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Adaptive Advantages of Behavior
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H O M E -
C R Y P T -
L I N K S
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E P S I L O N
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R S S
Adaptive Advantages of Behavior

Prehistoric Imprinting on Today's Behavior
Evolutionary biologists suggest violence and behavior are to a large extent genetic. But
we humans have another adaptive advantage: We think about these things. Descartes said, "I
think, therefore I am." (I believe that is the exact quote or close enough) Ambrose modified
it to "I think, I think, therefore I think I am."

Studies from researchers at the University of Michigan demonstrate
at least one of the ways `violence and behavior' is belief that it is
sanctioned by biblical scriptures.
"To justify their actions, violent people often claim that God has
sanctioned their behavior...Christian extremists, Jewish reactionaries and
Islamic fundamentalists all can cite scriptures that seem to encourage or
at least support aggression against unbelievers."

umich.edu/)
Violence is coded in our genes. It most assuredly was an advantage for
survival and reproduction at one time in our evolutionary past. But it
survived as a behavioral trait.

David Livingston Smith in The Most
Dangerous Animal wrote:
"Human beings are capable of almost unimaginable violence and cruelty
toward one another, and there is reason to believe that this dogged
aggressiveness is grounded in our genes."
Of course it is. But as Smith points out, ironically, if not the paradox
of being human is our potential for also being kind and altruistic. In
spite of the present state of scientific thought that altruism is
geneticly inclined for kin selection, e.g. the passing on of OUR genes -
or reciprocity because of returned favors - or simply a paradoxical
question which I don't believe has been adequately answered, what then is
the benefit, if not those mentioned?
At the molecular level there is something going on which makes us do things at the
individual level for the benefit of the population and it seems to me all the answers given
are simply the best guess for our time. I say this in spite of how convinced some biologists
are that altruism is valid for the reasons I mentioned. I'm not convinced. Why would anyone
be altruistic to the extreme and sacrifice their life for a stranger from which there is
absolutely no possibility of getting anything in return either to one's family, one's tribe
or in someway be beneficial to any of the genes one carries?

It seems far more likely those genes are not ours to give. And life is pre-set not by any
benefit to us or our kind at all but a program which is resident in our cells because
sometime in history is a memory of cooperation which is atavistic and either has not been
eliminated yet or it is not ever going to be - because it means survival of some molecular
benefit we have yet to discover. Or, the purpose which once was important as an adaptive
advantage may no longer exist at all but the memory of it in our genes is still there.

In combat altruism often happens in moments of confusion. There is no conscious
intention; it is just a sacrifice one makes - so what is the allure to sacrifice our lives?
Why do we have a "death wish" that Freud called it to experience the unknown, the last leg
of the journey of our lives? Is it merely that? A death wish? Perhaps!

Perhaps that is all it is, an inherent death wish, which would tend to go against our
survival instinct, but while there is a tendency to want to know what is unknown it seems
really counter-productive to our survival to take wanting to know something to that extreme. If
that, would it be the exception? And what if what is adaptive doesn't necessary
benefit us now at all, but may have been a benefit to our survival to reproduce in our
prehistoric past? Is destructive adaption behavior some kind of programming like apoptosis,
when cells commit suicide only in this case whole organisms are programmed to commit suicide?
Perhaps it is not what we might rationalize or think it is at all because it is a past behavior
which is an imprint from that past? Or perhaps it is wanting to know what happens next?
Steven Pinker, the reknowned evolutionary psychologist explains it quite succinctly as
part of prehistoric development. He says, "Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone
Age, not the computer age, there is no need to strain for adaptive explanations for
everything we do, such as pornography, drugs, movies, contraception, careerism, and junk
food. Before there was photography, it was adaptive to receive visual images of attractive
members of the opposite sex because those images arose only from light reflecting off
fertile bodies."
Hank Roth
Against nature
(human behavior that seems to have no adaptive advantage)
This article is from Discover,
October 1, 1997

by Steven Pinker
The theory of natural selection seems to conclude that creatures will try to maximize their
genetic propagation. Yet, many human behaviors such as birth control and celibacy, seem to
prevent propagation. The difference between individual behavior and long-term evolutionary
genetics is discussed.
There is an old song by Tom Paxton in which an adult reminisces about a wonderful childhood
toy:
It went ZIP! when it moved,

And POP! when it stopped,

And WHIRRR! when it stood still.

