But seriously, this is a real question. For example, several years ago, Herbert Weinstein tossed his wife out the window of their Manhattan apartment, after killing her, following an argument. He was well known to be a non violent person, and there was really no good reason for him to murder his wife this way. But, it turns out, his prefrontal cortical region was compromised by a very large cyst. Weinstein was one of the first in recent decades to use an insanity style defense connected to neuro-imaging or other neurobiology showing a demonstrable, physical, brain problems.

The obverse is obvious, and somewhat ominous. If a person can commit a serious crime and then be shown to have done so because of something we can see pretty easily inside their brain, then couldn’t, even shouldn’t, we be scanning brains to identify people who might also throw Mrs. Weinstein out the window?

More pragmatically, what about the link between damage to brains in sports or war, and behavior, treatment, and the simple problem of helping people who got messed up because we like to watch them smash into each other on the gladiator’s field, or we wish them to defend our nation on an actual battle field?

Author Kevin Davis notes:

Among the growing number of cases involving neuroscientific evidence are those that involve combat veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq as defendants. The attorney for Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who was charged with killing 17 civilians in Afghanistan, has said his client suffered a traumatic brain injury.

So many veterans are winding up in the courts that the National Veterans Foundation, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit, created The Attorney’s Guide to Defending Veterans in Criminal Court, which covers traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

By the way, do you know who Melissa Fitzgerald is? She played Carol Fitzpatrick (aka “Carol”) on The West Wing — CJ’s assistant. Go to The West Wing Weekly podcast, find episode 1.10, and listen to an interview with her about veteran law and veteran’s courts.

Anyway, Kevin Davis, quoted above, is coming out with a book called The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America’s Courtrooms, which covers this topic in some detail. In particular, he uses the Weinstein murder case as the context for a detailed exploration of neuroscience and criminal justice.

Shortly after Weinstein was arrested, an MRI revealed a cyst the size of an orange on his brain’s frontal lobe, the part of the brain that governs judgment and impulse control. Weinstein’s lawyer seized on that discovery, arguing that the cyst had impaired Weinstein’s judgment and that he should not be held criminally responsible for the murder. It was the first case in the United States in which a judge allowed a scan showing a defendant’s brain activity to be admitted as evidence to support a claim of innocence.

The Weinstein case marked the dawn of a new era in America’s courtrooms, raising complex and often troubling questions about how we define responsibility and free will, how we view the purpose of punishment, and how strongly we are willing to bring scientific evidence to bear on moral questions. Davis brings to light not only the intricacies of the Weinstein case but also the broader history linking brain injuries and aberrant behavior, from the bizarre stories of Phineas Gage and Charles Whitman, perpetrator of the 1966 Texas Tower massacre, to the role that brain damage may play in violence carried out by football players and troubled veterans of America’s twenty-first century wars. The Weinstein case opened the door for a novel defense that continues to transform the legal system: Criminal lawyers are increasingly turning to neuroscience and introducing the effects of brain injuries—whether caused by trauma or by tumors, cancer, or drug or alcohol abuse—and arguing that such damage should be considered in determining guilt or innocence, the death penalty or years behind bars. As he takes stock of the past, present and future of neuroscience in the courts, Davis offers a powerful account of its potential and its hazards.

The book is coming out in late February, but you can preorder it here.

An international team including researchers at the university of Edinburgh and Antoine Wystrach of the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (CNRS/Université Toulouse III—Paul Sabatier) has shown that ants can get their bearings whatever the orientation of their body. Their brains may be smaller than the head of a pin, but ants are excellent navigators that use celestial and terrestrial cues to memorize their paths. To do so, they use several regions of the brain simultaneously, proving once again that the brain of insects is more complex than thought. The researchers’ findings were published in Current Biology on January 19, 2017.

Until now, ethological research suggested that ants memorized the scenery perceived along their route as it is projected on their multifaceted retinas—thus using a body-centered, or egocentric, frame of reference. By this hypothesis, to recognize memorized surroundings and follow a path formerly traveled, ants would need to orient their bodies in the same way each time. But they sometimes need to walk backwards as well, and this doesn’t prevent them from finding their way back to their nest. Could it be that ants can recognize a route when facing the opposite direction? Are they able to create a visual model of their environment that is independent of their body orientation?

To answer these questions, the researchers studied Cataglyphis velox, an Andalusian desert ant known for its solo navigation ability. First they let the insects familiarize themselves with a route that included a 90° turn. After a day of training, ants that received a cookie crumb light enough to carry while walking forward handled the turn without the slightest difficulty. However, those given large cookie crumbs had to move backward, and unlike the others, they maintained their bearing instead of turning.

