rebellion: physics to personal will

rebellion

rebellion physics to personal will

James F. Brody

iUniverse, Inc. New York Lincoln Shanghai

rebellion physics to personal will Copyright © 2008 by James F. Brody All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting: iUniverse 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100 Lincoln, NE 68512 www.iuniverse.com 1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677) Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them. ISBN: 978-0-595-42955-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-595-87296-1 (ebk) Printed in the United States of America

To Colin Michael and Samantha Cate. I thank fourteen billion years for you, my grandchildren.

“One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place … a blink at the right moment may do it, an eye applied to a crevice, or the world seen through a tear. Then, to most of us, the lines reassert themselves, reality steadies out. It is better so. Every now and then, however, there comes an experience so troubling that the kaleidoscope never quite shifts back to where it was. One must then simply deny the episode or adjust one’s vision.” —Loren Eiseley, 1975

Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Introduction to Your Life’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii

1st Quarter: Your Cradle, from Numbers to Stubbornness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter One

Phase Transitions: To Do or Not to Do . . . . . . . . . . 5

Chapter Two

Sync: You Do My Thing and I Do Yours . . . . . . . . 19

Chapter Three

Emergent Networks: Life Organizes in a Tinker-Toy Way . . . . . . . . . . . 36

2nd Quarter: Pattern-Makers— Brains Are Made to Read . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Chapter Four

Exploration: Keeping What You Have and Getting More . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Chapter Five

Harrison Bergeron: The Outside, the Average, and the Outstanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Chapter Six

Common Sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94

3rd Quarter: Chosen Environments: Sync, and Disputes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Chapter Seven

We’re All Twins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Chapter Eight

Conceived to Rebel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

Chapter Nine

Your Divided Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 ix



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4th Quarter: Old Dogs, Suicide, and Free Won’t . . . . . . 161 Chapter Ten

Old Dogs, Young Tricks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

Chapter Eleven Suicide and Apoptosis: Mother Said “No.” . . . . . . 178 Chapter Twelve Free Won’t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Trusted Sources and Notes About Them . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

Foreword Rebellion is a rich tapestry of both personal experience and scholarly research into those rebel notions and nonconformist attitudes that dwell both within us and between us. The epigraph, a quote taken from Loren Eiseley, sets the tone for us: “One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place.” This book represents Dr. Brody’s attempt to bring order and meaning to what he has witnessed, but told from his own unique vantage point as a narrator, instructor, therapist, and scientist—with bits of humor thrown in. It extends over many hours of investigation involving clients, associates, presentations, articles, readings, and conversations that have culminated in Rebellion’s having much to say. There are many themes. One of these that I find most fascinating is differences between the two sides of the cerebral cortex. The right appears to handle novelty for us while the left deals with routines and that partnership allows stability, exploration, discovery, and adaptation. This also brings in the possibility of conflict between the two halves, conflict managed through oscillating (control of the brain alternates) between them, similar to the workings involved in muscle and eye coordination. The ultimate goal is to achieve synchrony—a mutual influence—between the individual and his surroundings although the right and left sides of the brain make different contributions to synchrony. An interesting corollary is that sexual dimorphism probably extends to the development of the brain. Further, maternal influences may govern the development of the left side of the brain, while paternal influences may govern the right side and each may have its own views on possible sexual partners! We take a walk in this book, examining our roots in biological and psychological terms using the models that physics and mathematics have to offer to provide signage for our journey. Looking at nature from different perspectives means that cells can be viewed as individuals and individuals can be viewed as cells. It allows us to understand abrupt changes in behavior through the mechanics of opposites, or what the author refers to as phase transitions (closely allied with catastrophe theory). He provides insight into a web structure of interactions, known as emergent networks, that connects all of us together in a virtual community through multiple nodes and interconnections. Condensates, swarming, and other models are all in his arsenal of concepts that he applies to the subject of individualism. I found the bibliography to be extensive with the annotated references for each chapter to be a helpful addition. This is serious work, yet it is not difficult to read. I would highly recommend it.… Bryen Lorenz, Ph.D., Professor of Electrical Engineering, Widener University, 11/26/07 xi

