Humans Had Dogs Before They Had Farming

By roughly 14,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer societies across Europe had discovered dogs, scientists reported in two new papers, which were published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The studies provide the first definitive genetic evidence that dogs existed during the Paleolithic period, before humans developed agriculture.

The researchers, who used several approaches to analyze DNA extracted from ancient canine specimens, identified Paleolithic dogs at five different archaeological sites in Europe and Western Asia. The oldest of these dogs lived about 15,800 years ago, pushing back the oldest known genetic evidence of dogs by nearly 5,000 years.

These early dogs came from sites that extend from Britain to Turkey, and were associated with several very different hunter-gatherer populations. But the dogs themselves were closely related. Across the five sites, the dogs were more genetically similar than the humans were, the researchers found.

“The people are so different, but the dogs are very much the same,” said Greger Larson, a paleogeneticist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors on both new studies, which were conducted by large, international scientific teams.

The finding suggests that these early human societies were exchanging dogs or acquiring them from one another.

“It is kind of the equivalent of a new blade or a new point or a new kind of material culture or art form or something, where everybody’s getting really excited about having this fun new thing around.” Dr. Larson said. “And it’s useful and it’s interesting and it’s probably cute.”

The research provides new insight into the early history of dogs, as well as the genetic legacy and the interspecies relationship that extends to today.

“It’s really a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of humans and dogs,” said Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute who was not involved in the research.

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The finding suggests that these early human societies were exchanging dogs or acquiring them from one another.

“It is kind of the equivalent of a new blade or a new point or a new kind of material culture or art form or something, where everybody’s getting really excited about having this fun new thing around.” Dr. Larson said. “And it’s useful and it’s interesting and it’s probably cute.”

The research provides new insight into the early history of dogs, as well as the genetic legacy and the interspecies relationship that extends to today.

“It’s really a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of humans and dogs,” said Elaine Ostrander, a canine genomics expert at the National Human Genome Research Institute who was not involved in the research.

- More Here

The Cognitive Foundations of Fictional Stories

Abstract

We hypothesize that fictional stories are highly successful in human cultures partly because they activate evolved cognitive mechanisms, for instance for finding mates (e.g., in romance fiction), exploring the world (e.g., in adventure and speculative fiction), or avoiding predators (e.g., in horror fiction). In this paper, we put forward a comprehensive framework to study fiction through this evolutionary lens. The primary goal of this framework is to carve fictional stories at their cognitive joints using an evolutionary framework. Reviewing a wide range of adaptive variations in human psychology – in personality and developmental psychology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines –, this framework also addresses the question of inter individual differences in preferences for different features in fictional stories. It generates a wide range of predictions about the patterns of combinations of such features, according to the pattern's of variations in the mechanisms triggered by fictional stories. As a result of a highly collaborative effort, we present a comprehensive review of evolved cognitive mechanisms that fictional stories activate. To generate this review, we listed more than 70 adaptive challenges humans faced in the course of their evolution, identified the adaptive psychological mechanisms that evolved in response to such challenges, specified four sources of adaptive variability for the sensitivity of each mechanism (i.e., personality traits, sex, age, and ecological conditions), and linked these mechanisms to the story features that trigger them. This comprehensive framework lays the ground for a theory-driven research program for the study of fictional stories, their content, distribution, structure, and cultural evolution.

- Full Paper Here

Archaea, Horizontal Gene Transfer et al.,

Since the late 1970s, there have come three big surprises about what we humans are and about how life on our planet has evolved.

The first of those three surprises involves a whole category of life, previously unsuspected and now known as the archaea. (They look like bacteria through a microscope, but their DNA reveals they are shockingly different.) Another is a mode of hereditary change that was also unsuspected, now called horizontal gene transfer. (Heredity was supposed to move only vertically, from parents to offspring.) The third is a revelation, or anyway a strong likelihood, about our own deepest ancestry. (It seems now that our lineage traces to the archaea.) So we ourselves probably come from creatures that, as recently as forty years ago, were unknown to exist.

One of the most disorienting results of these developments is a new challenge to the concept of “species.” Biologists have long recognized that the boundaries of one species may blur into another—by the process of hybridism, for instance. And the notion of species is especially insecure in the realm of bacteria and archaea.  But the discovery that horizontal gene transfer (HGT) has occurred naturally, many times, even in the lineages of animals and plants, has brought the categorical reality of a species into greater question than ever. That’s even true for us humans—we are composite individuals, mosaics.

It’s not just that—as you may have read in magazine articles—your human body contains at least as many bacterial cells as it does human cells. (This doesn’t even count all the nonbacterial microbes—the virus particles, fungal cells, archaea, and other teeny passengers inhabiting our guts, mouths, nostrils, and other bodily surfaces.) That’s the microbiome. Each of us is an ecosystem.

I’m talking about something else, a bigger and more shocking discovery that has come from the revolution in a field called molecular phylogenetics. (That phrase sounds fancy and technical, but it means merely the use of molecular information, such as DNA or RNA sequences, in discerning how one creature is related to another.) The discovery was that sizeable chunks of the genomes of all kinds of animals, including us, have been acquired by horizontal transfer from bacteria or other alien species.

How could that be possible? How could genes move sideways, between species, not just vertically along ancestral lineages? The mechanisms are complex, but one label that fits most of them is “infective heredity.”  DNA can be carried across boundaries, from one genome to another, by infective agents such as bacteria and viruses. Such horizontal gene transfer, like sex, has been a source of freshening innovation in otherwise discrete lineages, including ours—and it is still occurring.