They also exhibited unexpected behavior: After walking backward a bit, they would occasionally drop their crumb, turn around, observe the scenery while pointing their bodies in the right direction, return to the crumb, and resume towing it backward – but this time in the correct direction. For these ants, body alignment thus seems necessary for recognition of scenery perceived by their retinas, but they are then able to memorize the new bearing and follow it backward. This behavior also shows that they can recall the existence of the dropped cookie crumb, and its location, in order to return to it after updating their bearing. These observations imply that at least 3 kinds of memory are working in unison: the visual memory of the route, the memory of the new direction to follow, and the memory of the crumb to retrieve.

Through another experiment using a mirror to reflect the sun1, the team demonstrated that the ants used celestial cues to maintain their bearing while walking backwards. Furthermore, ants were able to move in straight paths, whether walking forward, backward, or sideways. Once a bearing is memorized, they stay on it no matter how their bodies are oriented. Together these observations suggest that ants register direction using an external – or allocentric – frame of reference.

These new findings show that the ants’ spatial orientation relies on multiple mental representations and memories woven together through a flow of information between several areas of their brain. This offers a whole new perspective on the world of insects, which is much more complex than previously believed.

… Many laboratories refused to join the project when it was first submitted because of its focus on an overly narrow approach, leading to a significant risk that it would fail to meet its goals. Further attrition of members during the ramp-up phase added to this narrowing.

In June, a Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA) for the second round of funding for the HBP was submitted. This, unfortunately, reflected an even further narrowing of goals and funding allocation, including the removal of an entire neuroscience subproject and the consequent deletion of 18 additional laboratories, as well as further withdrawals and the resignation of one member of the internal scientific advisory board.

… we wish to express the view that the HBP is not on course and that the European Commission must take a very careful look at both the science and the management of the HBP before it is renewed. We strongly question whether the goals and implementation of the HBP are adequate to form the nucleus of the collaborative effort in Europe that will further our understanding of the brain.

Why all this fuss? As far as I can tell, there is a conflict between those who wish to understand the “human brain” (which is a term here meant to refer to the human mind, human cognition, thought process, and all the neuro-biological process that underlies that) and those who want to build a human brain. It appears that when a half a gig of neuro scientists decry the project for being “too narrow” what thy are really saying is that all this money is being spent to build a replicate of a brain, a functioning brain that will operate inside a super-computer, rather than on understanding what brains are and how they work. And this ultimately may come down to a conflict between much of the global neuro-science community and one man: Henry Markram.

From The Guardian:

Central to the latest controversy are recent changes made by Henry Markram, head of the Human Brain Project at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne. The changes sidelined cognitive scientists who study high-level brain functions, such as thought and behaviour. Without them, the brain simulation will be built from the bottom up, drawing on more fundamental science, such as studies of individual neurons. The brain, the most complex object known, has some 86bn neurons and 100tn connections.

“The main apparent goal of building the capacity to construct a larger-scale simulation of the human brain is radically premature,” Peter Dayan, director of the computational neuroscience unit at UCL, told the Guardian.

“We are left with a project that can’t but fail from a scientific perspective. It is a waste of money, it will suck out funds from valuable neuroscience research, and would leave the public, who fund this work, justifiably upset,” he said.

One of these days, Markram is going to make his brain, and take over the world. But until then he should learn to get along better with others.

This is a pretty intense project but Spaun is sufficiently complex and integrate that it begins to approach an actual human brain in one important way: The external manifestation of its function is orders of magnitude simpler than its internal workings, so the best way to get a feel for how it works is to just watch it in action. The researchers, clearly understand this, have produce a paper (published in Science Magazine) that comes along with rather impressive videos of their spawn, er, I mean, of Spaun, in action. Finally, a complex research paper that explains itself!

Let’s start with the Introductory Movie:

There are eight tasks that Spaun has been assigned. Let’s look at some of them.

Copy drawing, Image Recognition, Counting, Question Answering, Serial Working Memory
Given a randomly chosen handwritten digit, Spaun should produce the same digit written in the same style as the handwriting.

Now let’s look at something a bit more complex, Fluid Reasoning, which gives us a look at the creature’s, I mean, model’s IQ.

Here is the abstract from the paper:

A central challenge for cognitive and systems neuroscience is to relate the incredibly complex behavior of animals to the equally complex activity of their brains. Recently described, large-scale neural models have not bridged this gap between neural activity and biological function. In this work, we present a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain (called “Spaun”) that bridges this gap by exhibiting many different behaviors. The model is presented only with visual image sequences, and it draws all of its responses with a physically modeled arm. Although simplified, the model captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and psychological behavior, which we demonstrate via eight diverse tasks.

Christian Machens writes a very helpful perspective on the project.

… Spaun performs all … tasks based on the activity of 2.5 million simulated neurons that are organized into subsystems resembling different brain areas, and wired up to provide the necessary functionality…

In each of Spaun’s areas or modules, the actual information is processed through populations of spiking (active) neurons. The link between the high-level computations performed by the networks and the lowlevel computations performed by individual neurons is constructed by means of the “neural engineering framework” (9), which specifies how to implement arbitrary mathematical vector operations in spiking neural networks. The framework assumes that information is read out linearly from neural firing rates and is transformed through the nonlinearities of neural activation functions. Consequently, the information processed by each area is distributed across neurons, and thereby roughly matches some of the known electrophysiological features of the areas, such as the diverse tuning of neural firing rates to sensory stimuli or motor outputs.

