Hey baby, check out my large...

Nice quote, from an interesting article:

"[B]iologists believe intelligence, as manifested in things like artistic and musical ability, is such a reliable indicator of underlying genetic fitness that it has been chosen by members of the opposite sex over the millennia. In the ensuing arms race to show off and get a mate it has been exaggerated in the way that a peacock’s tail is. This process of sexual selection, Dr Miller and his followers believe, is the reason people have become so brainy."[1]

Of course exactly what notions of intelligence are being selected seems pretty hazy, but even these might be identified, or identified as to which notions in what historical era of ancient or modern human development were pertinent for such selection.

REFERENCES

[image] Chilmark Research

[1] "Balls and Brains: The quality of a man’s sperm depends on how intelligent he is, and vice versa" The Economist Dec 4th 2008 (Accessed 12/6/2008)

A faceshot a day as he ages away

{ Podcast this essay } Here is a most interesting video of a man who took a picture of his face everyday for eight years. I think the most interesting parts are when his hair grows in, and also when when his beard and mustache grow in. Given his age, there is not much change, if any, in the basic structure of his face, which leads me to believe he was over 25 when he started the project. This would be a far more interesting project if he snapped the pictures between ages 35 and 45, when some distinct facial features begin to be noticeable due to aging. Also, many people tend to see a large increase of gray hair within a certain decade of their life, and so later sets of pictures would capture these more noticeable changes.

I'm not sure if women would rank him high as a potential mating partner or not, since he seems to have conflicting attributes.[1] Of course a lot would depend on what phase the moon is in: "Women have been found to prefer the scent of symmetrical men and relatively masculine male faces more during the fertile (late follicular and ovulatory) phases of their menstrual cycles than during their infertile (e.g., luteal) phases."[2] Such evaluations of male facial structure are not just germane to women either:

Men with highly masculine faces were judged more likely to get into physical fights, challenge their bosses, sleep with many women, cheat on their partners and knowingly hit on someone else's girlfriend. Those with more feminine faces were judged to be more likely to be good husbands, be great with children, work hard at their jobs even though they didn't like them, and be emotionally supportive in long-term relationships.[3]

I also liked the analysis in this article concerning who gets trusted to be the moral-acting bodyguard: "Men picked the less masculine-looking men to accompany their girlfriends on a weekend trip to another city," researcher Daniel Kruger said, "and both men and women would prefer the less masculine versions as dating partners for their daughters."[3]

REFERENCES

"Living My Life Faster - 8 years of JK's Daily Photo Project" vimeo (Accessed 12/15/2007)

[1] "Does he like kids? It's written all over his face. Women can tell whether he's a family man, study finds" MSNBC (Accessed 12/15/2007)

[2] "Facial masculinity and fluctuating asymmetry" Evolution and Human Behavior (Accessed 12/15/2007)

[3] "Does He Love You So? Maybe It Really Is In His Face" Science Daily Jan. 30, 2007(Accessed 12/15/2007)

O.

When did humans first start to murder?

{ Podcast this essay } I have often wondered when murder actually started. Is it something basic to the primate genome? I suspect it is. Chimps will go on raiding parties and kill one another:

It was only [in the 1970s] when researchers learned that one aspect of this shared behavior [with humans] is the proclivity of adult male chimps to attack, maim and kill other adult male chimpanzees whom they discover near their territory. Like gangsters during Prohibition or bounty hunters in the Wild West, male chimpanzees will organize raiding parties to seek out isolated members of other chimpanzee bands and then move in for the kill. In ways that eerily suggest human behavior, life for male chimpanzees is a continual jockeying for status and power.[1]

Bonobo monkeys, who are slightly more removed from humans in evolutionary development, have a different tactic of interaction than chimps:

Bonobos are the Barry Whites [cit.] of the primate world, dedicating their lives to peace, love and, above all, sex. "Bonobos use sex for much more than making babies [...] They have sex as a way of making friends. They have sex to calm someone who is tense. They have sex as a way to reconcile after aggression." Like the members of some adventurous free love commune of the 1960s, bonobos have frequent homosexual sex and condone sex between adults and children. When a bonobo group meets a group of unknown bonobos, they generally mate and socialize with them rather than try to kill them.[1]

Researchers Wrangham and Peterson go on to theorize that millions of years ago, subtle changes in food sources and feeding patterns "allowed the bonobos to stay together in larger communities on their side of the river."[1] Also to the social advantage of bonobos was the ability of female bonobos to hide their ovulation patterns. This ability made it difficult for bonobo males to detect the mating cycle of the female.[1] This, along with longer-term social bonds and the resultant tempering of aggressive urges of males, lessened the need for use of violent behaviors among males to establish dominant mating access.

Chimpanzees, however, did not gain such advantages in food access, and were forced by their environment to "break off into small parties to hunt for their favorite fruit and meat sources."[1]

Not unrelated to the plight of Chimpanzees in their environment, is an article recently posted over at The Center for Science Writing Blogs, which gives a short overview of when the first archaeological evidence for (human) murder was noted. There is discussion on why murder occurred then (around 20,000 years ago) and not earlier, since there were still plenty of humans around. Here's a selection toward the end of the excellent article which essentially reviews professor Sale's thesis:

[I]t is important to see that this kind of interpersonal violence and murder comes rather late in Sapiens development. In fact, for 90 per cent of our time on earth there is nothing to indicate that humans ever reached the extreme state of knocking each other off. It was a reaction to an extreme crisis, it got to be a familiar response to the increased tensions in a time of scarcity and competition, and once established it seems to have continued on. But not because it was in our human nature. Rather it was in the conditions of our life. And therefore the obvious lesson is that we can’t just shrug and say some people are just “born killers,” or “it’s in the blood.” It’s not, and was not for 175,000 years.[2]

This seems to me to parallel the Chimpanzee issue noted above; humans default to one kind of standard primate behavior under certain conditions of scarcity. Until we come up with a cheap energy source to manufacture food and shelter, we can expect this built-in violence proclivity to regularly crop-up in human affairs in the near future. Naturally, as fresh water management and farming patterns are quickly (and adversely) changed by global warming, that nasty part of our genome shared with Chimpanzee heritage will regularly re-assert itself, leading to regional wars for resources.

REFERENCES

[image] Cezanne, Paul The Murder (Le meurtre) c. 1870 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

[1] Daniel Pinchbeck "Men, Monkeys And Mayhem" Washington Post (Accessed 7/22/2007).

[2] Kirkpatrick Sale "Is Murder Human Nature" Center for Science Writings Blog (Accessed 7/22/2007).


O.