I never knew just what it was

And I guess I never will.
The whimsy of the song comes from the childlike pleasure in a complicated object with an
inscrutable function. When we grow up, we demand to know what an artifact is designed to do.
Coming across a contraption in an antique store, we ask what it is, and when we are told
that it is a cherry pitter, the springs, hinges, and levers all suddenly make sense in a
satisfying rush of insight. This is called reverse engineering. In forward engineering, one
designs a machine to do something; in reverse engineering, one figures out what a machine
was designed to do.
The human body is a wonderfully complex assembly of struts, springs, pulleys, hinges,
sockets, tanks, pipes, pumps, and filters, and since the seventeenth century, when William
Harvey deduced that the valves in veins are there to make the blood circulate, we have
understood the body by reverse engineering it. Even today we can be delighted to learn what
mysterious parts are for. Why do we have wrinkled, asymmetrical ears? Because they filter
sound waves coming from different directions in different ways. The sound shadow tells the
brain whether the source of the sound is above or below, in front of or behind us.
The rationale for reverse engineering living things comes, of course, from Charles Darwin.
He showed how "that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our
admiration" arises not from God's foresight but from natural selection operating over
immense spans of time. Organisms vary, and in each generation the lucky variants that are
better adapted to survival and reproduction take up a larger proportion of the population.
The complicated machinery of plants and animals thus appears to have been engineered to
allow them to survive and reproduce.
The human mind, which produces our behavior, is a product of the brain, another complex
organ shaped by natural selection, and we should be able to reverse engineer it too. And so
we have, for many parts of our psychology. Perception scientists have long realized that our
sense of sight is not there to entertain us with pretty patterns but to grant us an
awareness of the true forms and materials in the world. The selective advantage is obvious:
animals that know where the food, the predators, and the cliffs are can put the food in
their stomachs, keep themselves out of the stomachs of others, and stay on the right side of
the cliff tops. Many of our emotions are also products of natural engineering. Fear keeps us
away from heights and dangerous animals; disgust deters us from eating bodily wastes and
putrefying flesh.
But reverse engineering is possible only when you have an inkling of what a device was
designed to accomplish. We don't understand the cherry pitter until we catch on that it was
designed as a machine for removing pits from cherries rather than as a paperweight or wrist
exerciser. The same is true in biological reverse engineering. Through the 1950s, many
biologists worried about why organisms have body parts that seem to do them no good. Why do
bees have a barbed stinger that pulls the bee's body apart when dislodged? Why do mammals
have mammary glands, which skim nutrients from the mother's blood and package them as milk
for the benefit of another animal?
Today we know that these are pseudo-problems, arising from the wrong idea of what the bodies
of organisms are for. The ultimate goal of a body is not to benefit itself or its species or
its ecosystem but to maximize the number of copies of the genes that made it in the first
place. Natural selection is about replicators, entities that keep a stable identity across
many generations of copying. Replicators that enhance the probability of their own
replication come to predominate, regardless of whose body the replicated copies sit in.
Genes for barbed stingers can predominate because copies of those genes sit in the body of
the queen and are protected when the worker suicidally repels an invader. Genes for mammary
glands can predominate because copies of those genes sit in the young bodies nourished by
the milk.
So when we ask questions like "Who or what is supposed to benefit from an adaptation?" and
"What is a design in living things a design for?," the theory of natural selection provides
the answer: the long-term stable replicators, genes. This has become a commonplace in
biology, summed up in Richard Dawkins's book title The Selfish Gene and in Samuel Butler's
famous quip that a hen is an egg's way of making another egg.
What difference does all this make to reverse engineering the mind? For many parts of the
mind, not much. Vision and fear seem clearly to benefit the perceiver and fearer. But when
it comes to our social lives, where our actions often do not benefit ourselves, it makes a
big difference who or what we take to be the ultimate beneficiary. Mammary glands were
demystified when we realized that they benefit the genes for making the mammary glands  not the copies in the kind actor but the copies likely to be found in the beneficiaries.
We nurture our children and favor our relatives because doing so has a good chance of