Preface Rebellion’s first half describes events in the physical sciences that make the stage, curtains, drops, and spots for the scripts of your commonsense. Its second half works from behavior genetics into the absolute necessity for nonconformity, skepticism, and individualism. While most scientific books lay out theories about similarity, this one finds that our particular universe features—and possibly thrives on—variation! This variation, whether in solar systems or in humans who shout “don’t tell me what to do!” may be seen as “noise” or as the most interesting ingredient in whatever it is that we have here. Thus, Rebellion’s cover features schematics of emergent networks, it also features the tattoo of a phoenix between the shoulder blades of a young girl, one who, in her words, gets knocked down a lot and needs a reminder to get back up as herself. I have also tried here to keep three audiences awake: those of you who a) insist on freedom in a rule-governed universe, b) offer help to your children, students, parishioners, and clients but want an outlook consistent with natural laws, or c) are in school and need to find a thesis topic! Rebellion, therefore, must have some practicality, anchored both to common sense and to research. Those of you who want more of the former will find many suggestions that are embedded in the text; those of you who want more scientific evidence will find that many paths start here. Second, Rebellion emerged over ten years as if a growing creature: small ideas merged into larger ones and large ones generated streams of smaller ones; concepts that began as so different became almost identical, and Rebellion’s ending influenced its beginning. My interests in behavior genetics reached in one direction to the physical sciences and in the other direction to biographies and gossip about real people. Futher, my mother gave me a dose of her mania; my military father wanted sometimes to ride a motorcycle but never did because he would have felt irresponsible. I eventually used half of her temperament to achieve more than one of his dreams. I was also the scrawny, reactive kid, a teacher-pleaser geek who never picked up a hammer or football. I went to college because I wanted to and because I really had no choice. I learned there in a small, church-affiliated 

I’ve taken a few editorial liberties to ease the flow of ideas: for example, references occur in the text but are usually nested outside of their corresponding sentence. That is, expect to see “… a character in a straw hat.” (“Eiseley, 1957) and jump past the parentheses to the next sentence. xiii

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university, one committed to science and religion, “to pursue the life of the mind and to take the word of no man as final.” That lesson stuck immediately, generalized widely, and later, at a different university, drove my graduate teachers crazy. I remember one of them in particular: “You’re new here and you will learn that graduate students don’t ask such questions.” The hell we don’t! Third, I spoke to a local Rotary Club in June, 1995, on “Here Comes Granddad Again.” My conviction was that behavioral fragments run in families and can jump generations just as can be true for physical ones. Lucretius talked of these ideas two thousand years ago but they can be too radical for modern thinkers. This was a difficult talk to Rotary for another reason: I had thirty-five friends in the audience and I didn’t want to appear a fool, especially with material that was so personal. Instead of ridicule and snickers, I received the only standing ovation in anyone’s memory. I made my talk into an essay and posted it (again with dread!) on Behavior OnLine (www.behavior.net/bolforums/evolutionary) in 1997. Neither my monitor nor my mail box exploded. George Colt did a better job with the identical themes in a cover story for Life magazine in 1998: neither of us, however, changed educated minds about family similarities; on the other hand, people with traditional outlooks had already seen what we saw! While it is true that most of my clients dispute evolution and many others dispute religion, almost none of them disputes the reality of their family similarities that sometimes jump generations. At the same time, almost none of them dispute the reality of their personal volition. Thus, “Granddad” became an obsession that also fed and watered itself on (egad!) ideas from statistical physics, the quirks that run in families, and our allegiance to “Don’t tell me what to do!” Surprise: physical laws imply willfulness! That is, tiny differences in the nature of individuals require that each of us discovers, arranges, and sustains his or her unique partnerships and territories. None of us is mere clay for environment’s thumbs and even the youngest of ten children is a one-off architect who renovates his parents. Rebellion, thus, was itself an act of rebellion and an affirmation of folklore, a tribute to both order and variation. Sometimes whipped even now, I remain a rebel, both a scientist and a clinician. I also treasure individuals who take charge of their worlds. Rebellion is for all of us.