This is an aspect of evolution that was unimagined by Charles Darwin. Evolution is trickier, far more intricate, than we had realized. The tree of life is more tangled.

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These discoveries should not merely complicate our magisterial human self-image, but also help lead us toward a wiser and humbler understanding of our place—collectively and as “individuals” within the “species” Homo sapiens—in the story of life on Earth.

It’s a story in which we humans are important protagonists but not the ultimate and predestined heroes. It’s a story in which heredity has moved sideways as well as vertically and all the conventional hierarchies and boundaries have proven more imperfect, transgressible, and leaky than we had supposed. But these revelations don’t diminish our responsibility, as humans, to respect and preserve the diversity of living creatures, with all their own mosaic genomes and tangled lineages, who cohabit the planet with us. On the contrary, I think. All this should make us only more amazed, respectful, and careful. Life on Earth is wondrous precisely because it’s so complicated.

- More Here

The Past And Future Of Genomics

But more interesting than the exponential growth in data are the surprising things we have inferred from the data. In the heady early days of the publication of the draft of the human genome over twenty years ago, co-author Francis Collins asserted that the combination of molecular biology and genomics would “make a significant impact” on our attempt to understand and cure cancer. Despite some early instances where genomic sequencing was performed on cancer patients, like Steve Jobs in 2009, the overall impact of the new science on healthcare has been modest at best. Instead, paleoanthropology, prehistory, and history were transformed as genetics surveyed the pedigrees of the human past with a power and precision that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

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This shocking result only came out through ancient DNA. Not only do modern humans have Neanderthal ancestry, but some of us have Denisovan ancestry. It comprises 5% of the heritage of Papuans and lower fractions of Denisovan ancestry are found throughout Asia. There is an open question in anthropology as to whether humans are naturally promiscuous. The data from DNA shows that our forebears were sexually open to liaisons with populations and people quite different from them, and definitely forces us to lean in one direction in the debate.

Using a genomic clock, ‌Neanderthals and modern humans became separated 600,000 years ago. The most distinct lineage in modern populations, between South African Khoisan and all other humans, clocks in at 200,000 years. Our ancestors’ sexual preferences were evidently very broad. In a cave in Russia, Researchers have even discovered a young girl whose mother was a Neanderthal and whose father was a Denisovan. Statistically, the probability of catching a first-generation hybrid is low; the fact that it was discovered shows that this behavior was common.

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The Roman recollection of the rape of the Sabine women likely reflects cultural memory of events in prehistory, where victorious males obtained mates from the lands they conquered after killing the fathers and brothers of the women they would make wives. Prehistoric human males behaved like lions taking over a pack, killing everyone among the conquered except for nubile females. Genetics shows that since the end of the last Ice Age, paternal lineages are characterized by periodic explosions, where one clan seems to have replaced all the others through a process of competition and polygyny.

Call it the “Genghis Khan effect,” but the Mongolian world emperor was simply the last in a long line of “super-males” that have defined much of the last 12,000 years. They say to believe them when they tell you who they are, and the legends of the Indo-Europeans reflect a patriarchal and warlike culture, destroyers of cities like the god Indra and near-immortal warriors like Achilles, and this is exactly what genetics tell us about them. In prehistoric Sweden, the Neolithic Megalith builders who dominated the region for more than 1000 years seem to have been totally exterminated by the invading “Battle-Axe” culture. The development of agriculture was a new technology that allowed for the expansion of human societies and the emergence of social stratification, but combined with our innate instincts, genetics make it clear that the drive to extermination manifested itself in most places and most times.

We cannot avoid what human nature was for tens of thousands of years in the past. It was bloody, it was brutal, and it was typified by genocide. This is the legacy we inherit, but it is not the legacy we need to replicate. The average life expectancy in the past was also much shorter than in the present, but the application of technology and social institutions has ameliorated the toll that disease takes on the human body. Human societies are also organisms and their rise and fall are measured in the waves of change in the genes of our own species. To the victors go the spoils and the seeds of the future. But institutions like monogamy and a modicum of wealth redistribution can be thought of as social technologies that dampen the volatility inherent in human relationships, a volatility that can manifest in chaos and warfare. Not a war of all against all, but a war where winners took all.

- Read the whole piece by Razib Khan

What I've Been Reading

Complex human societies need elites – rulers, administrators, thought leaders – to function well. We don’t want to get rid of them; the trick is to constrain them to act for the benefit of all.

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Americans today grossly underestimate the fragility of the complex society in which we live. But an important lesson from history is that people living in pervious pre-crisis eras similarly didn't imagine that their societies could suddenly crumble around them.  

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

I have been following Turchin for many years now and his work "predicted" the path that led to the 2020 election madness. And he coined the term Cliodynamics.

The book is based on models built using CrisisDB (work in-progress - global history database) that includes one hundred cases from European, Chinese, Russian and American history (no Indian or other countries yet) 

The core findings behind "End Times" faced by past societies: 

1. Popular Immiseration - The proportion of GDP consumed by the government has not changed much in the last four decades and it has grown for elites. The main loser has been the common American. 

2. Elite Overproduction - What determines whether we have a problem of elite overproduction is the balance of the supply of youth with advanced degrees and the demand for them - the number of jobs that require their skills. By the 2000s, unfortunately, as is well known, the number of degree holders were greatly outnumbering the position for them. 

Surprisingly, Turchin's research doesn't count ideology as the primary factor. 

