the evolving mind

There are two types of thoughts in this world. In your right hand you’ve got logical thoughts and in your wrong hand you’ve got irrational thoughts. Right? Wrong.

As more and more is becoming understood about human psychology, simplistic notions about thinking, and the base categories we shoe-horn mental behavior into, are going the way of the Dodo. Or should.

In the very least, we are understanding that conscious intellectual activity is truly just the visible tip of an iceberg of cognition. So much important stuff goes on beyond our awareness. A fascinating new piece of research nicely illustrates this point.

From the APS website (American Psychological Society) I learned of an experiment that looked at how the perception of proximity, or nearness, can influence our judgment about how blemished or tainted an object is likely to be. In the case of one phase of the experiment, the objects were wrapped-up mugs.

The volunteers who were told that one of the mugs contained a gift coupon selected from the mugs which were close together. Conversely, the volunteers who were informed that one of the mugs was defective chose from the group of mugs that were spaced far apart.

What does mug spacing have to do with likelihood of one outcome or the other? Nothing. Is this irrational behavior? I don’t think rationality is a proper term.

In a second phase the objects were ketchup bottles. Did the subjects behave “logically” about these?

[V]olunteers had to choose among ketchup bottles (as before, the bottles were in two groups, close together or spaced farther apart). This time, some of the participants were told that either one or three of the bottles had defective lids, while the remaining participants were told that either one or three of the bottles contained gift coupons. It turns out that the volunteers who were told that three of the bottles had defective lids were the most likely to choose from the spaced apart group and the volunteers who thought that three of the bottles contained gift coupons were the most likely to choose from the closely spaced group.

Fascinating research. One of the things it highlights is that much of our cognitive processes evolved to handle social situations. That specific psychological “hammer” we now apply to many different types of nails. Or even screws, as the case may be.

Are human beings illogical and irrational? Sometimes. But how often do we set out to engage in these activities and fail?Yes, in those cases, call the thought wrong. But don’t call it illogical. What should it be called instead? Good question. Maybe alogical? I don’t know. I wish I had a word for it. Do you?

Technorati Links: cognition, perception, semantics

The native orange tree in our yard has nasty spikes on it. Whenever I reach into the branches I invariably get scratched. It makes me wonder why they evolved. How did the spikes protect the tree in eons past? From whom?

And then there are the fruits themselves. They didn’t evolve for the human palate, that’s for sure. The native trees produce fruit far too sour to eat. Yet the flesh is there for a reason. Maybe two or more reasons.

1) To entice a creature into eating the fruit and, inadvertently, the nearly indigestible seeds so as to better broadcast them across the land.

2) Maybe provide some fertilizer for the growing seed? I don’t know about this one–it’s just an offhand conjecture.

So many forces have shaped the form and function of life on this planet. Including our own.

Technorati Links: flora

I believe that dogs likely have rich emotional lives. They are social creatures, after all. Intelligent, social creatures tend to have complex emotional lives. That said, I do doubt that dogs experience guilt. Maybe something a bit like it–a rudimentary form, perhaps–but not guilt as we know it.

“Guilt” is a secondary human emotion that appears only after a significant amount of neurological and cognitive development has occurred. The newborn experiences no guilt, nor does the 1 year-old. The emotion only follows on the heels of growing self-awareness and a waning egocentric orientation. The word, and emotion itself, implies conscience. A knowing better. Morality even.

New research out of Barnard College in New York tells of an experiment conducted on “dog guilt.” The finding -

Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a “guilty look” to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see ‘guilt’ in a dog’s body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn’t have – even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense.

I have been a dog owner for decades and am familiar with their behavior. Certainly, I could mine my own experiences for anecdotal support of why I think they might or might not experience true guilt. But as a scientist tends to, I doubt my own experiences. I take them with a huge grain of salt. I know it is all too easy to project my own beliefs and preferences onto events. Particularly ambiguous events.

Is dog body language ambiguous? Heck yah. It can be difficult enough to accurately read exactly what another of our kind is emotionally expressing. Dogs do not speak the same body language we do. There is a huge potential for “mis-translation.”

In the above quote we read of “the human tendency to attribute….” Yes. We are so primed to find intention and motive behind events, we sometimes add these elements where there is in fact none.  Consider talk of “angry weather” etc.

In addition, dogs are perceptive animals. They can certainly perceive us looking at them. Stare at a dog at random, for no reason whatsoever, and it may alter its behavior. The dog-guilt experiment revealed that as well.

[D]ogs that had been obedient and had not eaten the treat, but were scolded by their (misinformed) owners, looked more “guilty” than those that had, in fact, eaten the treat. Thus the dog’s guilty look is a response to the owner’s behavior, and not necessarily indicative of any appreciation of its own misdeeds.

My moral to this story? Go ahead, love and value pet canines. But please understand that they are a different species than we are. Respect that. Sure, give them a name. But stop short of dressing them in human clothing.

Technorati Links: animals, morality, pets

Oh boy. Look close enough to a supermodel’s face and you might find a pimple. Or some other blemish. What is the above? Some consider it the supermodel of the floral world. That is hint enough. And the title. Identity of photo below the fold. And another pic.

