the evolving mind

One bit of pop-psychology reasoning goes like this: individuals who engage in casual sex, especially women, show they don’t respect themselves — by not holding out for a committed, loving relationship. They are engage in self-disrespectful behavior. And when you don’t respect yourself, how can you feel good about yourself, at least deep down inside (wherever that is). And when you don’t feel good about yourself, you likely have low self-esteem and are prone to mental health problems.

Many people find this reasoning compelling. To qualify as “common sense,” even. For me, it has always seemed suspect. Individuals differ in their innate social and sexual propensities. And social environments and learning experiences certainly differ.

I now have greater reason to doubt. A recent study has found that . . .

young adults engaging in casual sexual encounters do not appear to be at increased risk for harmful psychological outcomes as compared to sexually active young adults in more committed relationships. [source]

Okay, this is only one study, (though it was amply sized with over 1,000 subjects). But until I encounter another study that has found a link between casual sex and mental health problems, I’m inclined to doubt the proposition.

The news release sums up the issue nicely:

Although there has been speculation in public discourse that sexual encounters outside a committed romantic relationship may be emotionally damaging for young people, this study found no differences in the psychological well-being of young adults who had a casual sexual partner verses a more committed partner.

Personally, I find value in monogamous relationships. But not for every person in every social environment at every time in their life. And sure, while sexual cheating/infidelity and, especially, unsafe sex are clearly problematic, these are separate issues.

Technorati Links: mental health, sexuality

The above is certainly a moon, but what moon is it?

Answer: Tethys. It orbits Saturn.

Looks quite a bit like a ball of styrofoam. And it must be. To hang in space like that.

Yet celestial bodies don’t “hang.” That word reflects the perceptual habits of minds confined to a land-based life in a strong gravitational field.

Tethys is not so much hanging as it is traveling along a vector of velocity sufficiently great enough to keep the acceleration provided by Saturn’s mass from pulling in “down.” In, really.

Hang. Down. Fall. What’s in a word? A superstructure of unseen experience, both personal and collective.

Of course, any Aussie readers could easily dismiss my ruminations this way: What the heck does he know, he’s hanging on the underside of our planet. Too much blood must have rushed into his head.

[photo thanks to NASA]

Technorati Links: cosmos, psychology

Conservatives like to claim that ours is a Christian nation, founded by Christians on Christian principles. I beg to differ. For their time, the founders, on whole, were remarkably secular in attitude and philosophy. Many were deists — believing in a non-denominational creator who extends no hand into the workings of the world — which carried the reputation then as the atheist carries today.

Perhaps the most founding of our founders was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was most certainly not a Christian, having written his own version of the New Testament, subtracting out all the supernatural elements. He considered Jesus to be a teacher/philosopher and nothing more. So no, a Christian he wasn’t.

In an exciting historical development, brought to my attention by a news release at ScienceDaily, I learned of a recently discovered letter written by Jefferson. I downloaded the image of the document and tried to better clean it up for printing with Photoshop to read.

With some difficulty I did read it. One of the things that struck me was that in this personal correspondence expressing condolence over the death of a compatriot, there was not a hint of religious sentiments or mention of a god. Any of you familiar with religious folk know that one of the times believers typically trot out their god-talk is during occasions of death and loss. Not Jefferson.

The a-religiosity of Jefferson, and the secular nature of the U.S. Constitution, is no coincidence.

This morning I found a transcript of the letter online, and have included that below the fold.

Continue Reading »

Technorati Links: freethought, Jefferson

Rather the the apparently more brutish chimpanzee, does the bonobo provide better clues to our innate behavioral heritage?

In their monograph, “African Apes As Time Machines,” (7) R. Wrangham and D. Pilbeam point out distinctive bonobo traits, features seemingly shared with our kind, including these five:

1. extensive non-conceptive sexuality

Bonobos “do it” even when offspring will not be the result. Females remain sexually active when not ovulating.

Humans? Ditto.

2. friendship among adult females

Female bonobos have relatively extensive, non-direct-kin social relations.

Human females? One need not tune in to The View to find evidence of this.