helping copies of the genes for nurturance and nepotism inside the children and the
relatives.
In the case of altruistic behavior toward nonrelatives, a different explanation is needed,
but it still hinges on an ultimate benefit to the genes for the altruistic behavior. People
tend to be nice to those who are nice to them. Genes for trading favors with other favor
traders can prosper for the same reason that the partners in an economic trade can prosper:
both parties are better off if what they gain is worth more to them than what they give up.
The theory that human social behavior is a product of natural engineering for gene
propagation came to be known in the 1970s as sociobiology and was summed up by saying that
the brain is a fitness maximizer, or that people strive to spread their genes. It offered a
realization of Darwin's famous prediction in Origin of Species that psychology would be
based on a new foundation, fully integrated into our understanding of the natural world.
But there was one problem with the theory. When we look at human behavior around us, we
discover that the brain-as-fitness-maximizer theory is obviously, crashingly, stunningly
wrong. Much of human behavior is a recipe for genetic suicide, not propagation.
People use contraception. They adopt children who are unrelated to them. They take vows of
celibacy. They watch pornography when they could be seeking a mate. They forgo food to buy
heroin. In India some people sell their blood to buy movie tickets. In our culture people
postpone childbearing to climb the corporate ladder, and eat themselves into an early grave.
What are we to make of this Darwinian madness? One response is to look for subtle ways in
which behavior really might aid fitness. Perhaps celibate people have more time to raise
large broods of nieces and nephews and thereby propagate more copies of their genes than
they would if they had their own children. Perhaps priests and people in childless
households make up for their lack of legitimate offspring by having many clandestine
affairs. But these explanations feel strained, and less sympathetic observers have come to
different conclusions: human behavior has nothing to do with biology and follows arbitrary
cultural norms instead.
To anyone with scientific curiosity, it would be disappointing if human behavior had to be
permanently walled off from our understanding of the natural world. The founders of a new
approach called evolutionary psychology -- the anthropologists Donald Symons and John Tooby
and the psychologist Leda Cosmides, all at the University of California at Santa Barbara --
have shown that it needn't be. When you think it through, they argue, you find that the
gene-centered theory of evolution does not predict that people are fitness maximizers or
gene propagators.
First, natural selection is not a puppet master that pulls the strings of behavior directly.
The targets of selection, the genes buried in eggs and sperm, cannot control behavior
either, because obviously they are in no position to see the world or to move the muscles.
Naturally selected genes can only design the generator of behavior: the package of neural
information -- processing and goal-pursuing mechanisms called the mind.
That is why it is wrong to say that the point of human striving is to spread our genes. With
the exception of the fertility doctor who artificially inseminated patients with his own
semen, the donors to the sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners, and other weirdos, no human
being (or animal) really strives to spread his or her genes. The metaphor of the selfish
gene must be taken seriously: people don't selfishly spread their genes; genes selfishly
spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life,
health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the
next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved
(because healthy, long-lived, loving parents did tend, on average, to send more genes into
the next generation). Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating
themselves. But the two are different. Resist the temptation to think of the goals of our
genes as our deepest, truest, most hidden motives. Genes are a play within a play, not the
interior monologue of the players. As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or
unconscious, are not about genes at all but about health and lovers and children and
friends.
Once you separate the goals of our minds from the metaphorical goals of our genes, many
problems for a naturalistic understanding of human behavior evaporate. If altruism,
according to biologists, is just helping kin or exchanging favors, both of which serve the
interests of one's genes, wouldn't that make altruism merely a form of hypocrisy? Not at
all. Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't
necessarily specify selfish organisms. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is to
build a selfless brain -- for example, one that gives rise to a loving parent or a loyal
friend.
Take another example. In a review of three books on sexuality in the New York Times Book