Well.. humans are convenient creatures and ideology evolves over time. Lot of people today avoid mRNA vaccines but it's a matter of time as they get older they will embrace mRNA treatment with relish for cancer treatment.  On the other hand, "green" and "eco-savvy" people gluttonize a poor cow or worse baby cow using "veal" as a euphemism. 

I admire Turchin's rigor of applying data to find patterns in history. 

Yes, Turchin's models are not even close to perfect but if the same rigor continues for a few more years or decades (and we happen to survive) then Cliodynamics has a potential to become more robust. 

• Pundits and politicians often invoke "lessons of history". The problem is that the historical record is rich and each pundit an easily find cases in it to support whichever side of a policy debate they favor. Clearly, inference from such "cherry-picked" examples is not the way to go. 

• A relatively small set of mechanisms can generate exceedingly complex dynamics. This is the essence of complexity science; complex dynamics do not have to have complex causes. 

• What are the features of conspiracy theories that distinguish them from scientific theories? One, the conspiratorial theory is often vague about the motives of the behind-the-scenes leaders or assigns them implausible motivations. Two, it assumes that they are extremely clever and knowledgeable. Three, it places power in the hands of one strong leader or a tiny cabal. And, finally, it assumes that illegal plans can be kept secret for indefinitely long periods of time. A scientific theory, like the class-domination one, is very different. 

• First, let's avoid blaming the rich. The economic elites are not evil - or, at least, the proportion of evil people among them is not terribly different from that of the rest of the population. They are motivated by self-interest, but Mother Teresas, if absent among the ruling class, are quite rate in general population as well. 

The Secrets to Evolutionary Success

There may be a lot of traits that exist for no good reason at all.

We know examples from the wild too. There are subterranean caves that have been completely closed off from the outside world for millions of years. And when people went into those caves and sampled bacteria that had never been in touch with human civilization, they found that these bacteria were resistant against multiple antibiotics. And some of these antibiotics are not natural molecules — they are molecules that occur only in the laboratory.

It could seem almost like these bacteria are clairvoyant, you know? Like they anticipated that at some point they would need to be resistant against antibiotics when humanity came along, right? But there’s a very mundane explanation that has to do with these latent kinds of traits that we identified in experiments in the lab. So these traits really exist out in nature. They’re not just artifacts of experiments.

- Interview with Andreas Wagner author of the new book Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture

Self domestication and the evolution of language

Abstract

We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. 

We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis of language structure. If we think of language structure as reflecting an accumulated set of changes in our genome, then we might ask something like, “What are the genetic bases of language structure and why were they selected?”

 However, if cultural evolution can account for language structure, then this question no longer applies. Instead, we face the task of accounting for the origin of the traits that enabled that process of structure-creating cultural evolution to get started in the first place. 

In light of work on cultural evolution, then, the new question for biological evolution becomes, “How did those precursor traits evolve?” We identify two key precursor traits: 

(1) the transmission of the communication system through learning; and 

(2) the ability to infer the communicative intent associated with a signal or action. 

We then describe two comparative case studies—the Bengalese finch and the domestic dog—in which parallel traits can be seen emerging following domestication. Finally, we turn to the role of domestication in human evolution. We argue that the cultural evolution of language structure has its origin in an earlier process of self-domestication.

- Full paper here

Why Do We Get Sick? - The New Science of Evolutionary Medicine

Evolutionary medicine identifies six reasons why our bodies are vulnerable to disease. They are: 

1) defences,

2) environmental mismatch, 

3) trade-offs, 

4) conflict between survival and reproduction, 

5) co-evolution with infectious parasites 

6) constraints on natural selection. 

This explanatory framework yields insights about everything from cancer to why we age and die.

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Constraints on natural selection

Natural selection is powerful, but it’s not omnipotent. There are limits. For example, natural selection can only work with the raw material it has; if there is no genetic variation for a given trait, there’s simply nothing that can be done. Natural selection is also constrained by history, or what’s sometimes called “path dependence.” Because of the precursor from which our visual system evolved, we are stuck with the suboptimal design of having a blind spot in both eyes. Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer, so it can only proceed in a gradual step-by-step fashion, and each step must be a definite improvement over the last. There’s no such thing as going back to the drawing board and starting from scratch the way an engineer might. Because of this historical inertia, we’re stuck with the inelegant setup of the trachea and the oesophagus, which poses a serious choking hazard. Evolutionarily, where we can go next is limited by where we’ve already been and the existing body plan that we’re saddled with. These and other constraints limit the power of natural selection.

Since its inception, medicine has focused almost exclusively on the “how” questions of disease, largely setting aside the “why.” By tackling the missing why question—why our bodies are vulnerable to disease in the first place—evolutionary medicine supplies an exciting new layer of understanding.

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Evolutionarily informed cancer research is still in its infancy, but even so, it has already led to many new findings, and it promises more insights and practical applications over the next few years. As researchers Athena Aktipis and Randy Nesse note,

An evolutionary approach can help us understand why cancer exists and how it progresses (somatic evolution), how cancer cells interact with environments (ecological approaches), why it is not more common (natural selection for cancer suppression mechanisms), and why cancer suppression mechanisms can never be perfect (constraints, trade-offs, and other evolutionary reasons for vulnerability to disease). Evolution is essential for understanding cancer.

And It’s Not Just Cancer

Evolutionary medicine extends far beyond cancer and illuminates a wide range of health conditions. The science of why we get sick offers new insights into cardiovascular problems, tooth disease, blood iron deficiency, breastfeeding, pregnancy and miscarriage, pain, Alzheimer’s disease, aging and senescence, sepsis and even psychological disorders. We are only in the beginning stages of a revolution that is already transforming how we think about medicine, health and disease.