Given the scope of the model, … it is not surprising that many aspects of Spaun deviate from real brains. For instance, the spiking activity within many areas differs … from that measured in real brains. To what extent this problem can be remedied in future work, or to what extent these discrepancies point toward fundamentally different computations in the brain, is currently unclear. Spaun’s principal shortcoming is that it is essentially hard-wired and cannot learn any new tasks. Its architecture is quite flexible and not bound to particular tasks, and several parts of Spaun are learned (such as the visual hierarchy or the values of actions). However, learning in its broadest sense, such as learning completely new tasks, is one of the issues that the authors have deliberately—and perhaps wisely—side-stepped. … By assembling a large amount of brain know-how into one model, Eliasmith et al. have provided a coherent theory of how the brain works (with the exception of learning). To paraphrase the statistician George Box, their model is likely to be wrong, but it is certainly useful. …

Spaun was created using the Nengo simulation software package, and run on clusters Orca and Kraken of the SharcNet High Performance Computing Consortium. In other words, it is run on a Linux based supercomputer.

It takes up about 24GB of ram and takes about 2.5 hours of processing for one second of simulated time.

Eliasmith, C., Stewart, T., Choo, X., Bekolay, T., DeWolf, T., Tang, Y., & Rasmussen, D. (2012). A Large-Scale Model of the Functioning Brain Science, 338 (6111), 1202–1205 DOI: 10.1126/science.1225266

However, it really isn’t a reasonable possibility. If there was an Intelligent Designer, then sure, why would baby neurons pop up and then not turn into functioning adult neurons? But if there is no Intelligent Designer, and instead, things evolved, then it is quite possible that the lack of novel fully formed and hooked up neurons in an adult human (which seems to be the general rule of thumb, for whatever reason) is not necessarily achieved via some highly sensible planned out feature. Rather, it is most likely that an evolved feature is a kludge. If it turns out that neurogenesis occurs in the adult human nose but that those nascent neurons never enervate, well, that is what we might expect evolution, which is not intelligent but, rather, pragmatic, to come up with.

The method of testing this idea, applied by Jonas Frisén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is just as interesting as the finding itself. The idea is to date the neurons in the nose. One way to date organic tissue might be to use C-14 dating like archaeologists use, but that method is not precise enough. The neural tissue in a living human might be something like “50 years old plus or minus 80 years” which would not be too useful. But there is a way to use C-14 after all. Since atomic testing started, there has been a LOT more C-14 pushed into the atmosphere, and the added radiocarbon allows for a more precise atomic clock, if the clock is properly calibrated. This method was initially pioneered a few years ago in the forensic case of two sisters who were found dead, long after they had expired, in their home in Vienna. Both sisters had considerable wealth, and the one who died first would have passed on that wealth to the second, living sister. The relatives of the second-to-die sister would therefore receive a considerably larger inheritance than the relatives of the first-to-die sister. The two sisters’ bodies were found semi-mummified, and a couple of years after death, in their apartment which was surrounded by neighbors who never noticed they were no longer around.

The post-A-bomb calibrated C-14 method was used to determine that the sisters had in fact died about a year apart. This method has subsequently been used for other fine-tuned post atomic dating. (There is a write-up of this here.)

OK, now back to the nose.

In the new study, published this week in Neuron, Frisén, Spalding, and colleagues measured levels of ¹⁴C in olfactory bulb tissue taken during autopsy from the brains of 15 subjects who were born either before or after the atomic testing period. The researchers found that the neurons in the olfactory bulb were all the same age: the age of the individual they came from. “[That’s] evidence that in humans, in this area, neurogenesis doesn’t occur,” says Frisén.

There is still evidence, i.e. from mice, that neurogenesis of useful neurons does happen in some mammals. The question of novel nose neurons is not entirely settled. But, when the question comes up “Do humans generate new neurons as adults” please make sure that the assumption that they do is not based on this earlier nose research, or on any studies that merely looked for new neuron proteins.

In addition, Macklis points out that the tissue samples may have biased the results. The donors in the study died at the Karolinska Institute, he notes, and some had a history of substance abuse or psychiatric illness, both of which have been shown to decrease neurogenesis. He says that a better test would be to repeat the experiment in healthy people constantly exposed to new scents—chefs, sommeliers, perfumers, or travelers to exotic locales.

Face it: there is still some head scratching going on. We will need to keep an eye on this nose research before sealing our lips on it, and in the mean time, keep your chin up.

