it is maladaptive.  We poke at the fire, we see if it burns.  We smoke a cigarette, we take a drink, we eat a potato chip, we push the envelope to see what will happen.  Sometimes kids doing stupid things while on acid or drunk get killed, sometimes smokers get cancer & die, sometimes people who use potato chips as props grow obese & contract type II diabetes & cardiovascular disease…right?  Sometimes.  So I would say, for instance, that someone who sky-dives or bunjie-jumps or drives race cars is no more crazy than someone who smokes cigarettes or plays with a smartphone.  It’s all on a continuum of playing with risk.

Pull out your smartphone in my class again

Now, back to smartphones.  What is risky about them?  I don’t know.  This is not a neat & tidy unitary theory where play = risk or anything like that.  A smartphone in the hands of a student while you’re teaching class is certainly a prop that they’re playing with because they’re bored or stressed or something.  I learned a trick from a colleague to bribe the students to keep the phones put away.  The whole class gets an increasing amount of extra credit on the final if no one pulls one out all semester, but if one person violates that, everyone loses.  It’s like Full Metal Jacket, where Pyle eats the donut while the whole platoon does push-ups as punishment for his error.  You remember what they did to Pyle?  Then he went postal.  So if you pull your goddamn smartphone out my class again…

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Assholes and Self-Deception

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Christopher Lynn

 

cad

Findings just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Kristina Durante et al. indicate that women are hormonally deluded during ovulation to believe that hot guys will stick around. This is a crass way of saying what we already know–we’re all self-deceptive when it comes to having what we want. Read a summary of the article here, but the long & the short of it is an extension of the dad/cad paradigm (that women would prefer less roguish but faithful & resourceful “dad” types for marriage but more roguish & less faithful & resourcing “cad” types for short-term affairs).

dad

I often trot dad/cad slides out in class for students when demonstrating classic evo psy experiments in human mate selection, using the dad from 7th Heaven & Johnny Depp as “Captain Jack Sparrow” as the cad, & it works every time. Honestly, I’m surprised because, like some but not all students, I’d still pick Jack Sparrow over 7th Heaven guy even knowing he’d leave me. And I’m not alone. Durante et al. wanted to know why women, whose eggs are a valuable resource in limited supply (don’t you remember your moms always saying that growing up, ladies? “your eggs are precious, dear. build your nest & guard them well.” no?), so frequently put themselves in a bind by hooking up with hot asshole guys with reputations for being letharios, convince themselves that the guy has changed, they’ve changed him, will be a good dad, etc., then get themselves knocked up & get predictably left high & dry with a babe in arms. This is not a socioeconomic phenomenon–it’s ubiquitous, apparently. So without checking on that presumption, let’s take it at face value & proceed to the findings, which are that women, in three studies that included college-age & community-based samples, when ovulating, experience perceptual shifts such that they are more likely to believe in their current mate’s good intentions.  Hmm…

Now, mind you, I have yet to read this article. I preface with this because it connects directly with what I have been reading, which is a 2010 chapter by Robert Trivers called “Deceit & Self-Deception” in Kappeler & Silk’s Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universals. Trivers has been modeling self-deception from an evolutionary perspective since his introduction to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, culminating in his recent 2011 book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. Much of this chapter is reiterated in that book, which I have read in parts, & both restate to some extent what he laid out in his 2010 article, though he has a more elaborated theory now.

The crux for me is an operationalizable definition of self-deception as “hiding true information from the conscious mind in the unconscious.” The classic model for this was demonstrated in a 1979 study by Ruben Gur & Harold Sackeim in which voices of self & other were played back & subjects were asked to indicate which voices they recognized & which they did not. Even when the conscious mind did not recognize one’s own voice, galvanic skin response measures indicated familiarity, suggesting that true information was known to the sub-conscious but was not getting through to conscious awareness. Even more interesting is that by priming responders by deceptively criticizing their performance as being high in false positives, the respondents denied their own voices more but their GSR spiked even higher.  According to Trivers, this suggests an imperative for self-deception (& this is significant for findings in a study I am currently analyzing & will share more on later).

Trivers suggests that humans have a general tendency toward self-deceptive enhancement, to promote oneself positively, which has been validated by fMRI studies showing suppression of thought occurs in the dorsolateral prefrontal area. He also points to evidence in the primate line. As relative neocortical size increases, so does the frequency of deceptive acts. The same is true in human children over the course of development. As children become increasingly intelligent with age, their rates of social manipulation increase.  We intuitively know & have experienced that but coupled with other findings that “natural variation in intelligence, corrected for age, is positively correlated with deception in children (Lewis unpubl. data),” we begin to see the pattern of self-limiting on awareness as cortical elaboration increases.