- More Here

How Cats Took Over the World

After studying the mitochondrial DNA of those 209 ancient cats, the study's authors say cat populations seem to have expanded in two waves. The first occurred in early Middle Eastern farming villages, where wild cats with a distinct mitochondrial lineage grew along with the human communities, eventually reaching the Mediterranean. As rodents congregated to steal food, wild cats were probably just capitalizing on the easy prey at first, then were adopted as farmers realized their benefits.

The second wave came millennia later, as the descendants of Egyptian domestic cats spread around Africa and Eurasia. Many of those Egyptian cat mummies had a particular mitochondrial lineage, and the researchers found that same lineage in contemporary cats from Bulgaria, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa.

This rapid expansion of cats was most likely linked to ship travel, the researchers say. Like farmers, mariners were often plagued by rodents seeking their food stores—and thus naturally predisposed to welcome rat-killing carnivores onboard. Geigl and her co-authors even found this same DNA lineage in cat remains at a Viking site in northern Germany, which they dated between the eighth and 11th centuries.

"There are so many interesting observations," Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School who wasn't involved in the study, tells Nature News. "I didn't even know there were Viking cats."

- More Here

And Fluffy and Garph seamlessly took over the micro world of even a guy like me who's life is smitten by Max. 

Evolutionary Roots Of The Risk Of Hip Fracture In Humans

Abstract

The transition to bipedal locomotion was a fundamental milestone in human evolution. Consequently, the human skeleton underwent substantial morphological adaptations. These adaptations are responsible for many of today’s common physical impairments, including hip fractures. This study aims to reveal the morphological changes in the proximal femur, which increase the risk of intracapsular hip fractures in present-day populations. 

Our sample includes chimpanzees, early hominins, early Homo Neanderthals, as well as prehistoric and recent humans. Using Geometric Morphometric methods, we demonstrate differences in the proximal femur shape between hominids and populations that practiced different lifestyles. We show that the proximal femur morphology is a risk factor for intracapsular hip fracture independent of osteoporosis. Changes in the proximal femur, such as the shortening of the femoral neck and an increased anterolateral expansion of the greater trochanter, are associated with an increased risk for intracapsular hip fractures. 

We conclude that intracapsular hip fractures are a trade-off for efficient bipedal walking in humans, and their risk is exacerbated by reduced physical activity.

- Full paper here

In other words, we are born with bad hips since we evolved to walk on 2 legs unlike most mammals and our sedentary lifestyle makes it worse. 

Chimpanzee and Human Risk Preferences Show Key Similarities

Abstract

Risk preference impacts how people make key life decisions related to health, wealth, and well-being. Systematic variations in risk-taking behavior can be the result of differences in fitness expectations, as predicted by life-history theory. Yet the evolutionary roots of human risk-taking behavior remain poorly understood. Here, we studied risk preferences of chimpanzees (86 Pan troglodytes; 47 females; age = 2–40 years) using a multimethod approach that combined observer ratings with behavioral choice experiments. We found that chimpanzees’ willingness to take risks shared structural similarities with that of humans. First, chimpanzees’ risk preference manifested as a traitlike preference that was consistent across domains and measurements. Second, chimpanzees were ambiguity averse. Third, males were more risk prone than females. Fourth, the appetite for risk showed an inverted-U-shaped relation to age and peaked in young adulthood. Our findings suggest that key dimensions of risk preference appear to emerge independently of the influence of human cultural evolution.

- Full paper here

What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity - Justin Gregg

New book by Justin Gregg, If Nietzsche were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity has reminiscence of Yuval Harari's writings but it looks niche and funny. 

Good review here:

“If Nietzsche had been born a narwhal,” Gregg writes, “the world might never have had to endure the horrors of the Second World War or the Holocaust.” Say what? This seems to be a sterling example of what Gregg calls our species-specific penchant for “unexpected ludicrousness.”

Such rhetorical contortions are probably the consequence of what he derides as our obsession with causal inference. Nonhuman animals get by just fine on “learned associations.” They link actions with results, without having to understand why something is happening. Humans, though, are “why specialists.” We need to look for causal connections — leading to some incredible achievements but also to some bizarre practices. Gregg points to the old medieval remedy of rubbing a rooster’s keister on a snakebite wound.

Gregg studies animal behavior and is an expert in dolphin communication. He shows how human cognition is extraordinarily complex, allowing us to paint pictures and write symphonies. We can share ideas with one another so that we don’t have to rely only on gut instinct or direct experience in order to learn.

But this compulsion to learn can be superfluous, he says. We accumulate what the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan calls “dead facts” — knowledge about the world that is useless for daily living, like the distance to the moon, or what happened in the latest episode of “Succession.” Our collections of dead facts, Gregg writes, “help us to imagine an infinite number of solutions to whatever problems we encounter — for good or ill.”

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Leave it to a human to ask a question about justice, which has nothing to say about natural selection, or what Gregg calls “the great arbiter of usefulness.” Humans can agitate for change and even revolution because they can imagine a reality that doesn’t exist. 

The Trouble with Tribalism

Let’s not think small here, and just list the enemies that go against your tribal allegiances. This made some sense in the distant past, when our challenges were mostly local: local food source, and other small tribes going after them.