Photo courtesy of flickr user Lawrence Whittemore

Most simply defined, a human universal is a trait, behavior or cultural feature that we find in all human societies. Men are always on average larger than women. All humans see the same exact range of colors because our eyes are the same. The range of emotions experienced by people is the same, and appears in facial expressions and other outward affect, in the same way across all humans.

The term “Human Universal” shows up in Google Ngram (a rather course but very fun data mining tool) as appearing in books in about 1830 but not before, with sporadic occurrences until just after World Word II, when, presumably because of the rise of professionalized anthropology and sociology, it demonstrated a steady increase to the present. This increase is interrupted by what is probably a non-random drop in the mid 1980s followed by a spike I presume to be associated with the publication of Donald Brown’s monograph, “Human Universals.” in 1991. I’m not sure if Ngram’s failure as a data mining tool during the early 2000’s, or if the publication of Steven Pinker’s pro genetic deterministic book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature caused a sudden drop off in the use of the term over the last few years.

From World War II on, the phrases “genetic determinism” and “human universal” have very similar patterns of appearance in books, according to the Ngram viewer, but with the former having been much more popular. And, I mention that phrase here mainly to point out that the two terms are very different.

Now let’s refer back to the aforementioned definition and examples (color vision, male vs. female size, emotions and facial expressions). The first thing to ask is, can exceptions be allowed? Necessarily, yes. Color blindness (or blindness in general) does not obviate the universal biology of eye function. Individuals can be exceptions to any rules. But what about entire cultures or populations of humans that are different? It turns out that the list of emotions one would derive from a careful study of a group of people would be different depending on which culture you look at. Does this mean that emotions are not universals? Well, even though there would be differences, the fact remains that most cultures would be similar, and the few cultures that are different are different in ways that do not overthrow any generalized understanding of emotions, how they work, what they do, and how they function in society. It might be a little like going across the Iron Curtain into the old Soviet Union and looking at cars. The cars would all look just like cars back home and operate in the same way yet none of the models and makes would be familiar to an American from Detroit. Does the relationship between the parts of a hypothetical universal have to be the same everywhere? Hopefully not. On average, men are always larger than women in any sufficiently large and “normal” population, but there is often overlap. However, the absolute size of people in general and the relative size of men vs. women seems to vary across populations, with some having very large difference and others having very small differences.

So, our simple definition of a human universal holds as long as we are willing to allow at least three dimensions of variation or exception: Individuals can be exceptions, there can be some cross cultural variation, and the details can vary in important ways, so long as the universal is defined in a way that allows for it.

But at the same time, even this surfical look at a small number of examples indicates that the concept of a “Human Universal” is not the same as a species-specific genetically determined trait. Such a concept would be like asserting that the way emotions are expressed by humans is as invariant and predictable as the number of bones in an adult human, which we assume is always exactly the same from person to person.

Or is it? Actually, the number of ribs, vertebrae, teeth, and sigmoid bones varies from person to person, even if not counting rare pentadactylism, amputation, or other differences. So if something as basic and “biological” as bone count per person varies, we should be able to handle a widespread human trait as a “human universal” even if East Asian people grin under stress more often than do Englishmen (who scowl when they are happy because they wear hair shirts), or if the number of colors commonly and widely recognized in a given culture varies from three to dozens.

The color example is a classic, and for a good reason. Many groups of people tend to name only a small number of colors, yet they are physically capable of seeing the same colors as anyone else. The Efe Pygmies, for instance, while being experts on their own natural environment and able to identify thousands of species of plants and animals perfectly, only have specific words for red, white or black. They live in the rain forest but don’t have a word for green. Of course, on further inspection, they DO have a word for green, it’s just not distinct. They call green things “leaf colored.” And, they can and do call things “skin colored” or “dirt colored” and so on. In a sense, claiming that they don’t have more than a few colors is like saying that Martha Stewart doesn’t have neutral pastel color paint because these paints happen to be called “Morning Walk” (not a color, but a adverb/verb or adjective/noun), “Ash Bark” (not a color but a tree part), “Feldspar” (not a color but a kind of rock), “Wampum” (not a color but a form of Native American currency), and “Mink” (not a color but a fur bearing animal).

But still, different cultures do have different distinct color name lists, and you can more or less organize cultures by how many colors they have, and when you do this, you find that the cultures with the smallest number of colors tend to have black and white, then black and white and red, then those three and either green or yellow, then all those including green AND yellow, then they add blue, then they add brown, then purple, pink, orange or gray. Eventually, you get to the cultures with the most colors, and there you find colors named after fur bearing animals and verbs.

Color vision is a human universal, but a trivial one. This is like saying that all humans having a head is a human universal. But color naming is also thought of as a human universal to the extent that all cultures follow the above described pattern, even if cultures are very different from each other in this area. Furthermore, the theory goes, this pattern is followed because of the nature of the rods and cones in our eyes. (Read Brown for a more detailed explanation.) And there probably is something to this.