Review, the linguist Derek Bickerton wrote: "When a bird practices what zoologists call
`extra-pair copulation,' can we really call this adultery? . . . The intent of the two
activities is completely different. Those who engage in extra-pair copulation usually aim to
make babies; adulterers usually try to avoid them."
This is a perfect example of the confusion I am trying to cure -- when birds fool around,
they are most definitely not trying to "make babies," since birds have not had sex education
and presumably do not engage in conscious family planning. They are trying to have sex, and
building a desire for sex (including extra-pair copulation) into bird brains is the genes'
way of making more genes.
But if a desire for sex serves the interests of the genes, are we condemned to an endless
soap opera of marital treachery? Not if you remember that human behavior is the product of a
complex brain with many components, which can be thought of as distinct circuits, modules,
organs, or even "little agents," in the metaphor of the MIT computer scientist Marvin
Minsky. Perhaps there is a component for sexual desire that serves the long-term interests
of the genes by making more children, but there are, just as surely, other components that
serve the interests of the genes in other ways. Among them are a desire for a trusting
spouse (who will help bring up the copies of one's genes inside one's children), and a
desire not to see one's own body -- genes included -- come to an early end at the hands of a
jealous rival.
There is a second reason that behavior should not and does not maximize fitness. Natural
selection operates over thousands of generations. For 99 percent of human existence, people
lived as foragers in small nomadic bands. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way
of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations. They are not wired to
cope with anonymous crowds, written language, modern medicine, formal social institutions,
high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience.
Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone Age, not the computer age, there is no need to
strain for adaptive explanations for everything we do, such as pornography, drugs, movies,
contraception, careerism, and junk food. Before there was photography, it was adaptive to
receive visual images of attractive members of the opposite sex because those images arose
only from light reflecting off fertile bodies. Before opiates came in syringes, they were
synthesized in the brain as natural analgesics. Before there were movies, it was adaptive to
witness people's emotional struggles because the only struggles you could witness were among
people you had to psych out every day. Before there was effective contraception, children
were difficult to postpone, and status and wealth could be converted into more children and
healthier ones. Before there was a sugar bowl, saltshaker, and butter dish on every table,
and when lean years were never far away, you could never get too much sweet, salty, and
fatty food.
And, to come full circle, right now you and I are co-opting yet another part of our minds
for an evolutionarily novel activity. Our ancestors evolved faculties of intuitive
engineering and intuitive science so that they could master tools and make sense of their
immediate physical surroundings. We are using them today to make sense of the universe,
life, and our own minds.
Reverse engineering our minds -- figuring out what they are "designed" to accomplish --
could be the fulfillment of the ancient injunction to know ourselves, but only if we keep
track of who is designed to accomplish what. People don't have the goal of propagating
genes; people have the goal of pursuing satisfying thoughts and feelings. Our genes have the
metaphorical goal of building a complex brain in which the satisfying thoughts and feelings
are linked to acts that tended to propagate those genes in the ancient environment in which
we evolved. With that in mind, we might make better sense of the mysterious ways in which we
humans pop, zip, and whir.
Steven Pinker
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Hank Roth (on the Internet since 1982)

Worm
Hole (Home) - The Crypt -
Hank Roth (Bio)
* While I don't use a standard blog (weblog
software) mostly because I've been doing this too long - having been there with Ike when the
precursor to the Internet, Arpanet got started and every step of the way since, I can't get
into all the many fads over the years (now it is social networking), but I have been an
observer and participant in events which shape the world since my time with NSA and with
Army Security and as a voice security cryptologist in the White House for the President, and
the War Room at the Pentagon for the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff plus two wars.
You could say this site is one of the better kept secrets  on the InterNUT. You
are invited back as often as you would like to see what I and others, I trust, may be
saying. * *
-- Hank Roth*

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