3. relatively egalitarian males

While male chimps are clearly hyper-attuned to individual status within the troop — the pecking order and all that — male bonobos don’t show the same preoccupation, at least not to the same degree. The difference between the big male of their patch of jungle and the lesser males is not as great.

Human males? Under many conditions that is definitely the case.

4. sexual conciliatory behavior

Two bonobos, even same-sex females via clitoral-rubbing, will use sex as a means of patching up a temporarily torn relationship.

Humans? Already established couples certainly seem to engage in what has been called “make-up sex.” But casual sex for the purpose of relationship repair?

5. potentially relaxed intergroup interactions

When two chimpanzee groups meet, the males typically go apoplectic. There is a great ruckus, with threat displays breaking out. Bonobo males are not equally xenophobic.

Human males? I suppose it depends upon the circumstance.

Besides behavioral traits, are bonobos more human-like than chimpanzees in terms of any physiological characteristics? Actually, the bonobo does have some physical traits that suggest closer kinship to our kind.

In her monograph, “Reconstructions reconsidered: chimpanzee models and human evolution,” Adrienne Zihlman points out these three (8):

1. smaller facial and canine measures

Bonobos have smaller canines than chimpanzees. And those of humans are even smaller.

2. smaller body size

Relative to chimps, human bodies are proportionately long on limbs. Same with bonobos.

3. relative limb length

Bonobos have longer legs relative to their arms than do chimps. Same with humans. Both humans and bonobos, not coincidentally, have greater bone density in their legs (femur and tibia) than do chimpanzees. And relative to chimpanzees, bonobos are much better at bipedal standing and locomotion.

Chimp expert extraordinare, Frans de Waal, has recognized the significant physiological similarities (relative) of the bonobo and human.

“The bonobo’s body proportions, especially its relatively heavy legs, are closer to those of Australopithecus than the proportions of any other living ape. Bonobos stand and walk on two legs more often, and with greater ease, than common chimpanzees, who do not straighten their backs as much.” (10)

But maybe the kinship is only skin-deep. What about behavior?

In upcoming posts we will take a look at the different behaviors of bonobos as they pertain to both sex and ingroup harmony as well as out-group relations (reaction to foreign conspecifics). Finally, we’ll end with reasons for caution and doubt when considering crowning the bonobo as the preeminent proto-human.

—

(7) Wrangham, R. & Pilbeam, D., “African Apes As Time Machines,” in Galdikas, B. M. F., Briggs, N. E., Sheeran, L.K., Shapiro, G. L. & Goodall, J. (Eds.), All Apes Great and Small, Volume I: African Apes, Kluwer Academic / Plenum, New York, 2001, p.13
(8) Zihlman, A., “Reconstructions reconsidered: chimpanzee models and human evolution,” in McGrew, W. C. , Marchant, L. F. & Nishida, T., Great Ape Societies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1996, p. 297
(10) de Waal, F. Peacemaking Among Primates, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989
p. 181

Technorati Links: evolutionary psychology, primatology

The Internet reminds me of the Cambrian explosion. What types of websites will be the equivalent of the phylum chordata and persevere and develop into highly successful forms (at least according to our own biases)?

I recently received an invitation to check out a science website. And I checked it out. At pulse-project.org I watched a lecture on What Makes Us Human by Robin Dunbar.

So cool. I love being able to attend lectures both at-a-distance and after-the-fact.

Will the website persevere in the short and medium terms (human standards)? I don’t know. But for now, I marvel at the potential.

Technorati Links: nature photos, science

The news release of the recent discovery of a new supernova could have — perhaps should have — worldview altering implications. At least for those with worldviews lagging behind the times.

The very big.

First, the size of the thing. The star that exploded was 100 times the size of our sun. Yowza. Not only is our sun not the center of the universe, it isn’t even the biggest. Not by a long shot. This finding isn’t relevant just to sun-worshippers of the literal kind. Any believer in Biblical cosmology, Genesis, should, in the least, wonder on what day their god created this greater sun.

The very little.