Color naming could be thought of as a pattern of additive complexity, or complexity on demand, shaped by the nature of the physical environment (the way light works and the way the eye works) in which the phenomenon plays out, but the magnitude of the elaboration determined by culture. If we found a culture in which there were only six named colors and none of them were black, white, or red, would we have to disqualify color naming as a universal? Well, if you don’t like the idea of human universals, then you may want to say yes, it’s all or nothing. However, most likely such a culture would have such a naming system for some special and interesting reason.

Which brings us to sex. Or at least, a small digression I’d like to make regarding sex. Human Universal: Most sex that is not auto-erotic is between a man and a woman. Exception: The anonymous culture in New Guinea (sometimes called the “Sambia”) in which men try their hardest to have sex with women as few times as absolutely necessary to reproduce, but otherwise only have oral sex delivered by boys below a certain age. A tiny minority of sex is between men and women. Now, seriously, would the existence of that culture, and it does exist, obviate generalizations about human sexuality? Or, would it make you ask questions about that one particular culture, and perhaps even question the validity of your cultural relativism to some extent? Seriously.

The relative size of men and women is due to developmental differences between men and women and there is a great deal to say about it (which we’ll skip). For our present purposes, it is exemplary of an interesting kind of human universal that demonstrates both the validity of the concept and ways in which the concept becomes unnecessarily constraining in how we think about humans.

Early anthropologists (Mead, Benedict, etc.) made the case that human culture was so flexible that wholesale reversals in sex roles across entire cultures could be found (reversals from the western expected norm, that is). So they found those cultures in the Pacific. However, further study of the cultures in which the women were supposedly doing all the guy stuff and the men were supposedly doing all the girl stuff showed that these early anthropologists were, in the main, wrong: There are no documented sex reversal cultures in the Pacific. Indeed, a close read of Benedict and Mead won’t even find clear cut cases, though the derived literature and popularization of it, and Mead in some public appearances, would give that impression.

It is true, however, that if you measure “maleness” and “femaleness” (as gender spectra) of people in a bunch of different cultures, it is not hard to find one culture where the men are more female than the females of some other culture, or women in one culture that are more male then men of some other culture. And, how “male” vs. “female” actual males and females are may be very divergent by genetic sex, or less different, and some traits may demonstrate vast gender differences and others less, depending on the culture.

But no matter what you do, you will always find that the usual lists of male vs. female distinguishing traits fall in relation to each other the same way in every culture, where men are more male and women are more female, by a little or by a lot, but always with the same polarity. Always. Except for the exceptions, of course, which are actually quite rare.

So there is an overall pattern of gender roles found across cultures that is a human universal, but no one culture can be used to predict the exact pattern for any unknown culture. The patterns of gender roles is probably often shaped by certain features. Ocean fishing cultures, vs. forest horticultural cultures, vs grassland pastoral cultures vs. arid country forager cultures … will probably have internally similar patterns of gender roles (and other social roles). This is because some underlying set of male and female potentials, needs, vulnerabilities, requirements, limitations, etc. plays out in roughly similar ways given similar contexts, economies, externalizes, etc. Add a bit of history and some random chance and you get a complex, mosaic-like mostly post hoc but somewhat predictive pattern of gender role tendencies across the human species. With the usual exceptions.

So the male-female difference demonstrates, messily, the kind of human universal that arises from some pretty basic biological factors (penis or vagina? lactation? paternity anxiety?) when played out across an entire planet of crazy humans.

The emotion example demonstrates something else about human universals. This is the link between some rather well known neurological and endocrine systems, the broader phylogenetic context (humans as mammals, humans as primates, etc.) and the strange tension between the arbitrary nature of human communication (the linguistic) and the non-arbitrary nature of our bodies.

All mammals have limbic systems and endocrine (hormone) systems, and they are pretty similar across the groups that have been studied well. The “emotions” are the output of the limbic systems. Your larynx and pharynx makes your voice, your legs are how you walk, your limbic system does the emotions. At some scale most, perhaps all, mammals have the same basic emotions. There are four of them, and there is a mnemonic to remember what they are: The Four F‘s. Fleeing, Fighting, Feeding and Sex.

But of course, this is an oversimplification, and there is some neurological and circumstantial evidence that emotions can be very derived, and even entirely new ones present, in some mammals. For instance, in cats the “affective attack” behavior is probably like human rage, but plays out very different. Cats have a “quiet biting” attack emotional state that human hunters and soldiers mimic but that is probably not a separate basic emotion in humans. And when I say “cats have this emotion” what I mean is that you can see them do it in the wild and you can consistent replicate the emotion by inserting a needle in a certain part of the brain and giving it a bit of juice.