Acknowledgements Granddad Craig Brody who died from helping a neighbor, a quarter century before I was born, but who, nonetheless, passed toughness, honor, and duty to my one-year-old father. Gilbert Levin, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology and Social Medicine and of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is the founder of Behavior OnLine as well as the Cape Cod Institute. He tried to teach me “less is more” but I still have trouble heeding this Darwinian idea. Levin’s group and their courses still make the Cape jump every summer. The staff and managers of two Barnes and Noble stores in Pennsylvania—one in Devon and one in Exton—sold me not only fast Internet access over the past three years but also many gallons of latté, hundreds of scones and cookies, and perhaps several hundred pounds of sandwiches. They also sold me lots of books and let me use a soft chair and finger their biker magazines when I was stumped, tired, or burned out. The staff sometimes slipped me a venti-sized coffee while charging me for a grandé! Thank you all! I now expect several months in caffeine withdrawal! Buy your books from someone you can touch! Diane Alex-Brody dances ballet, teaches fellowships, and has read the Bible seventeen times. She finds in scripture the basics of whatever Charles Darwin had to say about nature. She’s my ex-wife, she’s also a friend. Also, Claire Feltham, mother of four, reader and critic, a Brit who nonetheless speaks English as the Queen intended, and Donna Wismer, member of the religious opposition but skeptical not only of my blurts but also theirs. And Rachele Walter of iUniverse who worked hard to give what I thought Rebellion needed. About thirty rebels, deviants, and business owners in Spring City and Royersford, PA. Ketti Melman—the phoenix from between her shoulders flies on Rebellion’s cover. The graphs of emergent networks were adapted from Csermely (2006). The epigraph is from Loren Eiseley (1975) All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life. NY: Scribners, 105. And twelve cats who befriended me over the last forty years. I intend to hunt, eat, scrap, and nap with them again …

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And a Caution Rebellion draws on traditional, printed sources and from the Internet; there is, however, a dispute about the relative accuracy of each. A debate between Encyclopedia Britannica and the scientific journal, Nature, is typical. That is, Nature (438, 900901, 15 December 2005) compared Wikipedia and Britannica and found them to be very near each other in regard to accuracy. Britannica had a seizure and in March 2006 claimed that Nature, one of the two premier scientific journals, did sloppy work! (//corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf ) The debate continues but calls to mind a review of signal detection theory from more than forty years ago. (Swets, Tanner, and Birdsall, 1961) In tasks that require a yes-no decision about the presence or absence of a stimulus, the subject may report the event to be present when it is, in fact, absent. Further, subjects will also report an event absent when it is in fact present. Subjects in such experiments, like readers of books or scientists in a lab, must separate out “truth” from “noise” and it is frequently difficult to increase the number of times that either “yes” or “no” is correct without also increasing the number of corresponding errors! The authors reasoned that sensitivity to an event was relatively constant but social context had powerful effects on the subject’s criteria for saying “yes” or “no”! In Rebellion’s case, I can tell you more but make more mistakes, I could also be more conservative, tell you less, and make a different kind of mistake while also boring hell out of you. (Peter Csermerly, 2006, handles this problem by coding each paragraph according to its degree of speculation!) Rebellion explores “maybe” but will sometimes wander a little further toward chaos and its surprises! (See Chapter 1: To Do or Not to Do.) Meanwhile, Wikipedia often has more information about a topic and contemporary individuals (e. g., essential characters such as Steven Strogatz who may be absent from Britannica for a very long time). Given that Britannica also makes errors, even if slightly fewer, a cautious scholar will take neither it nor Wikipedia as complete truth! Caveat lector—which, according to Wikipedia, means “let the reader beware.” Britannica had no translation for this nor one for “Mcjobs”! James Brody, Ph. D.