There is an extensive body of literature in social psychology, philosophy, economics, & other fields on self-deception, but Trivers has continually criticized the lack of studies seeking to elucidate its neural mechanisms or evolutionary frame.  He told me as much in 2001, when I was applying to Rutgers for grad school, that he had laid out a rough model for someone to pursue but didn’t have the time to test it himself.  It seems that it must nag at him, as he keeps coming back to it & adding more to the theory, piece by piece.  But he is nonetheless critical of the proximal studies, for they are comfortable resting on the analogy that self-deception is like the immune system & protects happiness like the immune system protects health–too little self-deception & we are pained by consciousness, too much & we are hopelessly deluded (Gilbert 2006).

This defense mechanism model is an elegant analogy but fails to consider the extreme variability & moving target that is human happiness, in addition to how truly unimportant it may be with respect to reproductive fitness.  Or, perhaps more accurately, momentary happiness may be important, the kind that leads an otherwise intelligent woman to believe a compulsive womanizer has changed for her (kinda like a male believing a stripper really likes him?), but long-term happiness may be no more important than a sense of duty or acceptance or any number of other nebulous states of being.  What Trivers does not come right out & say in this chapter but does in other articles & much of his life’s work is that reproduction is the name of the game, because it–whatever it is–has to get carried by genes to the next generation.  So if making someone self-deceptively happy to convince him or her to have sex with you is important, timing is everything.

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Fireside Trance and the Boob Tube

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Christopher Lynn

Bukowski picture I drew sometime in 2009 or 2010

When I was in my early 20s & wanted to be the next Charles Bukowski, I used to hang out at a bar called Coney Island High on St. Mark’s Place in NYC after work. Consistent with the Bukowski schtick, I went there nearly every day & because I could drink for free. I could drink for free because my band played there once a month for nothing, or in exchange for free drinks whenever Roger, the bartender who booked us, was working. The bar was upstairs & dark. There were a few regulars w/ whom I made a little small talk, but very little, as, frankly, I wasn’t very good at small talk. What I did was sit there & drink Jack & Cokes & stare at the TVs over the bar. The TVs played endless loops of ’60s burlesque, topless dancers w/ giant breasts who could make the tassels on their nipples spin in opposing directions. The sound was muted, as Roger preferred to listen to music. The TVs were simply visual stimulation &, really, utterly monotonous. Not that I have anything against giant spinning breasts–I generally am a big fan–but watching the same thing over & over, the same thing that never went anywhere, the same thing that had no other sensory component, drove me a bit batty. Yet watch I did. Our eyes were drawn to it, as I was not the only one sitting w/ a drink & blankly staring at the screen, & it was not just the male barflies but the females too.

My kids zoned out watching an itsy bitsy baby TV (photo by my mom).

Flash forward a decade & a half, & I am at the pediatrician’s office w/ my three kids. The exam room has TVs in that pick up Cartoon Network (thank gawd at least we’ve advanced from the years of being stuck in those interminable rooms w/ a forgotten magazine back in the “waiting” room–isn’t there a Seinfeld episode about how the exam room is just another waiting room & how they must feel obliged to make you wait since, indeed, it is called the “waiting room”?), & my kids are staring googly-eyed at the screen. At least they aren’t fighting. But we tell them, when the doctor comes in, they need to pay attention to the doctor. So the doctor comes in &, sure enough, they are in a trance & pay her no mind. The doctor mutes the TV & goes about the exam. We discuss amputating the children’s limbs & they are totally zoned, don’t express alarm whatsoever. I’m kidding. We didn’t discuss amputation, but we did discuss something important & a bit alarming, which normally would raise anxiety in the kids. The point is that, even w/ the sound off, the kids were transfixed. Not only did it captivate them visually, their thalamocorticol gating system was keeping everything else out apparently too. Fascinating, right?

When I was in grad school, I took a seminar course with Sean Rafferty in Cognitive Archaeology, & one of the readings was ”Shamanic healing, human evolution, and the origin of religion” by James McClenon. McClenon is a sociologist who has published widely on the topic of the shamanistic model of cognitive evolution & the ritual healing hypothesis (see his book, Wondrous Healing). I was unfamiliar with his work at the time & initially thought it seemed a bit hokey (which, as you’ll learn if you follow along, tends to be a good sign that I’ll be intrigued & venture deeper). One comment in particular stood out. He suggested that Homo erectus could have been selected for prosocial behavior via sitting around fires. He said that fires were hypnotic inductors & that H. erectus, as the first hominids to manipulate fires, would have occasion to sit around them & enjoy the trance benefits.

A society’s attitudes and values regarding hypnotizability affect fertility of those with the trait. The scenario remains plausible since H. erectus probably experienced group ASC around fires 700,000 years ago and H. sapiens could have used shamanic/hypnotic rituals for healing for over 30,000 years. There was sufficient time for a modest genotype selection mechanism to have meaningful impact.

Those benefits, he suggested, would have included calming effects, which others would have found pleasing. Those individuals more susceptible to being calmed would be more pleasant to be around. Thus, McClenon proposed fire had a selective influence in favoring people who could be prosocially calmed at the expense of those who persisted in stomping around pissed off in the dark.

