Behavior is as behavior does

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, animals, behavior, evolution, nature-nurture debate

A fellow showed up half an hour late for his regular poker game with friends, and found they'd started without him. For a fourth, they'd recruited the host's dog. The man told the host, "Wow! That's some talented pup!!" "Oh," he replied, "Old Groaner isn't so great. Whenever he has an ace he wags his tail."

We are amused by pictures or stories of animals doing "human" things (or the converse!). Yet until recently, while most people with pets seem to easily understand that the animals have feelings and purposeful behaviors, scientists have been slow (by centuries!) to come around.

Marlene Zuk's new book, Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why it Matters, drives lots of new nails into the coffin of the Animal-as-Automaton view. Let me state at the outset that, for two good reasons I hold that animals, even the rather elementary ones we call "bugs", all fit along at least three scales (none of them is the scala naturae, the "natural ladder" so beloved of ignorant biologists). Firstly, as to consciousness, one end might be called "Human-level self consciousness" (assuming it's truly the end point; maybe toothed whales are beyond us, for example); the other end we can call "barely conscious of more than the basic drives of hunger and the 'urge to merge'". Secondly, as to emotion, just as some animals have abilities we don't, there ought to be some that can have feelings we don't have. Thirdly, considering behavior, which is often divided into "purposive" (the scientific jargon for "purposeful") and "instinctive" (which really means "purely genetic"): everything living behaves. Animals are practically defined by behavior. It is what they ARE. "Lower animals" are the product of 4 billion years of evolution, the same as humans. So are the things that they DO.

Somewhere on my bookshelves I have the seminal volume, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men by E.C. Tolman, published in 1932. This book is not referenced by Dr. Zuk, more's the pity. If she's not an intellectual descendant of Tolman, she's at least a grandniece. He was far ahead of his time, as witness the still-nearly-pervasive use of the canard "anthropomorphism" to discredit much work on animal behavior.

My two reasons: To hard-line creationists, many of whom also hold the Calvinist position that God has no emotions, I would say, "Are we not created in the image of God? Did our emotions and behaviors come from nowhere? Are they not part of that image?" Of course, some would double down to say that all such things are part of "original sin" or whatever Protestants call it. (Though I am a believer, I am neither Catholic nor Protestant.) They are fools. To take a further step, "If we have feelings and behaviors that are something other than automatic, why would God deny such abilities to animals?"

To hard-line Skinnerian scientists I would say, "I subscribe to evolution, as carried out by natural selection. Do you? If so, you must realize that our feelings came from somewhere. Where? Of course, from our nonhuman ancestors. We emote and behave because they did." So much for anthropomorphism. And as I said before, animals that are attuned to greatly different environments than humans could survive (without costly technology) are likely to have feelings and behaviors that are so foreign to us that we are unlikely to recognize them as such.

So, a bit about the book—which I urge everyone to read!—what is the Dead Man Test? Some, wishing a less macabre moniker, call it the Teddy Bear Test: If a Teddy Bear can do it, it isn't behavior. Substitute Dead Man for Teddy Bear if you prefer. Definition by exclusion.

How does behavior evolve? Just like anything else! Behavior is a physical attribute. It is just as real as height, eye color, and whether your ring finger is longer or shorter than your middle finger. These things, plus all other "genetic traits" are influenced by environmental factors. This is the central emphasis of the book. Genes alone don't determine anything. Neither does environment alone. Everything is a mix, an intertwining of the two. She has to say it over and over, because many folks won't get it otherwise!

For an example of this intertwining: One of my great-grandfathers was prone to drink. The family was Methodist, and Methodists were, until the 1960's, required to sign a Pledge that they would not touch alcohol. Great-grandpa Joe fought his addiction mightily, but he would go on a bender on occasion. His daughters kept their Pledges; it helped that they never tasted "the sauce" as young people, and that they took their father as a cautionary example. Having a strict mother helped. My mother was also raised to be a teetotaler, as was I. But in college some friends persuaded me to have a beer to celebrate my 18th birthday (I lived in a state that allowed 18-year-olds to drink "low beer"). I soon found a way to get harder stuff, and I was off, headed for a life as an alcoholic! Except, I couldn't afford it. Also, returning home after the school year, back in a teetotaling home, I took a hard look at myself, and decided not to use "anything that hinders thinking clearly". At that time I didn't know about Joe. Later one of my brothers became more of an alcoholic than I had been. His own story is fascinating, but won't fit here. He and I are both "recovering"; one never fully "recovers".