Things have changed a lot since. The biggest enemy we have to fight against right now is our tribal past. What served us so well for thousands of years is now an obsolete concept. It’s no more about the survival of this tribe or that one, but about Homo sapiens as a species. We must wake up to the fact that, when seen from a global planetary perspective, we are a single species living in a fragile ecosystem. And it’s not about saving the planet. Earth was fine without us for most of its 4.5-billion-year existence. It’s about saving the environmental conditions that allow for us to survive as a species.

For the first time in our collective history, we must think of ourselves as a single tribe in a single planet. Tribes exist to guarantee the survival of their members. Given the current planetary and geopolitical stressors, if we don’t begin to think of ourselves in global terms as a single species as opposed to tribes fighting tribes, we risk letting our tribal past write our dystopian future.

We are a single tribe, the tribe of humans. And, as such, not a tribe at all.

- More Here

I have yet to meet a person who doesn't consciously supports one tribe or other without any sort of awareness. 

The Dawn of Everything - New History of Humanity

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

I preordered this book few months ago and it arrived early this week. 

And I started reading it today...

I want to scream at the top of my lungs. This is a once in life time book. It's so sad that David Graeber passed away two months ago. Thank you, thank you, thank you Graeber and Wengrow for spending 10 years of your lives researching and writing this book. 

This is a rare gem; it overturns everything we were "taught" and "learned" about human history. 

And why this is important? Because, it opens up possibilities that we haven't even imagined. 

Please stop booking tickets for "space tourism" and stop respecting morons who are chasing empty spaces in space. 

Instead, spend few dollars and read this book. We can use an extra mind to bring insights on how we can make marginal improvements to the quality of life of all sentient beings on this planet. 

This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast. There is not a single chapter that does not (playfully) disrupt well seated intellectual beliefs. It is deep, effortlessly iconoclastic, factually rigorous, and pleasurable to read.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Cognitive Tradeoff Theory - Tetsuro Matsuzawa

We then decided to make a direct comparison between the working memory of humans, adult chimpanzees, and young chimpanzees. The masking task was modified slightly for the purposes of this comparison. Sana Inoue, now an associate professor of Ritsumeikan University, and a postdoctoral student at that time, introduced the limited-hold task, in which the numerals were presented to the chimpanzees for only a brief duration.37 Suppose that there are five numerals—2, 3, 5, 8, and 9—displayed on the touch screen. After 650 milliseconds (ms), 430 ms, or 210 ms, all the numerals are automatically replaced by white squares. The goal is to touch the white squares in the ascending order of the now-masked numerals.

Ai’s performance in the limited-hold task was comparable to that of university students facing the same test for the first time. The performances of three young chimpanzees were much better than those of humans. We also tested the impact of overtraining among human subjects, allowing them to repeat the memory test many times over. Although their performances improved with practice, no human has ever been able to match Ayumu’s speed and accuracy in touching the nine numerals in the masking task.

One day, a chance event occurred that illustrated the retention of working memory in chimpanzees. While Ayumu was undertaking the limited-hold task for five numerals, a sudden noise occurred outside. Ayumu’s attention switched to the distraction and he lost concentration. After ten seconds, he turned his attention back to the touch screen, by which time the five numerals had already been replaced with white squares. The lapse in concentration made no difference. Ayumu was still able to touch the squares in the right order. This incident clearly shows that the chimpanzee can memorize the numerals at a glance, and that their working memory persists for at least ten seconds.

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In 2013, I proposed the cognitive tradeoff theory of language and memory. Our most recent common ancestor with chimpanzees may have possessed an extraordinary chimpanzee-like working memory, but over the course of human evolution, I suggested, we have lost this capability and acquired language in return. Suppose that a creature passes in front of you in the forest. It has a brown back, black legs, and a white spot on its forehead. Chimpanzees are highly adept at quickly detecting and memorizing these features. Humans lack this capability, but we have evolved other ways to label what we have witnessed, such as mimicking the body posture and shape of the creature, mimicking the sounds it made, or vocally labeling it as, say, an antelope.

- Primate Memory, Tetsuro Matsuzawa

Cliodynamics - History As A Science

To Peter Turchin, who studies population dynamics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the appearance of three peaks of political instability at roughly 50-year intervals is not a coincidence. For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. “I hope it won’t be as bad as 1870,” he adds.

Turchin’s approach which he calls cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history is part of a groundswell of efforts to apply scientific methods to history by identifying and modelling the broad social forces that Turchin and his colleagues say shape all human societies. It is an attempt to show that “history is not 'just one damn thing after another' ”, says Turchin, paraphrasing a saying often attributed to the late British historian Arnold Toynbee.

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What is new about cliodynamics isn’t the search for patterns, Turchin explains. Historians have done valuable work correlating phenomena such as political instability with political, economic and demographic variables. What is different is the scale Turchin and his colleagues are systematically collecting historical data that span centuries or even millennia — and the mathematical analysis of how the variables interact.

In their analysis of long-term social trends, advocates of cliodynamics focus on four main variables: population numbers, social structure, state strength and political instability. Each variable is measured in several ways. Social structure, for example, relies on factors such as health inequality measured using proxies including quantitative data on life expectancies — and wealth inequality, measured by the ratio of the largest fortune to the median wage. Choosing appropriate proxies can be a challenge, because relevant data are often hard to find. No proxy is perfect, the researchers concede. But they try to minimize the problem by choosing at least two proxies for each variable.

Then, drawing on all the sources they can find historical databases, newspaper archives, ethnographic studies Turchin and his colleagues plot these proxies over time and look for trends, hoping to identify historical patterns and markers of future events. For example, it seems that indicators of corruption increase and political cooperation unravels when a period of instability or violence is imminent. Such analysis also allows the researchers to track the order in which the changes occur, so that they can tease out useful correlations that might lead to cause–effect explanations.