My initial reaction was not to poo-poo the hypothesis altogether, as trance states are my primary research interest, & it made a lot of sense. What struck me was his evidence-less assumption that fires are hypnotic. Are they? Anecdotally, most would agree. But when I went looking for confirmation, I could find no data to support it. Hence, a study was born.

I thought I could do a quick & dirty study of the influence of staring at a fire, publish a brief write-up, & have a reference for people to cite when they were talking about the importance of fire, which many people do, just seldom in this way. Alarm bells should be sounding for you if you’re an anthropologist. In our field, there is no such thing as a quick & dirty study. So what I intended to bang out over a semester in my spare time by recruiting Colonie Mall goers in Albany, NY (where they have a fireplace I thought I could use) has turned into 6 semester project w/ a variety of researchers & methods. But actually, that’s been a good thing. What I initially considered a cheap & easy way to get a pub out (which hasn’t happened yet, mind you) has been immensely interesting to a wide variety of people & led me to continue & to expand the study. As I will be discussing at the AAA conference this fall, it has turned into a fantastic learning exercise for undergraduate researchers in neuroanthropology.

As the project has developed & I have thought thru the implications of this hypothesis, it occurred to me that the compelling nature of a fire, that flickering that draws us in, is similar to the influence of TVs, which we watch even when we don’t want to. It was at this point that I recalled my days sitting in Coney Island High, staring at TV breasts even when I didn’t want too, or my children tuning everything else out to stare at a muted TV. I thought perhaps there is an “ecological trap” here, a behavior naturally selected for that we have overindulged, like sugar, salt, & fat, in that now we have problems with things like TV addiction. It also occurred to me that the fascination with lava lamps in the ’70s may have had the same allure & that fish tanks, not just real ones but the ones we use as screen savers, or even those stars that fly at us when our monitors have been dormant too long, all pull us in & allow our eyes to focus while we zone out. Keith Jacobi, a friend & colleague who conducts forensics for the State of Alabama, suggested that the fascination arsonists have with watching the things they set on fire, even to the point of risking being caught, may be rooted in the same phenomenon…

Up next, fireside trance & cyberdependence!

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Evolutionary Clinical Stuff at HBES 2012

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Daniel Glass

The 2012 Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico has posted its schedule (available here), and I’m thrilled to report that clinical content is well-represented! There is an entire talk section entitled “Darwinian Challenges to DSM and Treatment Paradigms,” including presentations by Ed Hagen, an anthropologist who has dealt with evolutionary approaches to drug use and postpartum depression, among other topics, and Paul Andrews & J.A. Thomson, who have published on adaptive hypotheses of depression.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s also a second talk session called “Mental Health and Personality.” I’ll be speaking at that one about evolutionary perspectives on obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’m in the same talk session as Geoffrey Miller! I’m glad he’s after me so I don’t have to follow him.

Finally, I’m also excited about the “Evolutionary Medicine” session–both since evolutionary medicine is a strong interest of mine, and because there’s some more evolutionary clinical psych stuff scheduled.

Register here ASAP! Today (May 8th) is the last day of early-bird registration!

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Wrangham’s “Catching Fire” and Selection for Calmness

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Christopher Lynn

Several years back sociologist James McClenon speculated in a 1997 article in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion that selection for prosocial calmness took place in Homo erectus when they started manipulating fire. I took issue with this, not because it is not plausible, but because he presented it as a “just-so” story with no supporting evidence. For several years running now, I have been engaged in exploring this hypothesis, which I will blog more about in the near future. However, when Mel Konner was on campus a few years ago for an ALLELE lecture, Catherine Buzney, one of the grad students then in my research group, was kind enough to tell him about our study, & it turns out he was intrigued. He recommended I check out Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. I ended up assigning it as part of my undergraduate “Introduction of Physical Anthropology” course to give myself the opportunity to read it. In addition to a fascinating synthesis of evidence to support his “cooking hypothesis,” Wrangham speculates similar to McClenon:

If the intense attractions of a cooking fire selected for individuals who were more tolerant of one another, an accompanying result should have been a rise in their ability to stay calm as they looked at one another, so they could better assess, understand, and trust one another. Thus the temperamental journey toward relaxed face-to-face communication should have taken an important step forward with Homo erectus. As tolerance and communication ability increased, individuals would have become better at reaching a mutual understanding, forming alliance, and excluding the intolerant. Such changes in social termperament would have contributed to a growing ability to communicate, including the evolution of language. (2009:185)

I will post soon on how McClenon implies that “fireside trance” may have influenced a relative human calmness & some of the implications for this.