So human emotions can be, and should be, understood in the wider pattern of mammalian emotions, though I think a lot of people don’t understand that. It is often assume that emotion are entirely constructed from cultural experience. They are not. But the exact set of emotion that are typically experienced and the way in which they play out can be very much affected by cultural experience. Sexual Jealousy is a human universal … it is widely found and makes biological sense, is linked to visceral effects like other emotions, etc. But how sexual jealousy plays out or even if it is important seems to vary a great deal across cultures. Malu is arguably an emotion that exists only in a certain Indonesian culture, though it is like emotions found elsewhere (overlaps with “shame” and “honor”). And the affective state linked to emotions can vary. The scene in Platoon where a young man is killed because of his smile comes to mind.

Sexual jealousy would be an emotion that in some cases has a very important, adaptive, even central role in culture (in some cultures). The fact that East Asians grin/smile in a way that Westerners may not understand is not a cultural adaptation but rather a product of cultural drive (I assume), and Malu is a highly derived culture-bound form of some more basic emotion that all humans probably experience. But the fact that a genetic analogy works to describe these behaviors, and despite the fact that they are biological (in having their own organ, as it were, the limbic system) does not make these differences genetically determined. Indonesians do not have a gene for malu and French people a gene for sexual jealousy.

Which brings us to the concept of determinism. I used to hang out a lot with a client scientist who was always talking about determinism and how he was amused at the way in which social scientists repelled at the concept. In truth, the social scientists were being repelled at a different concept (that they called determinism) than what my friend Kerry was thinking. But he did make a valid point: When we think about things that matter, there is often a cause, and the structure of cause and effect is a matter of determinism. This is different than predestination. The fact that the overall structure of emotions is determined by genes does not obviate the equally valid fact that the overall structure of emotions is determined by experience. One kind of determinism is not the “correct” one or the more powerful one or the one that matters, though you will hear most people involved in this sort of discussion demanding that it does. And, whether or not something is a human universal is an entirely separate question than the details of what determines it.

Apartment building mice build, when living colonially, a complex warren with a specific engineered pattern of spatial relatioships between individual borrows, looking like tiny apartments in a large housing development. Termintes build incredibly complex systems of air cooled/air heated underground farms and birthing areas. The mice make their apartments by having a single behavior …. just one … that, when they live in a group makes the aprartments form quite incidentally, but I would argue that the making of apartments when living in a group is a “mouse universal” for that species. No termite or even group of termintes has a blueprint for a complex termitary system, but they manage to always make one anyway. The termitaries are universal to the termites, and each species has a species universal pattern of termitary, yet the termitaries … how they look and function … are determined by a handful of very simple (genetically coded) behaviors and context.

Certainly, there are human universals that are entirely non-genetic or that have entirely trivial genetic components. They are difficult to identify because once determinism comes into play in the discussion, everything is viewed by the interlocutors as “obviously genetic” or “clearly constructed.” Not helpful.

Human universals are real and they are important. They are important because figuring out how and why they exist at all reveals how individual humans, groups, and “cultures” function. They tell us about common experiences that may not be as obvious if we don’t recognize the universals, such as how shame, jealousy, malu, honor, and so on reveal the society shaping of what is considered normal. An understanding of human universals can be an exercise in calibration. The entire anthropological experience, with its relativism and its “outside” perspective is roughly equivalent to the observation of human behavior in relation to things that are universals and things that are not.

Kissing is not a human universal yet is built from parts that are. Homicide and rape are human universals yet they happen (usually) because of highly unusual circumstances. In the former, the actual “universal(s)” are unseen to us. Something about bodily fluids, or a drive for closeness, or some feature of risk or trust come together to cause the mushing of lips to serve as a tool for bonding (of many different kinds) in many but not all culture. Who kills or rapes whom and under what circumstances tends to follow very predictable patterns across cultures and contexts (but with very different incidence) but the specific contextual variables that determine this behavior to actually happen are almost always quirky.

So, human universals are real and the concept is useful, yet they are not what many people assume they are … they are not generically determined traits. They never were thought of as either simplistic genetically determined features of human culture or utterly invalid, by any camp in anthropology. The phrase “Human Universal” is a dog whistle only in limited contexts, though it is probably seen as one more widely, which is problematic. And here, by complexifying the concept, I’m not trying to weaken it, nor am I trying to slip it past any perceived PC police. Mainly, like with most of the Falsehoods, I have tried to expose some of the interesting inner workings of the topic at hand. In this sense, the concept of “human universal” is a reasonably useful tool functioning in a way somewhere between pick=axe and well placed dynamite.

An oystercatcher is a wading bird of the family Haematopodidae, distributed in one genus, Haematopus. As is the case with many coast loving birds, there has been confusion about the limits of the 11 or so species known to exist worldwide. That itself is an interesting story (Hocke 1996), but one we will not go into now.