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Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, a computer social scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, welcomes cliodynamics as a natural complement to his own field: doing simulations using ‘agent-based’ computer models. Cioffi-Revilla and his team are developing one such model to capture the effects of modern-day climate change on the Rift Valley region in East Africa, a populous area that is in the grip of a drought. The model starts with a series of digital agents representing households and allows them to interact, following rules such as seasonal migration patterns and ethnic alliances. The researchers have already seen labour specialization and vulnerability to drought emerge spontaneously, and they hope eventually to be able to predict flows of refugees and identify potential conflict hotspots. Cioffi-Revilla says that cliodynamics could strengthen the model by providing the agents with rules extracted from historical data.

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But Goldstone cautions that cliodynamics is useful only for looking at broad trends. “For some aspects of history, a scientific or cliodynamic approach is suitable, natural and fruitful,” he says. For example, “when we map the frequency versus magnitude of an event — deaths in various battles in a war, casualties in natural disasters, years to rebuild a state we find that there is a consistent pattern of higher frequencies at low magnitudes, and lower frequencies at high magnitudes, that follows a precise mathematical formula.” But when it comes to predicting unique events such as the Industrial Revolution, or the biography of a specific individual such as Benjamin Franklin, he says, the conventional historian’s approach of assembling a narrative based on evidence is still best.

Herbert Gintis, a retired economist who is still actively researching the evolution of social complexity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, also doubts that cliodynamics can predict specific historical events. But he thinks that the patterns and causal connections that it reveals can teach policy-makers valuable lessons about pitfalls to avoid, and actions that might forestall trouble. He offers the analogy of aviation: “You certainly can’t predict when a plane is going to crash, but engineers recover the black box. They study it carefully, they find out why the plane crashed, and that’s why so many fewer planes crash today than used to.”

- Advocates of ‘cliodynamics’ say that they can use scientific methods to illuminate the past. But historians are not so sure.

Stateless Civilization Was Probably The Norm In Early Civilizations

David Wengrow's brilliant observation on how we are so biased by the stories we tell but only this time, we seamlessly tweaked even the reality of how our early civilizations worked. 

Read the whole piece here (believe it or not, this changes so much we "believe" about politics and human nature): 

Admittedly much local variation can be found within this Trans-caucasian civilisation. Nevertheless, the features shared throughout it are suggestive of societies that may have defined themselves in conscious opposition to nearby states. Intriguingly, this may even be evident in their modes of cuisine. Among the types of material culture found throughout the network, from the Caucasus to the Jordan Valley, are ceramic hearths decorated with human-like faces, on which food was prepared in highly burnished vessels, topped with purpose-made lids. This method of boiling and stewing food in closed containers stands in contrast to the roasting and baking traditions of the urban lowlands, where the ritual preparation of food was conducted in open containers, or on exposed altars, so that the upward release of fumes from a sacrificial meal could attract the attention of the gods down to their human subjects.

Such culinary contrasts may be the stuff on which civilising missions rise or fall, as Catholic missionaries to the New World discovered, when confronted with the native Tupi, whose aversion to the baked substance we call bread proved an obstacle to their acceptance of the Holy Communion, itself a ritual descendant from the wine and cereal-based rituals of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. In the contrasting distributions of methods for food processing and preparation, we can perhaps detect the kind of conscious differentiation between state and non-state societies discussed by Clastres and Scott for more recent situations. But in the case of the Bronze Age, the tables are turned: this was a ‘world of peripheries’, where cities and state-centres rest like small islands amid a great sea of stateless civilisations.

I have said little as yet about why urban and state-like societies ever emerged in the first place. What I will offer by way of conclusion are some very brief and admittedly broad-brush observations. The first concerns utopian visions. It is striking that each of the earliest centres of urban civilisation presents us with a scaled-up and spectacular version of cultural values that extend back, in the same regions, to much earlier periods of prehistory. I am thinking here of the first monumental precincts at the city of Uruk in southern Iraq – designed as vastly expanded versions of a common household form, found in almost every Mesopotamian village during the pre-urban period; but also of the earliest royal monuments in Egypt – ceremonial versions of personal display items, the use of which (as we saw earlier) has deep Neolithic roots in the Nile Valley. We might think in similar terms of the great bathing facilities at the heart of Mohenjo-Daro, on the plains of the Indus.

In each case, time-honoured and familiar concepts of domesticity, wellbeing, or cleanliness were reproduced on a greatly magnified scale. For all their exclusionary qualities, we can hardly doubt that these early centres offered their dependants an image of cosmological perfection. It was in this fragile world of bread and circuses that the best and the worst of human nature conspired to produce what we now recognise as states. Yet the values of civilisation in which such political projects were grounded were both older and more durable than the projects themselves and were never truly encompassed by them, even at the height of ancient empire. By reducing our definition of ‘early civilisation’ to the formation of states, we risk losing sight of these much longer and more spatially extensive trajectories of cultural change, the roots of which must be sought in the development of prehistoric societies that succeeded – for millennia – in maintaining distinct forms of civilisation, while avoiding the emergence of states.

Humans Were Born to Carry Weight on Our Backs

After the Arctic, I traveled to meet researchers at Harvard, who told me that, compared to most other mammals, humans are “athletically pathetic.” We’re slow and weak. But we are damn good at endurance running and carrying. We can’t go fast. But we can go far — especially in hot weather. On a hot day, a relatively fit human will beat most other mammals in a distance race — lions, tigers, bears, dogs, etc. And we’re also the only animal that can carry well.