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Biological Anthropology Blogs

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Christopher Lynn

John Hawks is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who I first saw give a talk at the American Anthropological Association conference last year.  The first thing that caught my attention was that he looks like a pre-emo hipster intellectual from the East Village–e.g., like one of my people!  Dig the great hat!  Second, he was using Prezi for his presentation, which I’d never seen before, & it was such an elegant nonlinear showcase it blew my mind (perfect for moving back & forth throughout a phylogenetic bush).  Third, his Twitter feeds kept popping up at the top of his presentation, which he totally ignored (I’m not sure he meant that & it was a bit distracting, but he didn’t bat at eye–sort of like Gordon Gallup showing his whale penis slide–you’re thinking, “doesn’t he see what we see up there?! how can he just keep talking all seriously?”).  I thought, “wow, he’s really plugged in.”  Little did I know.  Fourth, his “Scars of Evolution” talk (this was the session title; I forget his talk title) was awesome.  Afterward, I started reading his blog here & there & found out, five, John Hawks knows some serious shit about paleogenetics.  Six, he was trained by Milford Wolfpoff, who has fought the good fight to keep the multiregional hypothesis alive for decades now, in the face of tons of data to support the out-of-Africa model (actually, it’s good he did, because it’s really come to some accommodation of the two, but who wants to give up the name of a model with brand recognition?).  Uh, seven, John is mapping the genome of Denisovans!  I just found out about them last year.  Am I that out of it?  Where the hell did the Denisovans come from (I know, I know, I read the pieces here & there, but it seemed like all of a sudden we have another Homo species & it wasn’t a bigger event than it was?)?  And, eight, John blogs practically every day.  Sometimes multiple times a day.  I have to remember this tidbit from John’s first post from this past Sunday when I’m teach paleo this fall:

The null model for early Homo should be the kind of evolutionary pattern that we now know to be true for Late Pleistocene humans. Multiple populations, much more highly differentiated than today’s human populations, existed during the Late Pleistocene and exhibited nonuniform patterns of expansion and mixture. The expansions of some groups within and outside Africa were likely driven by gene-culture coevolution, as both technological changes and physiological changes affected population growth. We are beginning to appreciate that similar episodes of expansions and mixture happened throughout the Pleistocene. The origin of our genus, initiating the first expansions of hominins into Eurasia, was surely driven by a similar process.

I like how John justifies academic blogging as a means of organizing notes/thoughts for other purposes, such as academic papers, grants, & teaching. This is particularly important for those of us fearing that it feels precariously close to the kind of things we do to look like we’re busy doing important stuff while avoiding doing other more important stuff, namely, getting manuscripts together & submitted & getting grant proposals out toward earning tenure. How do we justify blogging before tenure? Make it part of the work flow. And several bloggers of the digital anthropology mindset have made cases for blogging as a way to make anthropology relevant now & to get out work out there as part of the discussion without having to wait the several years after collecting data to send one stripped down paper off for publication, then another a year later, etc. I won’t backtrack thru all their names, but suffice to say, this idea was not mine but is certainly what got me motivated to contribute.

So now I want to inspire my students to do the same, & the way I’m thinking of doing that is to require blogging as a part of our graduate seminar in biological anthropology that I teach this fall. So, for one, I’m figuring out how to start a WordPress blog.  And two, I’m trying to figure out how to make it useful & integrative for them, so I welcome ideas.  My thoughts so far are as follows:

  • Assign 1-2 students to summarize the readings for each class as a blog entry, & assign the rest to comment on that summary–to indicate what they didn’t understand, didn’t agree with, found interesting or new, or whatever.
  • Require the students to post about their own research ideas & encourage them to post entries detailing their process thru the course of the semester.

But I know they’ll be overwhelmed with taking our Methods course & all manner of other first-year freakout-breakdown-o-mania, so I’m trying to brainstorm on how to use it productively & in a way that will facilitate their integration into the discipline instead of bog them down. Toward that end, perhaps the first task is to compile a resource list of other biological anthropology blogs out there, so we can look for inspiration & ideas. So I am going to start compiling them here, & I hope others will send me links to the many out there that I don’t know.  Actually, I’m sure someone else has already put this list together, so feel free to direct me there. The sheer density of people blogging out there is a little astounding. Just looking at the Psychology Today list of bloggers kind of sends me reeling, but then I find a host of people I know or know of but didn’t know were blogging, so I start reading. Actually, I have to grade papers now, so I’ll save them to my RSS Feed & read some later.

For now, here’s the beginning of a list of biological anthropologist blogs:

And a great way for students (or anyone blogging) to find out about current topics that they might want to write about or where the digital biological anthropology community is getting their gossip, there are a few VERY handy news feeds:

 

*Non-PhD–My point in making this qualification is not to undermine the credibility of anyone’s contributions but just the opposite–to point out to my students who I will be directing to this page that many non-PhD anthropologists already are & always have been very actively contributing to the discipline (& many far more insightfully than me, I might add), including anthropologically trained science writers who make us all look good.


