Maybe don’t have fireworks.

Any questions?

There are three categories of science book authors: Scientists, who write the best ones most of the time, science-steeped (often trained-as-scientists) science writers, who can write some pretty good books, and journalists who delve into the science and sometimes write amazing books, other times write books that are good books but not necessarily good science books. Superlative: The Biology of Extremes is in the higher end of the last category. It is about the scientists, the teams, the work more than the cells and polymers.

Also, LaPlante has another set of credentials: He is deeply, severely, hated by Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck. Oh, also, the book is at present deeply on sale.

Animal Beauty: On the Evolution of Biological Aesthetics (The MIT Press) is sort of the opposite.

This is a series of essays by biologist Chrisiane Nusslein-Volhard, engagingly and skillfully illustrated by Suse Grutzmacher (and translated by Jonathan Howard) about the aesthetic sense talked about by Darwin, its evolution, distribution, function, meaning, across animals. The essays take a Tinbergian approach to explore most aspects of how thinks look or are looked at, how paterns, colors, and other features play ar ole in sexual selection, and how the underlying genetic connect to these important surface features, allowing us to understand the phylogeny of this physical-behavioral nexus. This is the scientist talking about the science. The book itself is also a bit unusual, as it is designed to fit comfortably in a pocket or purse. Take it to the dentist office or hair stylist! (When the Pandemic is over.)

Go for a swim with a ghost shark, the slowest-evolving creature known to humankind, which is teaching us new ways to think about immunity. Get to know the axolotl, which has the longest-known genome and may hold the secret to cellular regeneration. Learn about Monorhaphis chuni, the oldest discovered animal, which is providing insights into the connection between our terrestrial and aquatic worlds.

I’m not endorsing every idea or story in this book. One can not write a book about adaptations and have any evolutionary biologist worth their salt not bump on things. But the author does an honest and straightforward job of representing the research, and you’ll learn quite a bit that is new, see new perspectives on things you’ve considered in the past, and you’ll enjoy LaPlante’s writing.

I will probably be recommending this volume as a holiday gift for the Uncle who has everything or the teenager who likes natural history. Teachers of wildlife biology, evolution, or related topics will be able to mine this volume for stories. The use of footnotes is notable.* I recommend Superlative

• … and well done.

Once upon a time there was a psychology research lab looking into stress. They did this experiment:

Get two distinct samples of rats, as identical as they can be, in every way but one. For one group, do nothing special. For the other group, have an undergraduate volunteer arrive daily and spend a fixed amount of time cuddling with the rat, saying nice things to it, petting it, etc.

At intervals before, during, and after this period, give the rats a standard test like you do. This test involves placing the rat by itself on a floor bound by four steep walls. the floor is divided into many tiles, each just a few inches across. At regular intervals, record which square the rat is in. Over time, one can draw as sort of map showing where the rat spent most of its time.

Non-cuddled rats were found to do what rats usually do in this test. They spend more of their time around the edges of the floor, near the walls. This is what rats do, spending their time moving along walls and in shadows out of fear.

The cuddled rats, on the other hand, spent their time more or less randomly across the floor, and were also observed to spend more time looking up and around on their hind limbs.

Interpretation: If you give rats loving care they become well adjusted human toddlers. Therefore, if you give human toddlers loving care, they also become well adjusted human toddlers.

Some time later, a different research group, or maybe the same research group after a few beers, became suspicious of those findings, and decided to have another look at rats.

They performed the same exact experiment, but with one change. Instead of an undergraduate volunteer showing up daily to cuddle half the rats, the volunteer simply picked the rat out of the cage, placed it in an empty coffee can, put the lid on the can, and shook the can around a bit. Not enough to harm the rat, but enough to freak it out.

After the same time had passed with this treatment, the rats were tested in the same way.

The rat-in-the-can rats, the ones shaken around like Folgers, had the same change as the cuddled rats, showing little stress or fear, not hugging the walls as rats normally do, and being curious and looking around more than normal.