Continue Reading »

Technorati Links: flora, microscope, puzzle

Why must a god be found? Because the game of spiritual hide-n-seek wouldn’t be half the fun without the hide part?

I believe in Gawd, but only if Gawd is equivalent to and completely indistinct from the entire universe. Or the opposite: gawd is human ignorance. If that is the case, sure, what we don’t know can be fascinating and beguiling and even humbling. But what we don’t know is only what we don’t know. Unless of course, we add some icing of conjecture to our cake of ignorance.

This Jesus and Mo cartoon says a lot:

Technorati Links: atheism, cartoon, semantics

What is the unit of evolution? While many argue it is the species, others say populations of organism, or individual organisms, or even individual genes. One way to approach the question is to ask, What is selected for by natural selection? Of course, the correct answer might be not one of the above, but some of the above.

New research into reasons for the dramatic brain growth in human evolution has highlighted that the social groups individual organisms are a part of can be a significant aspect of “the environment” which “naturally selects” the fittest organisms. If you get along with others, you may better survive and leave offspring. But that’s not the only option.

After looking at a triumvirate of possibly reasons for the dramatic increase in human cranial capacity — climate change, ecological demands and social competition — researchers at the University of Missouri came to this finding -

[S]ocial competition is the major cause of increased cranial capacity.

Wow. So besides the natural environment and all that is considered part of it, and in addition to “sexual selection,” we may want to add “social selection,” to the list of evolutionary mechanisms. And though we may not want to outright subtract the social group as the fundamental unit of selection (how can you select yourself?), it certainly does give one pause.

Science sure can be complex. I can understand how the answers it provides are found undesirably by many minds.

As an interesting tangent, I found this quote by study author David Geary to dovetail with my An Almighty Alpha project:

When humans had to compete for necessities and social status, which allowed better access to these necessities, bigger brains provided an advantage.

I would argue that religious beliefs and activities are a manifestation of the extreme importance of the human social environment.

Technorati Links: primates

Any one species, to so many others, is potential food. Doesn’t matter what species you are. Homo sapiens? Potential food for bears, sharks, and parasites of all sorts.

This afternoon we are having some limbs trimmed from what must be a 50 ft. Laurel oak. I thought it was a water oak, but after doing some research (thanks Google!) I’m fairly certain it is a Laurel oak, as is the above. The tree is sickly due to being dined on by fungus and who knows what else. We decided not to take the whole thing down for reasons of finances and birds. We’ll let area woodpeckers feed on the species of insects that feed on this species of tree. And cross our fingers that a hurricane doesn’t topple it onto our house. Depending how it looks next spring, we may take it down then.

I wish oak wood were the equivalent of a beef roast. For me. There’s going to be hundreds of pounds of it hitting the ground. And then it will be carted off to a landfill. What species will eat it there?

Technorati Links: biology, evolution, flora

Schizophrenia is not a contagious mental disorder. You can’t “catch it.” But more research has come in that suggests a mother catching a virus during pregnancy will make it more likely the child develops schizophrenia. Of course, the infection may be a trigger of the disorder, rather than an outright cause. Or a co-factor. Here’s the news, from John Krystal, editor of the journal Biological Psychiatry:

The good news is that most fetuses exposed to influenza virus while in the womb will not go on to develop schizophrenia. The bad news is that the prior association between influenza infection and later development of psychotic disorders was supported.

Fascinating. One of the things I am left wondering is how much of the previously reported heritability of schizophrenia (50%+) can be chalked up to this pre-birth environment influence? For identical twins share the same uterine environment, while ordinary siblings do not.

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Technorati Links: biology, mental illness

Okay, maybe this is an interesting and sad science fact, as it is about cancer. Here’s the fact: Human beings have a higher cancer rate than our closest genetic kin, the chimpanzee. In a new paper at the online medical journal, Medical Hypothesis, researchers speculate why this might be so. Their conclusion: it is a cost (side-effect) of our brain evolution.

Yes, not every evolutionary adaptation is good in all ways. Large brains, for example, mean large heads which means more perilous delivery of offspring. Death of mothers during childbirth–that’s not good.

Cancer, too, is not good. How could it be related to brain evolution? Chief researcher John McDonald says,

The results from our analysis suggest that humans aren’t as efficient as chimpanzees in carrying out programmed cell death. We believe this difference may have evolved as a way to increase brain size and associated cognitive ability in humans, but the cost could be an increased propensity for cancer.

Evolution: it’s not all good. (Nor is the human “design” fully intelligent.) Of course, the above finding isn’t something set in stone . . . just yet. But it is a fascinating idea.

[source]

Technorati Links: biology, chimpanzee, freethought

Bang, zoom, we’re going to the moon, again. Well, not “we,” but mechanical surrogates for “we.”

An extravagance? Yes. There are no potatoes on the moon, no meat. Nor is there oil. Then why go? “Because it’s there” is a lazy answer. We go to learn more, to flex our growing technological muscle, to inspire people, to . . .

Personally, I think the world would be a better place if every Sunday (or Saturday Sabbath) across the globe people gathered to view and read about the latest exploits of space exploration. At least our minds would be firmly planted in the 21st century and not the 1st or less.

But that’s just my opinion.

Technorati Links: belief, cosmos, NASA