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Improving an Introduction to Evolutionary Studies Course

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Christopher Lynn

As usual, I’m inspired by a few other recent blogs–namely Adam van Arsdale’s, Holly Dunsworth’s, & John Hawks’s (who is ingeniously focusing on the evolution of one body part at a time & actually posting his lectures here; maybe we can have him give one when he visits us for our lecture series in December) discussions of improvements they’re attempting to their Introduction to Biological Anthropology courses–to write a similar post myself.

I am just wrapping up a semester of teaching our introductory course to the EvoS minor, “Evolution for Everyone,” am reading student research proposals, & comments about the course & thinking thru the next iteration for spring 2013.  The trick with the design of this course is that it is “team-taught,” in that I provide a few structural lectures but otherwise coordinate what I keep referring to as a “Whitman’s Sampler” approach to our EvoS minor, by having a series of guest lectures by other professors who teach courses in the minor give sort of mini-intros to their disciplines.  While I thought it worked pretty well the first time around last spring, this semester’s iteration felt more disjointed to me, & it took me longer to get a feel for the students.  So the trick will be to (1) keep what was good about this & the last run of the course, which I think is the guest lectures & the integration of our ALLELE series expert speakers & (2) fix the lack of continuity by thinning out the modules & doing more structural work.

The basic outline of the class starts with me giving an intro to evolutionary concepts & mechanisms.  The students are generally cross-disciplinary & there is a healthy mix of bio/anthro/psych/chem types & non-science majors.  They all seem genuinely interested in knowing more about evolution, with most of the non-science kids having only pop cultural exposure previously.  This year I cut back on the cell biology so as not to overwhelm the non-bio people, since the rest of the course does not deal as much in mechanics as it does in concepts.  However, that was a mistake, as the students really missed exposure to the fundamental principles of molecular evolution, even if they didn’t quite follow when I gave those lectures.  Lesson learned.  No matter how much students gripe about learning Hardy-Weinberg in other courses, these kids need it.

From there, I tried to bring in speakers from other departments at my university who could address the topics in the class as I might normally teach it when following the typical textbooks:  some history & background on Darwin & the historical & philosophy of science that informed his theory of natural selection, some of the mechanics of natural selection & population biology, human history (paleoanthro), & then some topics in biological variability

For the history of science (that whole Aristotle, Buffon, Cuvier, Lyell, Lamarck, Malthus section of any intro to Darwinian theory) I invited Renee Raphael, a historian of science, who introduced students to the cultural tensions between Darwin’s thesis & natural theology, Paley’s watchmaker concept, & so on.  She brings in primary sources for the students to read & analyze, but I see & hear the difficulty they have sympathizing with the 19th century ideology that was more philosophical than what we would today consider “scientistic.”  In defense of my students, I have found them to be largely self-selected staunch secularists, angry at the intensity of Baptist hellfire & brimstone of their largely Deep South upbringings & ongoing environment, so they are actually far more reactionary against & less sympathetic to religious ideals than I am.

The first year I had students read David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution for Everyone & articles assigned by each speaker to accompany their lectures.  Those were not well-integrated into the course & the students never seemed to have read them, so this year I assigned just three tradebooks instead.  During this section of the course I had students read David Quammen’s The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, which I really like a lot but I’m not sure was quite right for these nacent evolutionists so early in the course.

The next module was by Fred Andrus, who teaches geological sciences.  He sets a great tone for the antiquity of the world & emphasizes how long this has been accepted by 18th century capitalists because of their quest to understand how to find coal to fuel the industrial revolution.  This blew my mind the first time I heard him lecture on the topic, & he has straight-forward lectures with one straight-forward & simple message each lecture (he is truly a genius at uncomplicating things).  I especially like his activities, including labeling a roll of toilet paper with geological timespans (humans being on the very last sheet natch–which, in all fairness, I saw David Strait do a version of when I used to TA for him at SUNY Albany, which he doubtless adopted from Fred Grine or someone at SUNY Stony Brook) & the visit to our own campus Natural History Museum.  Last year he was going to take us to rock outcropping to see the coal strata (& light it to prove it burns), but it rained; &, sadly, this year the outcropping had become unstable.

I have hosted three biologist modules over the last two iterations, including Leslie Rissler‘s module on evolutionary biology & speciation last year & this year, since Leslie (co-director of the EvoS minor) is off being an NSF program director, her post-doc Jen Sheridan filled in & provided a much-needed intro to Mendelian genetics (since I shamefully left it out) & a lecture on frog ecology, her specialty (which was awesome!).  Both years animal behaviorist Ryan Earley has given fantastic lectures on cooperation, deception, & alternative mating strategies, presenting primary research papers & examples from his own studies of signaling behavior & deception in fish.  He is great & we share a lot of theoretical interests.

Last year I gave three lectures on evolutionary medicine, primates & paleoanthropology, & religion signaling behavior (my research interest).  This year I just did the one lecture on evolutionary medicine but stepped aside on the other two to give the students more variety.  I invited our new linguist Matthew Wolfgram to give two lectures on the evolution of language, which I really enjoyed.  However, I realized that my 3-lecture interlude last year, at a point where the students were starting to get the hang of things, really gave me an opportunity to connect with them & get to know them a bit.  This year that did not happen until nearly the end.