Interpretation: Being picked up by an undergraduate, held in the hands, touched with the other hand, made noise at, maybe occasionally brought near the mouth for a kiss, is a rat’s worst nightmare. The giant predator has come out of nowhere, captured you, and is certainly going to eat, crush, or otherwise abuse you. Every day For days. Or, being picked up and shaken in a can every day, day after day, is in the end very very stressful.

Either way, the rat becomes over-acclimatized to stress, and beings to exhibit the utterly abnormal behavior of not avoiding further attacks by predators.

Meta-conclusion: Although endocrine systems in humans and rats are very similar and behave in similar ways, rats and humans are not very similar and at the level of the whole organism, do not behave in similar ways.

Original Title: Perfect Strangers

In the movie “Face/Off” when John Travolta and Nicolas Cage stared at each other following face-switching surgery, we were meant to understand that both men had a very uncanny feeling. Seeing a copy of oneself that isn’t quite oneself elicits an emotional response robotics experts call the “uncanny valley,” a phenomenon psychologists have been trying to explain in human terms for decades, beginning with Freud himself. Seed’s Joe Kloc explores the history and science of this strange phenomenon in “Into the Uncanny Valley.” (See Wayback Machine for that)

Seminal child psychologist Jean Piaget saw infants as unthinking bowls of Jell-O. Touched by the world around them, they sense their own jiggling, which causes nascent perception—leading to experimental jiggling, more complex perception, and so on—until repeated and recursive interaction with the self and the environment transforms them from a bowl of Jell-O into a thinking adult capable of, well, having strong opinions about Jell-O, among other things.

Charles Sanders Peirce saw the human mind as a habit-making machine. Novel things (situations, actions, objects) elicit an emotional reaction, often discomfort. As the novel thing becomes old and the perceiver inured, the thing becomes part of the background, the idea internalized, the physicality automated. Symbols become mere icons, startling meaning becomes mere expectation, overtly conscious action becomes subconscious reaction.

In either model that which does not belong is attended to or focused on, and there is a relationship between “belonging” (to one’s view of the world) and the attributes we observe. But when something is supposed to fit expectations perfectly but in fact does not fit in some unexpected way, discomfort happens. For instance: Your father has a mustache, your mother does not. Then one day, your mother has the stash and your father is clean-shaven. It is only one tiny detail among many details. But it would be enough. It would be…uncanny.

Freud attributed the uncanny to the outcome of a human attempt to deny death by making copies of oneself which, when viewed by the original, seem eerie. But recent research suggests that monkeys regard nearly perfect monkey manikins as strange, just as humans see modern very human-like robots as strange. If monkeys are creeped-out by slightly off monkey-doppelgangers, than Freud’s explanation of the uncanny is unlikely. But monkeys probably also start out life as bowls of jiggling Jell-O, and certainly they attend to the novel and ignore that to which they are inured like Peirce would expect. So the uncanny could be the result of a sudden and unexpected wrong turn in the normal process of perception and learning, by people or monkeys. Kloc’s article discusses a wide range of other possible explanations, including more straightforward adaptive models. Perhaps, it is suggested, the uncanny valley is an unsafe place to be so we are shaped by evolution to recognize it.

The uncanny, not-quite-perfect duplicate of ourselves (or our loved ones) is the stuff of so much fiction and myth that it must be powerful and may even be important. The near-duplicate human is a tool of shamans, the immortal spirit of religions, the face in portraiture, the death mask. And it is also the bane of those who wish to create robots with artificial intelligence that can stand in for individual humans even if they are not “real.” We seem innately to not trust our doppelgangers or our Frankensteins. We feel strange when we see human faces on the backs of crabs or human heads growing out of places they should not be. When pressed for a rational reason for this distrust or discomfort, it seems sufficient to say little more than, “Well, the whole thing totally creeps me out.”

And when we find ourselves able to satisfy our questions about a phenomenon with such a meaningless and irrational statement, that means we are probably on to something very interesting.

Originally published November 16, 2009

Source of Uncanny Valley image.