Adult coastal oystercatchers (some species are not coastal) eat all sorts of animals found in the intertidal zone, including shellfish of all sorts, depending on availability. They get their name from their tendency to prey on bivalves (including oysters). Oystercatchers have long heavy beaks which allow them to open these bivalves using various methods (de Hoyo, 1996). At least one method they use for this is to jam the beak into the bivalve and cut the muscle that normally would be used by the bivalve to “clam up.” This strategy is thought to be dangerous, because if the bivalve closes on the beak, then you’ve got this damn bivalve attached to your beak for the rest of the day. If the bivalve in question happens to be attached to the substrate (as are oysters and mussels, typically), then the Foraging Fail is more serious; The bird may have shoved its head under water to get at the bivalve. If not, the tide may be on its way in anyway. Either way, the bird may drown.

Here’s the interesting evolutionary story, which has to do with development.

Adult oystercatcher photo by Steppeland Click here for attribution

Adult oystercathers have a long beak and long legs to facilitate intertidal feeding behaviors, including wading and bivalve predation. But one method of bivalve predation is potentially deadly. So, baby oystercathers have to learn how to do this. Trial and error is not an option. The very first error a baby oystercatcher makes may be its last earthly act before going off to oystercatcher heaven (and there is no oystercatcher heaven). Instead, they must learn using some other learning method. One might expect oystercatcher genes to be selected to make oystercatchers automatically good at this dangerous act. The problem here is that the neural mechanisms underlying the process are higher order integrative systems using a wide range of sensory inputs and motor commands. Organisms with brains can’t evolve pre-programmed genetically tuned neural mechanisms that operate at any level of detail. The brain that runs this finely tuned process must be shaped by experience (learning).

What we see in nature is this: Baby oystercatchers follow their mothers around all day, every day, for many days, watching, watching, constantly watching. They internalize what they are observing, and after many instances of observing the bivalve predation technique, are able to do it.

Baby oystercatcher Photo by Haukur H. Click here for original

That part is interesting; Oystercatchers are an example of evolution NOT solving a complex behavioral problem by pre-programming neural circuits at a fine level of detail. This conforms to what we know about how brains develop (Deacon 1997). It is very difficult or impossible to pre-program complex cortical functions such as language, general intelligence, mathematical abilities, or even something simpler like catching an oyster using genes coding for neural connections. Rather, experience (learning, environment, culture) shapes the brain during development.

And, this part is also interesting (and in relation to oystercatchers, most interesting): The baby oystercatchers, while following around their mothers with their brains being shaped by experience to attain the appropriate skill level, retain a small and ineffective juvenile beak. The babies are incapable of trying what may well be fatal until some time in their development when a hormonal shift occurs, causing their beaks to grow to adult size. It did not have to be this way: It is not true that baby birds typically have non-adult beaks until the last minute (though there is a wide range of developmental trajectories for bird beaks). The long-retained small beak, caused by the timing of hormonal development, facilitates learning in the particular way that conforms to the overall oystercatcher adaptation.

Well, that certainly is a nice story, but it is also based on common knowledge of bird behavior, development, and ecology. How do we really know that oystercatchers actually risk death while foraging for bivalves? Well, we know this because we know this. This is probably one of those pieces of knowledge that is generally known by natural historians, is written down as a generalization in a number of authoritative or semi-authoritative books, and for which there is a handful of anectdotal examples buried somewhere in the pre-PDF, pre-Google, pre-Medline ancient literature. And therefore, lost in obscurity and of no possible value.

But wait, there are scholars who still read actual books and printed journals! And it turns out, this can be useful and interesting. There is indeed an ancient, obscure anecdotal case, and it is brought to us via Tetrapod Zoology Blog. In Clam attacks and kills oystercatcher, Darren Naish describes a publication from 1946 in The Auk (a classic bird journal) in which a brief account is provided of an oystercatcher having got its beak stuck in the clam, as it were.

In this case, an adult Haematopus palliatus (American oystercatcher) got its beak stuck in a Mercenaria mercenaria (hard shelled clam) in South Carolina, in 1939.

It drowned, and the soft tissue of its neck was scavenged by crabs. What a way to go.

Baldwin, W. P. (1946). Clam catches oyster-catcher The Auk, 63, 589-589

Deacon, T. (1997) The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. Norton.

Hockey, P (1996) Family Haematopodidae (Oystercatchers) in del Hoyo, J.; Elliot, A. & Sargatal, J. (editors). (1996). Handbook of the Birds of the World. Volume 3: Hoatzin to Auks. Lynx Edicions. ISBN 8487334202

del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A. and Sargatal, J. (1996) Handbook of the Birds of the World. Vol. 3: Hoatzin to Auks. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.

A recent paper published by PLoS (Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces) throws a sopping wet blanket on widely held deterministic models of human behavior. In addition, the work underscores the sometimes spooky cultural differences that can emerge in how people see things, even how people think.

A Repost

The following is from a PLoS press release:

Because face recognition is effortlessly achieved by people from all different cultures it was considered to be a basic mechanism universal among humans. However, by using analyses inspired by novel brain imaging technology, researchers at the University of Glasgow have discovered that cultural differences cause us to look at faces differently.