Instead of providing them any continuity, I hosted three more guest lectures by cognitive psychologist David Boles, social psychologist Rosanna Guadagno (check out Rosanna’s study on personality factors of people likely to be bloggers), & philosopher Richard Richards.  While I loved all of their modules & learned a lot, as usual, the students had difficulty keeping up with the continual changing of pace.  Because, in addition to all these starts & stops, we hosted four of our usual outside evolution lecturers, who all stopped by for a discussion or presentation (including Eugenie Scott & Greta Schiller, Brian Fagan, Ryosuke Motani, & Frans de Waal), as well as an impromptu visit from behavioral ecologist Andy Sih.  And the students loved these opportunities but could not really digest them.

As mentioned, the students were also required to read three tradebooks, which, in addition to the Quammen & Wilson titles, included Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane, which ultimately bored me a bit.  We didn’t quite finish that one.  And we read articles by the outside speakers so the students would have a basis for discussion, which didn’t always happen.  They often sat there mute while I nervously drove the discussion by asking ridiculous questions to which I already knew the answers.  The only motivation the students had to actually read the books otherwise was a quiz I administered every class, drawn from the reading.

Finally, the students were required to compose a 3-page research proposal founded in evolutionary theory but focused on a topic within their own majors that I discussed at the beginning of the semester when I lectured on the scientific method & hypothesis testing but didn’t mention again until the class before it was due.  Most of them forgot, so I had to give an extension.  And they were administered two multiple choice tests.

Ironically, in my opinion, as I could feel the course veering off as I sat in the back of the room observing & taking notes for exam questions, the students gave really positive feedback about in general, though they as often echoed my sentiments.  But even better, they offered a lot of constructive criticism that I want to try to implement as follows, which will hopefully work (I’ll let you know) & provide a template for others who can’t, as some other programs do, offer two separate intro to evolution & modular seminar-style courses:

  • I will organize the course into three sections that I’m modeling on the recent Consilience Conference in St. Louis.  I will provide a more substantive intro, then proceed with a natural sciences module (e.g., biology, geology, etc.), then a social sciences module (anthropology, psychology, etc.), & end with a humanities module (history, philosophy, English, etc.).
  • Each guest lecturer will give fewer lectures & only on Thursdays (it’s a Tuesday/Thursday class).  Students will be assigned relevant research papers on those days that relate to the lecture & give them some exposure to research methods.
  • On Tuesdays I will facilitate the flow of the course with activities & discussions.  We will do group activities to discuss research design & hypothesis testing (which they sorely needed guidance on, I now realize), so students can refine a proposal over the course of the semester thru classroom work, not over one week on their own.  I will assign reading from Wilson’s Evolution for Everyone for those days during the first half of the semester, as I think he does a great job of presenting a breadth of “roll-your-sleeves-up” evolutionary study design in that book, with compelling implications for classroom application & life.  During the 2nd half, I will again assign the Quammen book, when perhaps they are more interested in a lighter read about Darwin’s life & process.
  • Outside lectures will stay as they are, but I will require that students write up questions in advance to ask during our discussions & give some credit (extra?) to those who actually ask them.  I will collect the questions afterward & penalize students who didn’t compose any.
  • And students always want more activities & field trips.  Maybe we’ll go to the zoo & see the primates.  That’s always fun.  Maybe we will go fossil hunting.  Alabama has some of the richest fossil beds in the country, I hear, & have yet to vist them.  What else?  I am open to suggestions…
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Northern New England Values and Evolutionary Psychology: The Granite State Rocked

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Glenn Geher

Several years ago, when David Zehr, an academic dean at Plymouth State University in upstate NH, offered to host NEEPS one year – some of us thought this was almost too good to be true. That would be the folks in the group who’d lived in NH and who know just how special this place was. So that was Kathy and me (who each spent 5 years in grad school at UNH out on the Seacoast), Sarah Strout, who’d spent some time in Manchester at SNHU, and our President, Rosemarie Sokol Chang, who was raised in the White Mountains of the Granite State – a fact that explains pretty much everything there is to understanding Rose (except her conspicuous absence of a large motorcycle that she’d likely call “her hawg.”) Otherwise, she’s New Hampshire through and through.

And from a cultural evolution perspective, New Hampshire has a lot to teach the world. Folks from NH derive from simple wood folks – who permeate the thousands of acres of forest that cover the state – nearly from top to bottom. European settlers in the 17th century had a lot of work ahead of them. They needed to build shelters, churches, schools, and stores. They needed to make determinations regarding travel – creating new forms of travel, when needed. The early settlers of New England (who came to Dover along the sea in 1623, looking for a place to settle) were plenty prepared for the enormous task ahead. And think what they had to overcome:

1. Winter extremes beyond anything they’d every seen back in England (where snow was a rarity at best).

2. Not-yet developed agriculture – with most of the claimed land owned by natives – who had little time or understanding for people from afar who were not trained in their languages and ways.

