Month: November 2011

Has Evolution Made Us More Peaceful?

Steven Pinker sees little reason to believe it has:

The reason that today, France and Germany aren’t likely to go to war, slavery is illegal, human sacrifice has disappeared, we don’t break heretics on the wheel, homosexuality has been decriminalized, and people are less and less likely to smack their children, is not that our hormone systems or brain wiring has changed by Darwinian forces. In most of these cases, the changes are too recent for generation-to-generation evolutionary changes (they unfolded over centuries, decades, or even years), and in most cases it is not clear how the less violent choices would have led to increased sexual attractiveness, fecundity, or survival. Of course I cannot rule this out in all cases (such as the decline in homicide since medieval times—it’s theoretically possible), but I don’t see any evidence that it has taken place.

Bryan Appleyard thinks this makes the current era of peace extremely fragile:

[I]s there something especially robust about these solutions we have found that makes them more likely to survive the cataclysms of history? If not, then the Pinker Peace is indeed a special case and nothing more.

The Metaphysics Of Weight Loss

GT_Obese

Alva Noë unpacks them:

[W]e are not free if freedom means an immunity to the ways in which we are sculpted by habit as well as by the world around us. If freedom means the ability to change course as a result of wanting to change course, or weighing up options, then we are not free. But maybe there is a different way of thinking about our freedom … [W]e are surfers riding the wave. Although the wave conditions and controls our every move, with skill, with training, we learn to carve our own path along the water's surface. 

If you want to lose weight, learn how to surf. That means learning to be responsive to the ways in which we are controlled by our past selves as well by the world around us.

(Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Chimps Can Talk?

H.S. Terrace and Peter Singer debate the evidence. One of Singer's core arguments:

In 2008, thirty years after David Premack and Guy Woodruff wrote a seminal paper entitled “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?,” Josep Call and Michael Tomasello surveyed the extensive literature that now exists on this question. They conclude that “there is solid evidence from several different experimental paradigms that chimpanzees understand the goals and intentions of others, as well as the perception and knowledge of others.” Call and Tomasello do not find evidence that chimpanzees understand false beliefs, but it is clear that chimps have enough understanding of other minds to be able to perceive what others are thinking, and thus to use simple forms of language to communicate with them.

The discussion was sparked by a piece Singer wrote a few months ago on Project Nim, a film about Terrace's research. Recent coverage on animal minds here and here.

Homesick In America

Francesca Mari traces the history of the word: 

[H]omesickness didn’t come into use until the 1750s. Before that, the feeling was known as "nostalgia," a medical condition. … By two years in [to the Civil War], two thousand soldiers had been diagnosed with nostalgia, and in the year 1865, twenty-four white Union soldiers and sixteen black ones died from it.

Meantime one hundred thousand Confederates deserted, presumably motivated by memories of mom’s hushpuppies. The war just about ended what little romanticization of homesickness had survived in the wilds of early America.

Libby Copeland applies homesickness to today's culture:

[Author Susan J. Matt] wonders if, in the face of rapid change, we have sublimated our longing for home, for the way things used to be, into a passion for retro objects. This type of nostalgia lets us signal cultural hipness instead of the rootlessness and neediness we feel deep down.