Endurance running and carrying are, quite literally, acts that made us human. The human body is built the way it is so that we could slowly but surely run down prey for miles and miles in the heat until the animal toppled over from exhaustion. Then we’d kill it and carry it back to camp. This is why we have two legs, springy arches in our feet, big butt muscles, sweat glands across our body, no fur, short torsos, and strong grips.

But as we evolved, running was relatively rare. It was reserved mostly for hunts. Modern-day tribes like the Tarahumara, for example, never run for the fun of it. Running is reserved for rare hunts and religious ceremonies, the Harvard anthropologists (who’d embedded themselves with the Tarahumara) explained.

Carrying, on the other hand, is something we humans did all the time as we evolved. So all the evidence suggests that we were more so “born to carry.”

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After the Arctic, I traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, to spend a few days with Jason McCarthy, a former Green Beret who founded GORUCK, a company that makes beautiful backpacks built to military specs.

“You never run in war without weight. Never,” said McCarthy. “But you’re always rucking. No matter what. Always. Rucking is the foundational skill of being a Special Forces soldier. Any soldier for that matter.”

“Ruck” is both a noun and a verb. It’s a thing and an action. It’s military speak for the heavy backpack that carries all of the items a soldier needs to fight a war. And “to ruck” or “rucking” is the act of marching that ruck in war, or as a form of training for soldiers or civilians to get really, really fit.

One morning Jason and I each loaded about 45 pounds into his GORUCK packs and rucked into GORUCK HQ. It worked my lungs and muscles. He described rucking as, “cardio for people who hate to run, and lifting for people who hate the gym.” It corrects for body type. If you’re too big, it’ll lean you out. Too skinny? It’ll add muscle to your frame. This, he explained, is why carrying is the foundation of military fitness training. It builds humans who one hour can hike 75 pounds of gear up a mountain and the next powerfully breach an enemy cell.

- More here from Michael Easter, the author of new book The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

High vs. Low Context Comunication

The American anthropologist Edward T Hall introduced a distinction between two types of communication culture: high context and low context. In a low-context culture, communication is explicit and direct. What people say is taken to be an expression of their thoughts and feelings. You don’t need to understand the context – who is speaking, in what situation – to understand the message. A high-context culture is one in which little is said explicitly, and most of the message is implied. The meaning of each message resides not so much in the words themselves, as in the context. Communication is oblique, subtle, ambiguous.

Most of us, wherever we are in the world, are living increasingly low-context lives, as more and more of us flock to cities, do business with strangers and converse over smartphones. Different countries still have different communication cultures, but nearly all of them are subject to the same global vectors of commerce, urbanisation and technology – forces that dissolve tradition, flatten hierarchy and increase the scope for confrontation. It’s not at all clear that we are prepared for this.

For most of our existence as a species, humans have operated in high-context mode. Our ancestors lived in settlements and tribes with shared traditions and settled chains of command. Now, we frequently encounter others with values and customs different to our own. At the same time, we are more temperamentally egalitarian than ever. Everywhere you look, there are interactions in which all parties have or demand an equal voice. Everyone expects their opinion to be heard and, increasingly, it can be. In this raucous, irreverent, gloriously diverse world, previously implicit rules about what can and cannot be said are looser and more fluid, sometimes even disappearing. With less context to guide our decisions, the number of things on which “we all agree” is shrinking fast.

Think about what defines low-context culture, at least in its extreme form: endless chatter, frequent argument; everyone telling you what they think, all the time. Remind you of anything? As Ian Macduff, an expert in conflict resolution, puts it, “the world of the internet looks predominantly like a low-context world”.

If humans were purely rational entities, we would listen politely to an opposing view before offering a considered response. In reality, disagreement floods our brain with chemical signals that make it hard to focus on the issue at hand. The signals tell us that this is an attack on me. “I disagree with you” becomes “I don’t like you”. Instead of opening our minds to the other’s point of view, we focus on defending ourselves.

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It’s often said that if humanity is to rise to the existential threats it faces, we must put our differences aside. But when we all agree – or pretend to – it becomes harder to make progress. Disagreement is a way of thinking, perhaps the best one we have, critical to the health of any shared enterprise, from marriage to business to democracy. We can use it to turn vague notions into actionable ideas, blind spots into insights, distrust into empathy. Instead of putting our differences aside, we need to put them to work.

To do so, we will have to overcome a widespread discomfort with disagreement. Disagreeing well is hard, and for most of us, stressful. But perhaps if we learn to see it as a skill in its own right, rather than as something that comes naturally, we might become more at ease with it. I believe we have a lot to learn from those who manage adversarial, conflict-ridden situations for a living; people whose job it is to wring information, insight and human connection out of even the most hostile encounter.

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The US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has described how to have a conversation with someone with whom you strongly disagree. You don’t have to share her politics to see that it is good advice:

“I have this mentor. And one of the best pieces of advice that he gave me is ‘always give someone the golden gate of retreat’, which is: give someone enough compassion, enough opportunity in a conversation for them to look good changing their mind. And it’s a really important thing to be able to do, because if you’re just like, ‘Oh you said this thing! You’re racist!’, you’re forcing that person to say, ‘No I’m not’. Et cetera. There’s no golden gate of retreat there. The only retreat there is to just barrel right through the opposing opinion.”