3. Kin members distributed broadly across two continents – and relations with these new people (called “Indians,” for reasons of historical accident – a common cause of the names of things) as ambivalent – on the good days.

4. The Europeans who succeeded in settling places like beautiful New Hampshire, clearly had some strong values – values and patterns that can be well understood from the perspective of Evolutionary Psychology.

- Europeans who succeeded in settling Northern New Hampshire worked in groups – they came in groups – and these groups served as a social core for their lives. Having a built-in group of helpers, including a mixture of kin and non-kin, is a great formula for getting things done cooperatively and efficiently. If you need a house built quickly and well, I’d say to hit up a group of cooperating Amish who have tool sets – rather than 5 randomly chosen college kids. No offense, College, but groups with norms that dictate cooperative and helpful behavior – and (literally) community building – outcompete a group of college students with some tasks any day.  (and this is OK if you’re in college – because college is all about learning – you’re not supposed to be experts on life at this point – not yet!)

Why did cooperation evolve to come typify our species? Probably because the benefits to the cooperating group were so huge (you all get a roof over your heads) and each individual in that group benefits accordingly.

I’d argue that David Zehr and his colleagues at Plymouth State drew upon the work ethic norms of Northern New England to help make NEEPS VI a huge success this year. The culture of a region sits defining in some ways – and New England cultural norms are strong and deep. While not a native Granite Stater, David has been there long enough to get it. If you want to host a fun and successful intellectual conference on evolution in New Hampshire, you’re going to have to get some grass stains on your knees and you may get a few callouses along the way. I know David well enough to know that he realized this was the deal. He and his team are New Englanders, and they expect nothing less than to get some grass stains on their jeans and dirt beneath their nails.

The effort put forth by the Plymouth Team was huge – and the event ran like a well-greased machine. None of the posturing and infighting that would have typified an effort in other parts of the world or the “well, any solution is fine” wishy / washy nonsesnse that may have characterized folks from yet other locales.

These were New Englanders, and getting it done right matters in this part of the world. And working together is axiomatic.

And having New Hampshire Native, Rosemarie Sokol Chang, as president, overseeing things at a higher level, certainly facilitated this successful nuts-and-bolts approach to throwing an academic conference.

At the end of the day, this conference was seamless from top to bottom. Talks were on time, snacks where always there when needed, and all attendees felt totally comfortable about the basics of the conference (internet access? How to get to lunch? How can I hang my poster? etc.). The devil is in the details – and the details were resolved before anyone made it across the Massachusetts state line.

Having such an A-Game in terms of the running of the show, made it so that much more focus could be spent on the issues at hand. What is human nature? How can we define it? Is the human mind a massively modular entity? Can you simulate the real world – with any validity – in psychological research? Will Evolutionary Psychology ever reach its potential? Will clinical psychologists ever pay attention to the awesome work we’re doing? Will we convince every school district in the nation that some part of the social studies curriculum based on human universals may have as much in the way of positive influence as other aspects of the social studies curriculum?

The questions that emerged from NEEPS 2012 were many – and the experience included a great deal of discussing, challenging, questioning, and, most importantly, learning.

I learned a lot – and I trust that the many students in my EP Psychology Lab did too!

I say we follow David Zehr’s lead and take a little New England work ethic to our efforts to make evolutionary psychology bigger, stronger, and more applicable to issues of our everyday lives.

Thank you to David and all the other great folks at Plymouth State who helped make this a truly memorable experience. The NEEPS meme continues forward, upward, and with high fidelity and high fecundity. Next year, Pennsylvania! Let’s see if their woodsmen have the same work ethic that allowed 2012 to be such a huge success. With John Hinshaw at the helm, I have a feeling that we’re in good hands!

NEEPS!!!

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The Poor DSM: Atheoretical, Overpathologizing, and Friendless?

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Daniel Glass

If you know anything about clinical or counseling psychology, chances are you’ve heard of the Diagnostics and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fourth edition. It’s the standard for the identification and diagnosis of mental illness.The fifth edition is slated to come out next year, and has been anticipated almost as breathlessly as the next Song of Ice and Fire book (come to think of it, DSM revisions come out more frequently).

The DSM is written by a committee—some would say “shadowy cabal,” but I’m not that flip—of expert psychiatrists.  While it’s an enormously important book, it has attracted its share of critics of all different theoretical orientations. What’s interesting about these critics is that they all seem to dislike the same things about the DSM, all for different reasons.

Take the recent open letter to the DSM-5 crew, written by the Society for Humanistic Psychology. Since the DSM-5 committee’s proceedings are available for preview, it is possible for fanboys everywhere to sign a petition which says, essentially “I see what you’re doing, and it’s going to suck.” (Incidentally, this is how the world was saved from a Superman movie starring Nicholas Cage, excuses about “budget issues” aside.)

