And not merely because it is TGIF* day.

The theme “everything you know is sort of wrong” is familiar to readers on this blog. It is an underlying theme for much of what happens here. Every now and then that theme is manifest overtly, as in the Falsehoods posts, which are, as we speak, being revised, expanded, and reissued.

Well, starting this evening and running for an indeterminate amount of time (but probably a few weeks or so) “Everything you know is sort of wrong” is not just a phrase to keep in your head all the time as you are walking around doing stuff. It’s the name of a new radio show segment at Skeptically Speaking, with Desiree Schell.

EYKISOW is a short pre-recorded discussion between Desiree and me about the nature of falsehood in general and a specific falsehood (or two) in particular. Since it is not live, you can’t make snarky comments during the broadcast or call in, but you can certainly leave comments here or on other relevant blog posts and those comments could, in turn, influence future discussions.

So please join us today, Friday May 28th, 6PM mountain, 7 Central, on Skeptically Speaking:

…science blogger Greg Laden joins us for “Everything You Know Is Sort of Wrong,” a new regular feature exposing the truth behind some commonly held beliefs. Our first segment: Primitive Cultures.

The current batch of Falsehoods posts (Falsehoods II: Return of the son of the falsehoods that would not die) can be found here. The older falsehoods posts, pre-revision, expansion, and updating, can be found here.

But wait, there’s more! One of my favorite current books is Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo by Vanessa Woods. Well, Vanessa is going to be the Main Guest on Skeptically Speaking tonight. So tune in mainly for that. Also, go to the Skeptically Speaking web site and turn on the chat thingie and make snarky comments during the show! It’s fun!

Details on Vanessa’s interview:

Journalist and author Vanessa Woods joins us to discuss her new book “Bonobo Handshake.” The memoir takes us inside Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, a refuge for orphaned baby bonobos in the Congo. What can studying these highly social primates tell us about ourselves?

ADDED: The First Podcast is HERE.

footnotes

*Thank Gregory** its Friday.

**As in Pope Gregory XII, who gave us our current calendar.

That would be the way it would happen if two chimps walked into a bar. Or imagine two chimps, and each finds a nice juicy bit of fruit out in the forest. And instead of eating the fruit, because they are not hungry, they carry it around for a while (this would never happen, but pretend) and then accidentally run into each other. What would happen? Same thing. Event though neither chimp actually needed the fruit and each chimp had its own fruit, the dominant chimp (between the two) would end up with both pieces of fruit.

This is why chimps could not possibly cooperate in any effort to scour the forest for various edible items, bring them all back to a central place, share and then cooperatively process the food items, and ultimately produce a meal that is eaten by all of the chimps on an as needed basis. Humans do that but chimps can’t. Explain this and you explain one of the major features of human evolution…

Some of us think that about two million years ago, an ape-like hominid ancestral population for humans gave rise to individuals with the novel capacity to do the following:

1) Make and control fire;

2) Cook food on this fire; and

3) Cooperate enough that individuals could in fact bring food morsels to a central place for processing and sharing.

The consequences of this nexus of novelties would be significant. There would be much more energy in the environment available for consumption because cooking converts a lot of inedible biomass into edible biomass. This could supply the necessary nutrients for bodies to grow larger and be maintained at larger sizes, which might be useful in the predator-rich environment of Africa. Note that where we can determine cause of death for australopiths, or at least guess reasonably what it might have been, predators are typically involved. This seems to stop happening with the larger bodied Homo erectus following this transition.

Another consequence is the extra nutrition to support the growth and maintenance of a large, costly brain.

These early human ancestors would have to have a way of cooperating rather than (almost) always competing over things like food. This could result in behaviors supportive of more complex and sophisticated technologies being regularly used, as we in fact see in the archeological record. The novel food sources plus the additional technology together would support this species’ movement into additional habitats previously not occupied by hominids. We also see this happening just at this time in the archaeological record.

For various reasons I won’t go into here, this would also have surely changed the overall social organization among these hominids, and we suggest that this may have been the origins of something not entirely different from modern (more or less monogamous) marriage.

(Here is a copy of a paper that discusses this idea in some detail.)