The next big question is how the replication of genes created human psychology. A thought is an electrical signal that’s transmitted through your brain. Human behavior is the result of chemical and electrical signals being transmitted from your body into your brain, then through your brain, and then back out to your body. That pattern of signals results in your keeping yourself alive, having children, keeping them alive, and making more copies of your genes. But how can we talk about thoughts in terms of biochemical electrical signals?
We need a new perspective. And that’s what evolutionary psychology is.
The first principle of evolutionary psychology is: All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her genes by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.
With one rather complicated sentence, you have identified everyone’s goals for every action they ever take in life. How the Mind Works, by Dr. Steven Pinker is a very thorough introduction to evolutionary psychology. The Moral Animal by Robert Wright is a more philosophical introduction to the concept.
Now let’s break that sentence down.
A gene is a molecule that triggers chemical reactions that make more copies of the gene. In the same way, a camera is a device that creates photographs. Neither the genes nor the camera need to know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. When all the parts of the camera operate, a photograph gets created. Protons, neutrons, and electrons are basically frozen droplets of energy that cooled off after the Big Bang. Now they’ve fallen into patterns that created the Periodic Table of the Elements. Those different combinations of subatomic particles connect to each other in various ways that create atoms and molecules. Some of these mindless fragments of the Big Bang have fallen into patterns that create more patterns. When all the parts of those molecules operate, identical molecules get created.
If a gene made a copy of itself directly, that would be a stable chemical reaction. But what if it started a chemical reaction that started another chemical reaction that made a copy of the gene? That would still be a stable chemical reaction. What if there were three steps to the process? Or ten? Or a million?
If you walk to the store and buy a loaf of bread and eat it, there are a lot of chemical reactions involved, but you keep the genes that started all those chemical reactions alive for another day.
If you meet the man or woman of your dreams, get their phone number, get a date with them, go to the store, buy groceries, fix a gourmet meal, fall in love, have sex, get married, and have a baby, there’s a lot more chemical reactions involved in that, but it results in your genes getting replicated.
Your life is the process by which your genes make more copies of themselves. Each one of you is the product of 3 1/2 billion years of a process of elimination. Each of you was born because half the genes that started the chemical reaction that created you also helped start the chemical reaction that created your mother, and that kept her alive, half of her genes helped create your grandmother and kept her alive and the other half helped create your grandfather and kept him alive, and the same on your father’s side, and so on, back through time.
Once upon a time, change and variation gave a microscopic worm a skin cell that was sensitive to light. That worm acted differently when light was hitting its light sensitive cell than it did when light wasn’t hitting it. That resulted in the worm being better able to orient itself to the rest of the world. The worm didn’t need to know what it was doing or why it was doing it, it just did it. And as a result of doing it, it survived and reproduced better than the other members of its species and passed more of its genes on to future generations.
This happened for the simple reason that the light hitting the photoreceptive cell started a chemical reaction in the cell that made some electrons move around and started an electrical current, and that electrical current made other chemical reactions happen in the worm that made its body wriggle differently than it would’ve otherwise.
As long as that process resulted in the worm acting in a way that made more copies of its genes than the other worms did, you have a self-replicating pattern that’s more stable than the self-replication patterns of the other worms. Now you have a more intelligent worm because this worm is better able to process information. The worm’s sensory input creates physical output that results in it replicating more copies of its genes, and that results in photoreceptive cells being passed on to some of its offspring. The pattern creates more patterns.
If another worm got a photoreceptive cell in its skin but it didn’t act differently as a result, that wouldn’t be a more stable pattern because the worm wouldn’t be processing sensory input in a way that resulted in more of its genes being replicated.
Now fast forward to the southern tip of Africa about 7 million years ago. Dr. Paul Erlich tells this part of the story in his book Human Natures. A species of primate lived in the forest there. When their forest got overcrowded, either by the forest shrinking or the population expanding, some of those primates wandered out into the grassland.
They already had hands and arms that were well adapted for grabbing branches as they climbed around in the trees, which made them one of the only species of mammal in the world whose front limbs were very different from their hind limbs.
Out in the grassland, standing upright let those primates see predators approaching over the top of the grass, which made the ones who stood upright the most, the most successful at passing their genes on to the next generation. Eventually, all the genes for walking on all fours got eaten, which means those chemical reactions got terminated. So that species of primate became the only mammal in the world to walk on two feet.
Now that those primates had hands that were good at grabbing things and didn’t need their hands for walking anymore, they started using more tools. The use of tools let these primates turn inanimate objects into extensions of their bodies. They could use clubs to help them kill other animals, they could use sharp rocks to cut through the hides of their prey, and so on, rather than depending entirely on parts of their own bodies to do those things. But doing that also depended on their being able to recognize patterns of cause and effect that would make those things happen. The ones whose hands let them use tools the best, and the ones whose brains could think of the most uses for tools, were the ones who passed on the most of their genes.