The letter expresses concern that the DSM-5 appears to be lowering diagnostic thresholds, which would make it easier to get a mental illness diagnosis and thus, perhaps, some little pink pills. Remember how people are always talking about how America has underpathologized human behavior, and we need to diagnose more people with mental disorders? Yeah, me neither.

Similarly, the letter also chides the committee for the addition of more mental illness labels such as Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder for children. The existence of this diagnosis implies that some kids get riotously upset not because at least 60% of the adults they encounter on a daily basis are patronizing, domineering jagoffs who try to force them into unnaturally structured and stultifying environments, but because these youngsters have had as-yet-unrecognized mental disorders.

The list goes on…for example, the DSM-5′s wording might not guard well enough against the eventuality of a person being called “disordered” because s/he doesn’t fit the particular sociocultural context in which s/he might reside.

Let me reiterate that this is the Society for Humanistic Psychology pointing out these claims. Psychologists with this orientation are not known for their evolutionarily informed thinking…these professionals are concerned with the implications of slapping a label on someone and pointing, as validation, to a book which supposedly reifies the “mental illness” diagnosis. But evolutionary clinical psychology proponents (the twenty or so of us who are out there, anyway) who have been shaking their heads at the DSM for years and holding out anxious, unrealistic hope for the next release (“Please don’t put rubber nipples on the batsuit, please don’t put rubber nipples on the batsuit!”) are likely to be as disappointed by the DSM-5 as the humanist psychologists, at the same problems brought up in the letter (but for different reasons).

The DSM is admittedly and proudly “atheoretical.” That means it remains neutral to all those pesky quibbling theories of why disorder exists, and instead classifies and defines disorder by symptoms and syndromes, i.e., what the disorders look like. So far, so benign.

“But a diagnostic manual needs a guiding metatheory!” the evolutionary people say (I’ll give you a spoiler–they’re referring to biological evolution). Evolutionary perspectives can help us understand the natural function of the brain, so we can better understand what disorder looks like. Who’s to say that a child who can’t sit silently in a wooden desk from 8am to 3pm with no recess and and a wordless 30 minute lunch break has a mental disorder? Miss Farley? Principal Jenkins? Superintendent Blattenfarb? Maybe they’re the ones who have disorders, those sadists.

If nobody supports the new DSM when it comes out, what happens? Along with the ICD, with which it roughly corresponds, the DSM has been the structural basis of mental disorder diagnosis since 1980 when the third version came out (essentially a successful reboot of the feeble DSM franchise…the first one wasn’t too bad, but Part II completely jumped the shark). Suppose everybody just turns walks away, like rats from an increasingly unpopular ship. Suppose every theoretical orientation writes their own diagnostic manual (like this psychodynamic alternative, the PDM, already in print, that my friend Nick Armenti showed me)…would that be such a bad thing?

Many feel like it wouldn’t. Power to the people! A Balkanized bunch of diagnostic manuals to bust up the monopoly and win adherents via their own merits, rather than just by riding the dynasty. There are whispered rumors of a newly conceived project to complete an evolutionarily informed alternative to the DSM. We all complain about the DSM, but can we do better?

 

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Why New York State Loves Evolution

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Megan Geher

I may be just a kid, but I am smart enough to realize that New York State loves using the concept of evolution to test their students. They may not say “evolution” outright but in my mind “change over time” = evolution. Even the teachers know that on the ELA tests, there is bound to be at least one “change over time” question. On some of our practice tests, the whole essay is targeted to the character’s “change throughout the story.” I assume that even if NYS doesn’t realize they’re using evolution-related concepts in their major tests, they know they are using an awesome idea! Technically, they are testing students, teachers, schools and entire districts on how to comprehend evolution. They might as well have given students David Sloan Wilson’s “Evolution for Everyone” and asked for the change over time from the book. NYS, even not fully understanding evolution, knows that it is a simple way to test students. Some of the questions on the test actually said “a change over time.” This is sort of a good thing, though, because the teachers whose jobs are on the line know what to work on and what to expect. I wonder if the state read “Evolution for Everyone,” if they would then see that their test is aimed towards evolution. They really should attend an evolutionary conference. I don’t exactly know who the state is, but whoever writes the questions loves evolution – perhaps without really knowing it. And even though they love it, the state should know what evolution really is and what it does for the world. In Dan Kruger’s talk during the “evolution in education” workshop at NEEPS, I learned that although many citizens are interested in evolution, very few actually understand what it is they are interested in. Honestly, we should just hand out “Evolution for Everyone” to the world and we evolutionists would be all set. That would solve the love but non-understanding of the amazing evolution. Maybe next time the testing time rolls around, someone from the state will have read David Sloan Wilson’s outstanding book and will fully understand their own questions!

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