Lead researcher Dr Roberto Caldara said: “In a series of eye-movement studies, we showed that social experience has an impact on how people look at faces. Specifically we noticed a striking difference in eye movements in Westerners and East Asian observers. We found that Westerners tend to look at specific features on an individual’s face such as the eyes and mouth whereas East Asian observers tend to focus on the nose or the centre of the face which allows a more general view of all the features. One possible cause of this could be that direct or excessive eye contact may be considered rude in East Asian cultures.”

The results of the study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Medical Research Council, provide novel insights into why non verbal communication between people from different cultures is sometimes problematic, in an age where globalisation has dramatically increased interdependence, integration and interaction among people and corporations from all over the world. Western societies are generally more individualistic, whereas East Asian societies are collectivistic; Westerners appear to think and perceive focally and Easterners globally.

Dr Caldara continued: “By disproving the long-held assumption that face processing is universally achieved we have highlighted that the external environment, including the society in which we develop, is very influential in basic human mechanisms and caution should be taken when generalising findings to the entire human population.”

There is a general perception that behavioral variation emerges from a genetic substrate in a kind of inverted pyramid … at the genetic level there is not much variation, but at the “surface” (or beyond) there is potentially quite a bit of variation. It is more or less true that everyone believes this, and that people argue over the amount of variation that is determined way down at the genetic level vs. constructed at the surface. Even the most extreme construtivists will acknowledge that genes determine the basic neural circuits that give us, say, the ability to speak, even if the same constructivists will then argue that genes have nothing to do with what we say or how we make or interpret meaning.

So you have genes, then you have basic primitive neural mechanisms and neural-hormonal circuits, and these building blocks are put together to make more complex behaviors which are increasingly shaped by context (culture, etc.) at increasingly derived levels.

But this is a naive and inaccurate view. To the extent that genetic information is involved in human behavior, there is no strong evidence that genetic determination is manifest mainly in one vs. another developmental stage, behavioral substrate, or context. Yes, yes, you will see positivist statements asserting a link between developmental depth and genetic determination, but these are almost never based on conclusions from evidence, but rather, these statements are almost always assumptions used to interpret observations. Indeed, in the paper at hand, we see this:

Face processing,… is thought to be invariant across all humans. …Here we monitored the eye movements of Western Caucasian and East Asian observers … Contrary to intuition, East Asian observers focused more on the central region of the face.

I’ve added emphasis to the phrase “Contrary to intuition.” The “intuition” here is ‘what everybody assumed to be true.’

The constructivist I mention above who admits that the basic neural circuitry is genetic but that the nature of our thoughts is cultural has it backwards and upside down! The neural circuitry that determines our ability to speak is present in all primates, even those that don’t speak. The preservation of this circuitry in humans occurs because we grow up as babies in a linguistic environment. Culture determines that we have the ability to speak (with word, sign language, whatever). On the other hand, the nature of our thoughts may in some cases be determined by hormone levels. If you don’t think that is true than you hav never met, or been, a teenager.

Constructivism. Determinism. It is all a bunch of hooey.

Caroline Blais, Rachael E. Jack, Christoph Scheepers, Daniel Fiset, Roberto Caldara, Alex O. Holcombe (2008). Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces PLoS ONE, 3 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003022

Get the paper HERE.

Anyway, the following is the abstract of a 1998 paper by M. Henneberg that is still relevant of some interest:

1. The hominid brain has increased approximately three times in size since the Pliocene, but so has the brain of equids. The tripling of hominid brain size has been considered as an indicator of increased mental abilities, as it coincided with the production of tools, weapons and other artefacts of increasing sophistication. No indicators of the increase in equid intelligence are known. Intraspecific correlation between brain size and variously measured ‘intelligence’ is, in modern humans, very weak if not completely absent. With the exception of size, there are no major differences between the anatomy of ape and human brains.

2. A study of 297 estimates of body height, 626 estimates of bodyweight and 276 estimates of the cranial capacity of hominids dated at various periods over the past 5 million years shows that the increase in hominid brain size was paralleled by an increase in body size.

3. In a sample of 45 variously dated fossil hominids, brain size correlates isometrically with body size.

4. Since the Late Pleistocene (approximately 30 000 years ago), human brain size decreased by approximately 10%; yet again, this decrease was paralleled by a decrease in body size.

5. Therefore, it may be concluded that the gross anatomy of the hominid brain is not related to its functional capabilities. The large human brain:body size ratio may be a result of the structural reduction of the size of the gastrointestinal tract and, consequently, its musculoskeletal supports. It is related to richer, meat-based diets and extra-oral food processing rather than the exceptional increase in the size of the cerebrum. The exceptional mental abilities of humans may be a result of functional rather than anatomical evolution.

There are earlier and later papers that indicate or support similar ideas, but this is the nicest summary.

Hat Tip: Virginia Hughes. Who also has something interesting on Coffee.