Why weren't my mother and her mother alcoholics? In a different environment they'd have been so. We have a kind of protein that turns ethanol into a heroin-like addicting substance. Fortunately, it is kind of rare. Yeah, I know there are lots of alcoholics; some of them have this same genetic situation. But they are a small fraction of the whole of humanity.

I'll leave it to you to get the book and allow Dr. Zuk to lead you down many a lane and garden path, with her stories of dancing cockatoos (do they have something to dance to in nature? Neither do elephants, and I've also seen videos of them responding to music); of octopuses punching fish, apparently out of irritation; of how animals from flies to flying foxes vary in their behaviors based on still-inscrutable combinations of their genetic endowment and their past and present environment. This sure is an enjoyable book!

Are you an Econ? Don't bet on it!

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, economics, errors, behavior, behavioral economics, memoirs

John Maynard Keynes developed early theories of economics and markets, and made a distinction that later economists neglected and then forgot. He stated that the actions people take are frequently prompted by "animal spirits", which he defined as "a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities." [Keynes, 1936: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money] In other words, people do not always, or even usually, thoroughly calculate or deliberate upon their decisions.

Fast-forward forty years, from 1936 to 1976. Milton Friedman has become the twelfth Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences. Economic theories have been developing, even proliferating. Men (no woman won until 2009) labored for years to wring a new formula out of the growing mass of theory, a few became Nobelists, and the edifice thus built was indeed founded on the analysis of "quantitative benefits…" and so forth. Social scientists other than economists were beginning to protest that the "rational" decisions that were required for economic theory to work could not be realistically made by genuine human beings. Policies were arising that assumed everyone was capable of making near-instantaneous decisions using the very calculations that Nobel Prize-winning economists had labored for years to discover.

Friedman poured oil upon the roiled waters by invoking the "as if" argument, using an expert billiards player as an example. To summarize, an expert, or even pretty good cueman, does not calculate the outcome of a series of Newtonian physics collisions, but plays as if such calculations had been made. But others, who for the time being mostly kept their thoughts to themselves while they sought tenure (!), realized that this implied all of us have Olympic-level skills when we make economic decisions. Don't I wish!

One of these others was Richard H. Thaler, who began to use the term "Econs" to describe the fictitious super-rational beings (who could out-Spock Mr. Spock) upon which economic theory depended. He distinguished Econs from Humans, a term referring to genuine human beings, who are indeed not Vulcans, but have emotions, proclivities, life histories, and only in the most extreme cases act with unvarnished Reason. Econs never err. Humans seldom fail to err. Extracting useful theories from the reliable errors of Humans has been a major element of Dr. Thaler's work, as described in his memoir Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.

Dr. Thaler might be a somewhat unusual economist, because he has befriended and worked with a number of psychologists, including Daniel Kahneman, whose book Thinking, Fast and Slow I reviewed a few months ago. Perhaps most economists fear too much exposure to psychology, because Humans are so complex. Yet it is that very complexity that must be studied, for policy that does not take it into account cannot succeed.

The main "policy" way to get people to do something is to tell them. If the matter is important, perhaps sanctions such as fines will be enacted. A simple example might be (Ladies, avert your eyes) putting a sign in the Men's Room, above the urinals: "Please Aim Accurately. Excess Cleaning is Costly". Such a sign is likely to result in even greater need for cleanup. What to do? Economics is the study of incentives as one aspect of motivation. What motivates Human males? Exhortations typically just rile them up. Of course, if there were no Humans, only Econs, no sign would be needed. Econs never miss. Humans seldom miss if they have an enticing target. Some years ago in Holland something new was tried: to etch the image of a fly just above the drain of the urinal. "Excess Cleaning" needs were reduced by 80%. Don't be surprised if you see a "fly" in a public urinal.

The title Misbehaving refers to anomalies that Dr. Thaler has been collecting for decades, anomalies that could not exist or persist if we were all Econs. The fly-target is just the simplest example. Others include violations of the "Efficient Market Hypothesis" (EMH). The most glaring is a case in which 3Com acquired Palm, then years later sought to divest it by a partial sale of stock, to be followed by successive sales until the whole was sold off. Early sales of Palm shares indicated that, if EMH were true, investors considered the residual value of 3Com to be negative, because the value of all Palm stock at that price would exceed the value of the combined company! This is a small example of a bubble. The existence of bubbles, such as the U.S. housing bubble that burst in 2008, is a huge anomaly contrary to EMH. Bubbles imply that things are wrongly priced, and so does all the talk on morning "business segment" shows about whether a "correction" is imminent. Econs never suffer bubbles or corrections. For them, the price is always right. Always. For Econs, the price they are willing to pay or receive for an equity exactly mirrors all the expected future value of the company and its dividends and even closure costs when it comes to an end. Econs are the ultimate Seers!!