But seriously … I’d like to do something today that I’ve been meaning to do, quite literally, for years. I want to run down a selection of readings that would provide any inquisitive person with a solid grounding in Behavioral Biological theory. At the very outset you need to know that this is not about Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology is something different. I’ll explain some other time what the differences are. For now, we are only speaking of fairly traditional Darwinian behavioral theory as applied generally with a focus on sexually reproducing organisms, especially mammals, emphasis on humans and other primates but with lots of birds because they turn out to be important.

I’m not going to give you the science; Here I’m just going to give you the books. In all cases I’ll provide links to the Amazon page, because that has become a sort of default quick and dirty way of recognizing a book (you often get to see a picture). In many cases, however, these books are not available new, so you’ll have to find them in your local library or used book store, or on-line somewhere. There are only a few that, if found used, should be expensive owing to rarity or some other value-enhancing feature. Some have been so widely used in classrooms that they are readily available at used book stores near campuses, if you can find such a beast.

You will notice that most of these books are old. That is because Behavioral Biology reached a point a few years back when two things happened: 1) It had matured to a standard academic discipline so things like anthologies of the hottest new papers or “oh wow” books by key writers in the field were no longer as common and 2) It started to be eclipsed, in trade publication, by Evolutionary Psychology, which is unfortunate.

OK, I said this was about the books and not the science, but I’ll give you a little bit of science as a framework for the literature bomb I’m about to explode.

Darwin’s Natural Selection has genomes evolving due to differential fitness of specific alleles. There is co-evolution among genes, some of which are in the same bodies, some not, some in the same species, some not, so we get Sexual Selection and various other co-evolutionary phenomena.

Behavior happens, and is facilitated in tetrapods and fish and so on by neural systems which have some basic capacities. Neural and sensory systems, information processing systems, etc. can be shaped by Darwinian selection on the genome or by selection (still likely Darwinian more or less) on the behavior itself when said behavior is passed on extra-genetically, as extended phenotype, culture, memes, whatever you want to call it. This applies mainly to mammals, and within mammals, more in primates and within primates, more some apes. So there is parallel evolution in some species between genes and behavior, which are always interacting with each other.

Neural and sensory systems should evolve to enhance fitness. But fitness can be extended beyond alleles of genes, and include, just like co-evolution does, genes in other parts of the genome, others of the species (the other sex, other ages, etc.) and other species. So, things like Kin Selection can emerge whereby individuals act in the interest of their gene-sharing kin, not just themselves. Perhaps there are higher levels of selection as well.

As behavior evolves, Darwinian influences on it are limited. The degree to which genes can determine behavior in a given species is not determined by adaptive design, but rather, by phylogenetic constraints, developmental issues, and yes, to some extent, adaptive design. No matter how cool it would be to have a brain programmed by genes to recognize when another person is telling you a lie, the genetic coding for this behavior does not exist in humans mainly because it did not exist in primordial mammals or other vertebrates, where the basic brain system we have today was first developed by evolutionary processes. No matter how cool it would be to be born able to produce language, we are not born this way because our ancestors were not born this way and our brains do not develop this way. Many, perhaps most, important behavioral features of brainy primates can’t be coded into genes because of the way brains evolved over tens of millions of years. So Natural Selection, Kin Selection and other kinds of selection on behavior work through a variety of proximate means in humans, including fine tuning of things like “drives” or other psychological features that can be somewhat adapted during development as well as the culture we require to be human and a fair amount of reinvention of roughly the same wheel again and again and again.

Foundations of Behavioral Biology

The basics are to be found most efficiently in some excellent textbooks. If you do not know all the in formation provided across most of the chapters of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s textoobk Sex, Evolution and Behavior, then you simply need to read that book. Some of it is outdated, but really, where there are studies that have been supplanted by more recent work, those studies are not usually wrong, just classic. Obviously, you would read a book written 20 something years ago as a book … that is not current. But it is basic. This book must be supplemented with the material in Robert Trivers Social Evolution. It was Trivers that took basic stuff like Natural Selection and Kin Selection and made them part of a larger toolkit of behavioral science, and in particular, introduced the all important Parental Investment Theory, which turns out to explain a fair amount of the patterning we see in bird and mammal behavior.