When we’re in an argument with someone, we should be thinking about how they can change their mind and look good – maintain or even enhance their face – at the same time. Often this is very hard to do in the moment of the dispute itself, when opinion and face are bound even more tightly together than they are before or after (the writer Rachel Cusk defines an argument as “an emergency of self-definition”). However, by showing that we have listened to and respected our interlocutor’s point of view, we make it more likely that they will come around at some later point. If and when they do, we should avoid scolding them for not agreeing with us all along. It’s amazing quite how often people in polarised debates do this; it hardly makes it more tempting to switch sides. Instead, we should remember that they have achieved something we have not: a change of mind.

- Adapted from Conflicted: Why Arguments Are Tearing Us Apart and How They Can Bring Us Together by Ian Leslie

Jane Goodall's Interview With Krista Tippett

Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

A lot of my frustrations come out on this blog regarding the incapacity of humans to understand animal suffering, human-animal bond, and lack of understanding of my relationship with Max. But these frustrations are ridiculous when compared to what Jane Goodall faced in the 1980s (I cannot even begin to imagine how it was in the 1500s and what Montaigne had to face with his fellow sapiens). 

Amazing progress has been made in the last 30 years because of a few human beings like Jane Goodall. Please ignore my frustrations, the truth is Max and I benefited immensely from this progress.

Peter Singer focused on morality and animal suffering but Jane Goodall focused on "why" they suffer. The answer is a rudimentary one - non-human animals have immense cognitive abilities and they are sentient, period.

Please do listen to this heartwarming interview...

KT: It’s worth underlining, because it’s so hard for people now to imagine, that as late as the latter half of the twentieth century, human beings thought that we were the only creatures who made tools.

JG: That’s what was, from science, believed. If somebody at that time had gone to the Pygmies in the rainforest in Congo, they could’ve told you.

When I finally was made to go to Cambridge University, by Louis Leakey—he said I needed a degree to get money—

KT: And, also, you were the eighth person in the history of Cambridge to come in to do graduate work without an undergraduate degree, which was almost unheard of.

JG: I was greeted by scientists who said, “You’ve done your study wrong. You can’t talk about personality, problem solving, or emotions,” because those were thought to be unique to us. I was actually taught, and it’s in the textbooks, that the difference between us and all other animals is one of kind. But my dog Rusty taught me when I was a child that that certainly wasn’t true: we’re not the only beings on the planet with personalities, minds, and emotions. We are part of, not separate from, the animal kingdom.

Arrogant Western science. I think it probably stems from religion. God made man, God made man different, God made man to have dominion over the birds and the animals and the fish and so on. But that is a wrong translation. The original Hebrew word is more like “steward,” not dominion.

KT: There’s social and emotional continuity with the natural world. We’re creatures, rather than just all the other creatures being creatures.

JG: It’s just very arrogant to think that way. I was told at Cambridge that you have to be absolutely objective, you must not have empathy with your subject. “You shouldn’t have named the chimpanzees,” they told me, “they should’ve had numbers.” To me, that was so wrong. When I was watching a chimpanzee family, for example, and one of the young ones did something a little strange, it’s because I was empathetic toward them that I thought, They do it because of . . . whatever. That gives you a platform, and you can stand on that platform and then analyze what you’ve seen in a scientific way. But it’s the empathy that gives that aha moment.

By 1986, I had my PhD, I’d built up a research station, and, best of all, I could spend hours alone in the rainforest. That’s where I felt that deep, spiritual connection to the natural world and, also, came to understand the interconnectedness of all living things in this tapestry of life, where each species, no matter how insignificant, plays a vital role in the whole pattern. And I imagined continuing in that way, well, for the rest of my life. Why not?

And it was when I published that big book, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, and it had all my scientific observations, but it also had all the stories. Science is apt to scoff at a story; they are apt to scoff at anecdotes. But an anecdote can be a very carefully recorded observation. It’s an anecdote because you only see it once, but those anecdotes are sometimes the key to unlocking a puzzle. They’re terribly important. And a collection of anecdotes, stories, has been very, very important in my research.

So anyway, we organized a conference with the then-director of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, Dr. Paul Heltne—I think there were six other study sites back then, and we invited scientists from each and, also, a few from noninvasive, captive research, like big zoo groups, for example. The main object was to see how chimp behavior differed from environment to environment.

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KT: I believe that the title of your book, In the Shadow of Man, in 1971, was that chimpanzees live in the shadow of man, as we had evolved to overshadow them with our powers of thought and speech. But what you also then picked up was how we had evolved and become a threat to the natural world from which we emerged and with which we remained in kinship.

JG: The biggest difference between us, chimps, and other animals is the explosive development of our intellect. Because science is now acknowledging that animals are not the machines they once thought, there’s a huge flurry of information about animal intelligence. It ranges from chimpanzees using computers in clever ways, elephants with their very close social bonds and strong relationships between herd members, and crows, who turn out to be able to actually use and make tools. And pigs—we can come back to factory farms later, perhaps— pigs are as intelligent as dogs, more intelligent than some. And now we know the octopus is highly intelligent. We know trees communicate with each other.

So here we are, with this intellect that’s enabled us to do something very different from all the animal successes, and that’s design a rocket, for example, that went up to Mars. Bizarre, isn’t it, that the most intellectual creature that’s ever lived on the planet is destroying its only home? There’s a disconnect between that clever, clever brain and human heart, love, and compassion. Only when head and heart work in harmony can we attain our true human potential. 

Also, support and join Roots & Shoots - Jane Goodall's initiative to educate children on bringing positive change in their community.