Maybe at work you have access to a 401(k) retirement savings plan. Do you contribute? Does your company pay a matching contribution of the first few percent? For years, taking advantage of a 401(k) required filling out some paperwork, selecting a level of participation, and perhaps selecting one or more funds (including company stock and a few mutual funds) to put your money in, for the next 20-40 years. Making changes was not simple. Participation was low.

I guess I am more of an Econ than usual. I jumped at the chance, starting with 6% (which we could barely afford to sock away, but the company matched the first 6%, so it was like getting free money). Each time I got a raise, I added a percent or two, until I maxed it out. But I knew one guy who put in his 6% each year, but took it back out the following year and spent it. He got his free money, but was only accumulating half as much as someone who saved 6% and left it there with its match. I bet he wasn't nearly as well prepared to retire at 66 as I was. Even more puzzling, in those years, even with 3% or even 6% company matching, more than half of my co-workers never started their 401(k).

A dozen or so years ago, Dr. Thaler and others began convincing companies to switch from this opt-in method to an opt-out one. Employees were informed they would be automatically enrolled in a 401(k), with 3% of their earnings and 3% of company matching funds going into some default investment, usually a money market fund or company stock or a mix of both. If they really didn't want it, they had to sign a certain form and send it to the payroll office. Participation rates increased greatly. Then they devised a follow-on program called Save More Tomorrow: Each time an employee received a raise, half of it (or a different proportion that could be chosen) would be added to their participation rate, maybe raising an initial 3% to 4% or 5%, then to 6% after the next raise, and so forth, up to a ceiling such as the maximum allowed amount. Some companies, not wanting to write extra software to couple the payroll system with the retirement system, opted instead to simply add half a percent yearly to each participating employee's savings rate, unless, again, they sent in a form with differing instructions.

If you have access to a plan such as this, and it has resulted in your saving more toward retirement than you used to, you have Dr. Thaler and other "economics renegades" to thank. Reading such an entertaining, informative book, I was quite encouraged that, finally, some economists are looking at us as genuine Humans, who do things because we like to rather than because of some lengthy, Nobel-worthy calculation; who make decisions when we are happy or sad or mad that are often different from what we'd decide in a calmer mood; who wear green today and blue tomorrow and can't decide what color shirt to wear after that, so we ask our spouse, who likes mauve but we hate it so we grab an apricot-and-chartreuse print and wear that. Don't be surprised if the decision which house or car to buy is backed up by no more thought than that print shirt! We are Humans!!

A burr under the PC blanket

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, genetics, sociology, behavior

To date, Nicholas Wade has written three seminal books, which I have read in reverse order. I first read his most recent, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, which I reviewed July 30, then The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures, reviewed August 12. Now I have in hand Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, published in 2006. His books in general criticize or expose academic mischief. These three take a more nuanced approach. While Wade is openly critical of the anti-recent-evolution stance of nearly all scientists who study human history and prehistory, he primarily presents data, draws logical conclusions, and engages the reader to think it through.

The premise underlying all three books is that human evolution continues apace. Anthropologists and others have from the beginning operated under the conceit that human evolution stopped about 50,000 years ago with the worldwide spread of "behaviorally modern humans", often called Cro-Magnon, but these days usually called Archaic Humans. This in spite of the facts that a typical archaic human was more heavily built than most moderns, and that the AH's were foragers (like chimps and bonobos are today), not even having the social organization of modern hunter-gatherers, let alone using settled dwellings. If there exist any AH's today, no matter how "behaviorally modern" they may be, they are probably being kept in prisons or hospitals for the criminally insane.

We are more gracile—having more slender bones and less muscle—than AH's. It took them, both in Africa and in the wider world a few hundred of them invaded around 50,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years to become hunter-gatherers, and another 5,000-10,000 years to begin to live in at least semi-permanent settlements. Only then, perhaps by accident, did cultivation of grains and domestication of certain animals produce an agricultural economy. I had not read before that people began to live in settlements several millennia before the agricultural revolution that began about 9,500 years ago. Only in the Americas was the order apparently reversed, with the domestication of maize preceding city-building, and that some 5,000 years later than in Eurasia and Africa.