Second, the news release on ScienceDaily contains this info about some of the unique super-supernova dynamics -

The balance in a super-giant star is different. Here, the photons (light particles) are so hot and energetic, they interact to produce pairs of particles: electrons and their opposites, positrons. In the process, particles with mass are created from the mass-less photons, and this consumes the star’s energy. [bold added]

Massless particles combine to produce particles with mass…. Findings at the quantum level highlight the degree to which some of our primary philosophical concepts may be problematic and lead our thinking astray.

Religious believers, when doubting evolution and arguing for the necessity of a god, will often argue, “How can something come from nothing?” While this is a legitimate question, I wonder about the continued legitimacy of the concept “something.”

Does the universe consist of stuff (objects/matter)? Stuff in motion? How can stuff come from non-stuff?

But wait, energy is as fundamental/essential as is mass and matter. Maybe energy is the other side of the same coin of mass, which we tend to identify as “stuff.”

Thanks to science, philosophers today (including the theological sort) are being forced into addressing such seemingly basic questions of the nature of “stuff” before going on to wondering where this stuff comes from. At least the better educated ones.

Technorati Links: beliefs, cosmology

If aliens from a distant world visited ours, would we insist — to their face or behind their backs — that our solar system, our galaxy, was more important than theirs?

Some religious folk claim that were the Earth to be visited by non-religious aliens, this would do nothing to shake their faith. And there you have a good example of how faith can place your intellect in a hermetically-sealed Ziploc of myopic belief.

[Photo thanks to NASA]

Technorati Links: atheism, cosmos

To be humble means to be closer to the earth (c.1250, from O.Fr. humble, earlier humele, from L. humilis “lowly, humble,” lit. “on the ground,” from humus “earth.” [source]). There are at least two ways that science helps us to be more humble.

1. By exposing our essential animal nature. Human beings are basically upright alimentary canals, empowered by muscles, guided by brains.

2. By bringing to our eyes and minds the grandeur of a vast universe. A universe that favors us not a whit. (At least not according to the deep-space images provided by the Hubble Telescope and other sources. As far as I am aware, no image of Jesus or “Mother Mary” has appeared in one of them yet.)

Oh sure, in our own relatively small circles we are big deals. But on a greater scale?

In the past 24 hours I encountered two pieces of humor that illustrate the varieties of human hubris.

First, this headline from The Onion: Sports Illustrated Sportsman Of The Year Award Important, Sports Illustrated Reports.

Second, this cartoon from AtheistCartoons.com:

Technorati Links: belief, science

Consuming a cup of coffee, or even a six-pack of iced espresso, before leaving a bar likely does nothing to “sober” a person up. New research demonstrates — at least in mice that have had a few cocktails too many –

. . . caffeine made mice more alert but did not reverse the learning problems caused by alcohol, including their ability to avoid things they should have known could hurt them . . . [source]

Of course, if the same is true for humans, one might reason that at least the increased alertness is a plus. But maybe not. Study co-author Thomas Gould suggests -

“People who have consumed only alcohol, who feel tired and intoxicated, may be more likely to acknowledge that they are drunk,” he added. “Conversely, people who have consumed both alcohol and caffeine may feel awake and competent enough to handle potentially harmful situations, such as driving while intoxicated or placing themselves in dangerous social situations.”

In other words, an alert drunk may pose greater danger to themselves and others than one whose eyelids keep heading toward the south pole.

Perhaps the designated non-drinker should have a fold-out cot in his/her trunk. Dude. Here’s a safe place for you to lie down and sleep it off. Making stupid decisions is much less likely when you are inactive.

Technorati Links: alcohol, caffeine, psychology

What do you “make of” the above photo? As to why you make of it what you do (or don’t) — the reasons likely include genetic predisposition, experience/learning, and even your current mental state/mood.

As for what you make of the entries in the two blog carnivals listed below — should you choose to check them out — the same might be true.

1) Carnival of the Godless #130

2) Scientia Pro Publica #16: Us, Friends, and Society

Enjoy. At least as far as your disposition/personality, experience, and mood allows.

Technorati Links: nature photo, psychology