These were social animals, like all primates, who lived in groups for their mutual protection, but who competed against each other for mates. Eventually, these tool-using primates got smarter than every other species in the world. But they were still competing against each other for mates. So changes were still happening, variation was still happening, and cumulative adaptations to environmental pressures kept happening. People kept getting smarter because the ones who could best perceive patterns of cause and effect and anticipate the decisions other people were going to make were the ones who were most successful at surviving—and reproducing—in the group.
Meanwhile, the primates who didn’t leave the forest of southern Africa stayed in the trees and evolved into chimpanzees.
So here we are now with brains that can think that are each made up of lots and lots of molecules that can’t think. In effect, the human nervous system is made up of lots and lots of little cameras that exist as a result of stable chemical reactions making more copies of those sets of cameras than of any other set of cameras. Those biological cameras—in other words, your senses—start different chemical reactions when different sensory input hits them.
Those chemical reactions create different electrical currents in your brain. All those electrical currents in your brain mixed together create a replica of the outside world. It’s not a replica in the sense of being a photograph; it’s a replica in the sense of it being a combination of electrical currents that correspond to a pattern of cause and effect in the outside world. It results in your body acting in a way that keeps you alive and makes more copies of your genes. We don’t need to know what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, we just need to do it.
Intelligence is the ability to recognize and act upon patterns. It’s not simply the ability to make choices. Making choices is just the only time you notice that you’re using your intelligence. When one choice is obviously better than all the others, there really is no choice to make, so there’s really nothing to think about. Every time you leave your house, you have the choice whether to lock the door or to leave it unlocked. But one of those choices is obviously better than the other, so you make the same choice every time without thinking about it. Then maybe you get halfway to wherever you’re going and can’t remember whether you locked the door or not. Your brain processes information that way all the time. Those are subconscious decisions.
Sometimes the electrical currents in your brain create ambiguous replicas of the world, where two or more possible courses of action are fairly evenly matched in their predictions of the maximization of your genetic survival. That’s when your consciousness gets involved.
If you are ever faced with a few choices and one isn’t obviously better than all the others, what do you do? You start thinking about it. You devote more brainpower to the problem, you might use your senses to try to get more information to use in making your decision, you might bring more information into your decision making from other parts of your brain, and you might start ignoring other things happening around you so you can focus your attention on making that choice.
If you see a hundred-foot cliff in front of you, your brain predicts that if you jump off it you will die. So it doesn’t send signals to your body to make it do that. Instead it sends signals to your body to make it avoid the cliff. That’s how you make every decision in life. That’s how non-intelligent molecules created the survival and reproductive instincts, and created the pattern recognition we use to act upon our survival and reproduction instincts. We are not capable of seriously considering acting upon any ideas that we don’t perceive to maximize the survival of our genes in some way or another. We think this way because that’s the pattern that 3 1/2 billion years of a self-perpetuating chemical reaction created—namely, a chemical reaction that would make itself keep happening. Evolution had no way of creating a chemical reaction that could do anything else.
At the same time, since evolution is a chemical reaction and chemicals can’t think, evolution had no way of anticipating that our evolution was leading to some twists that could destabilize the self perpetuation of our chemical reactions.
The first is that we don’t naturally perceive the existence of our genes. We just naturally perceive a desire to survive and reproduce. We also perceive ourselves to have other desires, but one way or another, all of those desires helped our ancestors survive and reproduce.
Another twist is misinterpretation of our perceptions. Sometimes the signals that our brains receive from the outside conflict with each other. Sometimes information gets processed incorrectly and makes us perceive a future that appears to correspond to the maximization of our genetic survival, even though it doesn’t correspond to it. In other words, sometimes we make mistakes and get ourselves into trouble. We can make self-destructive decisions by accident.
Even a person who does jump off a 100’ cliff because he wants to kill himself perceives himself to be surviving and reproducing in the best way he can think of. I don’t mean to make light of people committing suicide. I’m simply pointing out the fact that when people voluntarily carry out self-destructive behavior they’re still acting upon the perception of maximizing their genetic survival. So suicide doesn’t disprove the first principle of evolutionary psychology, it just proves that something has gone seriously wrong with those people’s perceptions. That’s why suicide counseling depends on getting suicidal people to perceive their situation differently than they do now.
This is also the reason people can think about ideas that don’t maximize their genetic survival because they’re neutral to their genetic survival or even slightly self-destructive. If I wanted to, I could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious right now and that wouldn’t have any effect on my genetic survival. Or I could smoke ten packs of cigarettes in one sitting and harm my genetic survival. Either way, I would perceive those choices to maximize my genetic survival, even though they didn’t really.