Chapter 12, "Evolution", summarizes points made earlier in the book and adds a few pieces of evidence that we continue to evolve at about the same clip as large animals in general. These items include:

• Defenses against malaria, including sickle cell anemia and thalassemia and a few other independently evolved modifications of hemoglobin, plus metabolic chain modifications such as G6PD, all of which evolved in the last 5,000 years or so.
• The change from light skin, as in chimps and bonobos, to dark skin presumably came about when humans lost most hair hundreds of thousands of years ago. After a small group left Africa, most entered more northerly climes, and had less need for sun protection, plus in the most northerly, the need to make more vitamin D from what sun there was. This led to lighter skins. The situation is complicated by the last cold phases of the ice age between 20,000 and 12,000 years ago, when pale-skinned northerners would have been forced southward, only to return northward about the start of the Holocene, variously put somewhere around 10,000-11,500 years ago. The genes that favor pale skin in Eurasians are different from those in the Chinese and other East Asians.
• Genes that affect brain size, one protective from microcephaly and another that affects the style of neural connections, arose 37,000 and 6,000 years ago, respectively.
• Adult lactose tolerance arose about 5,000 years ago, in at least three different ways in different places.
• Very few AH's got impacted wisdom teeth. Compare the situation today! The average modern male Euro-American lower jaw is a centimeter shorter than the average male AH lower jaw.

Such conclusions have led to criticism from academia. Curiously, having dipped into the literature some eight years after the fact, I find nearly no countering factual arguments, and mostly ad hominem attacks and circular reasoning. But things like malaria or light skin or wisdom teeth are one thing. The way we think and behave is sacred ground! Wade storms in where angels might fear to tread. But he is no fool.

It is becoming ever more clear that the human brain is no tabula rasa, on which culture can be written freely regardless of one's ancestry. Noam Chomsky and others have shown that infants have a "grammar engine" that enables them to learn language very easily. This definitely evolved well prior to 50,000 years ago, and improved communication may have been the salient factor that allowed a small band to invade eastward against probably opposition by Neanderthals and Homo Erectus. Other newly found innate skills are reported frequently. Wade contends that the modern ability to trust strangers rather than kill them on sight (or slink away to prepare an ambush) required genetic changes to our brains. Trusting was totally outside the scope of AH's. Trade is not seen between bands of apes, and is not yet universal among modern hunter gatherer tribes.

The mental adaptations needed to survive or thrive in settlements that have social order rather than total egalitarian organization are at least partly genetic. The puzzle to me is, wherever such mutations first arose, how did they spread throughout the human species? Wade mentions parallel, convergent evolution, but I am not so sure.

Bands of foragers and later, hunter gatherers, were and are so warlike that 30% of males die by the spear. That may work out to a yearly death rate due to fighting in the 1% range, but consider if the city of Philadelphia had a 1% murder rate: 15,000 per year (of half that if only males frequently kill). Compare that to around 200 yearly over the past decade. But a less murderous people are unlikely to spread into the territory of their violent cousins. This puzzle remains, but the modern fact of very low (comparative) violence.

The human species not only domesticated wolves, goats and other critters, they domesticated themselves. I am reminded of a scene from Demolition Man (1993), in which Wesley Snipes commits a bit of mayhem, and a dazed police officer says, "We're policemen. We aren't used to this level of violence". The actors other than Stallone and Snipes were chosen to be slender and inoffensive, as if they'd evolved further along the track of gracilization that has been going on for 50,000 years.

In a telling statement, Wade writes

There is no reason to suppose that human nature ceased to evolve at some finishing post in the distant past or to assume, as do some evolutionary psychologists, that people are struggling to function in modern societies with Stone Age minds. Genomes adapt to current circumstances or perish; the human genome is unlikely to be an exception. (p. 278)

I find a curious dichotomy in the past decade's debate over our failed nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most pundits predicted failure, stating that the region's peoples didn't think in terms favorable to American-style capitalism and representative democracy. "They are tribal peoples, it doesn't make sense to them." They were right. Some commentators even implied that peoples such as the Afghans can't think in these terms. Though this further implies that their brains work differently, they'd be aghast if this were pointed out. But if our genetics reflects our heritage, including adaptations to all of the past environment including culture, then it follows that the kinds of thoughts we are able to think is affected, if not delimited, by our ancestry.