Here, I will pause for a bit more theory. Kin Selection theory explains why bees commit suicide, but worked (in our minds) initially with bees where there was a single queen mothering all the offspring and not too many male drones. But then suicidal and other behaviors was observed in bees without this social pattern, and lots of insects (and mammals) with the same peculiar pattern of genetics that bees and ants have were found to have bee-like patterns of behavior. Co-evolutionary patterns are often found in one or two species, make total sense from a Darwinian point of view, but then the young turks (graduate students usually) find numerous counter examples showing that the predicted patterns don’t hold up. Since I just made a huge statement (above) about patterns, I’d better point out that it may well be that most cases, or at least many cases, do not fit the rules! Does this mean that the rules are invalid, that there is no Natural Selection or Kin Selection, or Parental Investment, etc. etc.? No, usually not. What it usually means that when people discovered, for instance, an explanation for sex bias in Red Deer offspring (high ranked females have male offspring, other females have female offspring) they assumed that this adaptation was so cool that it must occur in all mammals, and then they discovered that it is actually rather rare in primates and may occur in the end in only a few mammalian species, and seemingly not in humans. For instance. But this does not mean that the so-called Trivers-Willard hypotheses (which you will find described in Social Evolution and elsewhere) is wrong. Rather, this subset of parental investment theory is expected to work only under certain circumstances. And this is true of all of these behavioral models.

Think of these evolutionary models as being like currency behaving in a rather straightforward economy, but where that economy is only a subset of a larger economy involving barter, coercion, bribery, some very intense marketing and with con artists everywhere. Under many conditions the money will change hands in predicted patterns, following the rules, but under most conditions, while the expected values and directionality of exchange is a force, it is only one of many forces. And, the system is likely very dynamic. It may turn out that we don’t live in a world where evolutionary stable strategies … co-evolutionary systems that are stable over the long term are maintained because there is no “better” (more fitness enhancing) alternative … are very rare because, in fact, conditions are constantly changing. ESS’s may be rare, but that does not mean that the evolutionary forces and the definition of what is “stable” are non existent. They are just living the life of Sisyphus.

Advanced Behavioral Biology

I would start the next phase of learning with one of my favorite books, one I’ve used many times in classes: Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) by, as it turns out, Robert Trivers. This volume includes many of the key papers that were behind the literature cited above that you’ve just finished reading, along with interesting introductory material by Trivers, giving context. You will be more than prepared to read the source material, to understand it better than most people will if encountered on its own, and to see its strength’s and shortcomings. Do report back.

You can read Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) either before or after the following two items, which are by the authors of one of the above mentioned textbooks, and which provide excellent empirical studies of human behavioral biology using strict Darwinian approaches. Both of these books may be fairly hard to find: Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior and The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (Darwinism Today series) by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson.

Proximate Mechanisms: Hormones and Neurons Galore

Now that you’ve got a good exposure to the basic theory and to some empirical species-wide studies (of humans) let’s step back for a moment and look at the biology a bit more closely. First, you have to understand endocrinology and related neurobiology at several levels, and you also need to entertain yourself with some excellent writing. So, read Mel Konner’s The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit followed by Robert Sapolsky’s The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament.

To put this in the most important context (as it relates to the most important human adaptation) now read Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, or watch the documentary Childhood (at least the first hour of it).

At this point you are ready to explore the human brain, it’s evolution, and the evolution of language. You’ll want to start with Terry Deacon’s The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain.

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h3>It’s People!!!

Now that you have the basic behavioral biology, the proximate mechanisms related to hormones, development, neural systems, etc. under your belt, and a bit of real life application to human culture and society, it is time to explore the women and the men of the species. You might want to glance first at the infanticide literature. It turns out, despite protestations by Men’s Rights Advocates, that a lot of what happens in human culture and related human evolution has to do with the fact that men are dicks, and male committed infanticide is a big part of that. You’ve already explored that with Daly and Wilson and Cinderella, above. Now have a look at Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression against Females or a selection of the papers therein. Or skip that part and take my word for it.

Either way, your next stop should be with Sarah Hrdy and these two books by her, in order: Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Then, on to the boys with Richard Wrangham: Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. When you are done reading that, you’ll need some Frans DeWaal to calm down.

Report back!