Another twist was that the genetic evolution of our brains eventually made itself obsolete. Generation by generation, our brains kept getting better and better at recognizing and acting upon patterns, until they got so good at it that the predictions of the future that they could make and act upon could adapt so quickly that the brains effectively eliminated every threat to the survival of their genes. People still die prematurely, and sometimes dictators even exterminate entire ethnic groups. But the genes that create our brains are spread throughout the world. Wherever some people survive, the genes still survive. And the genes survive, and don’t continue to evolve, because now the ideas the brains create evolve instead.
The study of the evolution of ideas is called memetic evolution. Every time you think of an idea and then think of a better idea, your ideas are evolving. The idea that your brain perceives to maximize your genetic survival replaces the idea that it doesn’t perceive to maximize your genetic survival. That’s still adaptation to an environmental pressure—meaning natural selection.
The point at which the evolution of ideas outran the evolution of genes once and for all was reached at least 40,000 years ago, or possibly 60,000, or 100,000, or maybe even 200,000, depending on which evolutionary psychologist you ask and what they’re using to define that point. But 40,000 years is guaranteed, and that has the most evidence to support it. The most dramatic piece of evidence is the Chauvet cave paintings in southern France. They are great works of art by modern standards, but they are 30,000 years old. Which means they were painted by people who had brains like ours.
That means we are all born with brains that evolved in the stone age. We’re trying to use them to live in the nuclear age, the space age, and the computer age. We got here because our ancestors’ ideas kept evolving after their genes stopped evolving. With their evolving ideas, and by combining an ever-larger number of ideas with each other, they discovered more and more ways of interacting with the world that maximized their genetic survival. They kept developing technology little by little that removed our bodies and our ideas from the stone age, but left our brains in the stone age. So now when we act upon what we naturally feel to be true about the world, we make a lot of misperceptions and we make a lot of mistakes that turn out to be self destructive in the long run.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, President Kennedy faced a lot of opposition from people who thought we ought to just throw down with the Soviet Union and start a nuclear war. Now that evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Pinker have gone back and looked at the decisions people kept trying to get President Kennedy to make, they can see that if it had been the Cuban Wooden Club Crisis, it would’ve been a perfect strategy.
Another twist in human evolution has been our process of outsmarting the environment. The impact of any species on its environment is held in balance by all the other species. Zebras eat grass at the same rate lions eat zebras, so the amount of grass, zebras, and lions in the environment stays stable. But the impact of each species on its environment is held in balance by a combination of many, many things.
The evolution of human intellect threw our relationship to the environment out of balance because we don’t naturally perceive the world the way the world actually works. We naturally perceive the world in whatever way of perceiving it made the most copies of our ancestors’ genes as of 40,000 years ago. We best perceive the things that affected our ancestors most directly, we perceive more faintly things that affected them less directly, and we don’t perceive at all things that didn’t affect them or that affected them only very indirectly.
Over the course of history, as we have thought of the ideas and made the decisions that seemed best to us, we have been combining our stone age instincts with our current level of knowledge, to make plans for the future. And it keeps getting us into trouble.
This brings me to Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Dr. Jared Diamond. About 10,000 years ago, the plains of Mesopotamia were the most favorable environment in the world for human habitation. There was so much food to hunt and gather that the people there could live in permanent villages. So they made the best decisions they could think of and maximized their genetic survival.
But that meant using all the food they could get to feed as many children as they could have. That meant population growth. That meant more people hunting the local gazelle herds each year. Eventually that meant the gazelle herds getting wiped out.
That meant a lot of Mesopotamians looking for new ways to get food. Soon enough some of them noticed that food plants were growing out of their waste dumps from previous years. Then they discovered that plants grow from seeds. Then they started experimenting with planting seeds themselves. Since they lived in permanent villages, they could tend their plants year round. So began the agricultural revolution. That same process played out later in other parts of the world.
But it still didn’t stop population growth. All it did was to provide more food. When the land couldn’t produce any more food, the population started spreading outward, looking for more land. Since they had so many more people now, they hopelessly outnumbered their neighbors, so it was easy for them to take their neighbors’ land. So began the empires of the Middle East, China, the Maya, and the Inca.
None of the first farmers had any way of knowing about the chemical cycles taking place in their soil that made it produce their food. Over farming led to the depletion of soil nutrients and soil erosion. Irrigation led to the salinization of the soil. Which is why, as you may have noticed, the Middle East is now a desert.
Filed under: f: Restoring Science to its Rightful Place by Ezra
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