Had Wade written only Before the Dawn he'd have been in sufficient hot water with academia. But he took Chapter 9, "Race", and part of Chapter 8, "Sociality", particularly the section on Evolution of Religion, and expanded them into the two later books. Now he is being attacked not only by evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists, but also the Civil Rights establishment—and the PC world in general—and many Christians (Jews, Moslems and most others mainly greeted The Faith Instinct with a yawn).

Face it, folks. There is no dichotomy between "man" and "nature". We are part of nature. We continue to evolve, both in body and in mind. Isn't it now a tenet of psychology that we are not body plus mind, but a body-mind, that the mind is a product of the body? The brain is part of the body, and evolves also. It must have required a significant change in how human brains work in order to allow people to settle down in communities larger than about 150, and a further, equally significant change to yield a 100-fold reduction in lethal violence over the past 20,000 years or so. Even the infamous Yanomamo of Brazil, murderous as they are, have a lower violent death rate than the typical group of AH's. Isn't that a good thing?

Is there a family anywhere that is composed of adoptees from radically different cultural heritages, but all were adopted as infants? This would constitute a small, natural experiment. To what extent would the infants, once grown to adolescence and adulthood, become comfortable in their adopted culture? I mean totally comfortable. Were such a family in suburban Minnesota, for example, would they all become productive taxpayers and voters? Would things such as the rule of law ("…a nation of laws and not of men.") make for them the kind of visceral sense it does to Euro-Americans? Maybe and maybe not. If Wade's thesis is correct, there would be a differing response to Western institutions depending on genetic heritage.

Data miners, light your lamps

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, internet, behavior

PPC means 'pay per click', but to Bill Tancer (I think it rhymes with dancer), it also means, 'porn, pills, and casinos', some of the biggest categories of internet searches. Porn searches top the list of all searches…or at least, they used to. This may be changing.

In the UK at least, social networking searches have surpassed them (Image from Hitwise.com's blog site). The author of Click: Unexpected Insights for Business and Life, Bill Tancer is one of seven Hitwise bloggers, and the company's lead analyst (& general manager of global analysis).

Hitwise purveys competitive intelligence of all sorts, gleaned from a massive, continually growing database of internet searches, clicks and click-throughs. For most of us, a spate of activity on the Web starts with a Search, or several-many. Then we Click on some of the results. A Click-through is a trace: for each Click (URL clicked upon) it is the URL that preceded it and the one that follows. These can be chained for more complex analyses. With the right software and the amalgamated searches, etc. for ten million Web users, you can learn a lot.

The author takes us down a few of the paths he has followed, to find out why searches containing the words "prom dress" spike in January rather than later in the Spring; why the popularity of a certain lady wrestler didn't translate into a win on Dancing with the Stars; or how the internet has become many people's psychotherapist.

To take up the first item: One large segment of "prom dress" searchers is composed of affluent, fashion-conscious girls, and many fashion magazines (on-line and off) publish their initial prom fashions in mid-December…and these girls don't wait. The girls who are more likely to buy a department store dress tend to begin searching in April, and are less avid searchers.

Yearly trends clearly show what people are resolving, each New Years' Day, what diets are most popular when we need to get rid of some of that Thanksgiving lard we pack on, and when young minds begin to think of June weddings (it isn't June).

But the data have social correlations also. This chart, of clicks on charitable websites, shows an interesting trend compared to the Dow-Jones index. Whether this mainly represents people who think more charity will be needed, or people hoping to find help, is left unstated in the blog post this comes from.

But this isn't a review of the blog, but the book. The author supports his contention that Click data can reveal trends that polling never will. This is because we're not afraid of the search engine. It won't pass judgment on us. We ask things we really want to know, from "how to kiss" to "why am I sad" to "where is Tom Cruise today". You may tell a telephone pollster, "I don't gamble," and the number of people who might admit that is indeed very small; but a large proportion of us spend more time on casinos.com and similar sites than the poll would predict.

The author often begins a public appearance by saying, "I love data", or, "I've always loved data". The audience may titter, but quite a number of people whisper later, "So do I." Data are the roots of information, and information is power. The author quotes John Batelle, who said it best,

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind—a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.

Just by the way, folks, there may be a constitutional right of privacy, but the real thing is now that much harder to attain. I enjoyed the book, but the implications are unsettling.