Introduction to Your Life’s Story “The errors which had been poison to the observer of the stars, for they had been errors of the observer, proved to be meat and drink to the measurer of man, for they were errors of nature; and they became the means of understanding nature.” Cyril Dean Darlington (1962, 10) “1903–1981 … discovered the mechanics of chromosomal crossover, its role in inheritance, and … its importance to evolution” (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Dean_Darlington. 11/5/2007) “Science generally does a pretty good job of dealing with the statistical properties of aggregates. It does a lousy job of dealing with individual particles.” Reverend Lindon Eaves, Ph. D., 1998, Distinguished Professor and Director of Human Genetics and Psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Quote is from Allen A (1998) “Nature and Nurture,” The Washington Post, January 11.

This is a story of how you got here, a biography of one, fourteen billion years long. The career of a nearly hairless primate—one that might ride a fast noisy bike, wear a tattoo, and shake his fist at conformity—began an instant after the Big Bang, when identical particles first made partnerships. (Bloom, 2000) Almost thirteen billion years passed. Enucleated cells on Earth started to emerge roughly 1,500 million years ago, mammalian traits appeared five hundred million years ago, primate traits fifty-five million, great apes ten million, and human characteristics six million. (Wilson, 2007) All the while, environments and their occupants acquired complementary features. As a general trend, life, with the passing of eons, ratchets upward the influence it has on its surroundings. You became a busy-fingered mind that looks for repetition, arranges it, and extends it into the future but in ways that fit specifically with you. Thus, you are exceptional but you impose your exceptionality on your surroundings when you choose which rules to follow, evade, or forget. If you are to be the son of a particle, you demand to be a self-directed one. W. N. P. Barbellion, dying in his late 20s from multiple sclerosis, had that same determination: “How I hate the man who talks about the ‘brute creation,’ with an ugly emphasis on ‘brute.’ … As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other xvii

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rebellion animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees, and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden? Barbellion, July 10, 1922)”

I wouldn’t and neither would many of you! Rebellion: - tells about your home that physics made, one that shelters fuzzy and squishy things, homes for order, chaos, phase transitions, synchrony, emergent networks, and exploratory systems. - emphasizes the influences that you personally exert on environments, - admires the behavioral details that, like physical ones, may run for two or three generations in your family, and - describes individuals who found both fun, risk, and honor in “Don’t tell me what to do.”

Being a Part of Nature, Not Apart from Her Human ancestors faced “hostile forces of nature,” as described by Charles Darwin (1859), forces such as disease, droughts or floods, hungry cats, or most dangerous of all, groups of other humans. Darwin, however, both over-and under-stated the problem. Africa truly was a garden, one surrounded by Earth’s atmosphere, a bubble that protected us—and whatever we met for dinner—from the vacuum, black holes, meteor swarms, extreme heat, supernovas, and waves of radiation that still wait for us only a hundred miles overhead. The physics of the universe provides shelters on Earth that are so much a part of your own nature that you rarely notice them. That is, your instincts, intuitions, and thoughts duplicate the organizations that exist in the nonliving world. You not only have a home in the universe but, in important ways, you are a talking, thinking, planning, feeling, and inventing extension of it. Its essence and yours cannot be divided. Further, you expand, reform, and stabilize what nature gave you: her design produced a designer and a carpenter who exerts a personal will on what he



I am grateful to Dave Evans for making me aware of this passage, also used by Clarence Day on the second page of his 1920 book, This Simian World. According to Wikipedia, “W(ilhelm) N(ero) P(ilate) Barbellion was the nom-de-plume of Bruce Frederick Cummings, 1889-1919, an English writer who was responsible for what is sometimes considered one of the greatest diaries of all time, The Journal of a Disappointed Man.//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._N._P._Barbellion. (11/29/2006)

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conceives, finds, and makes. Through human consciousness, the universe gains some direction, meaning, and a sense of its own future.

Rebellion’s Elements “While we accept certain cultural values as propriate, as important for our own course of becoming, it is equally true that we are all rebels, deviants, and individualists. Some elements in our culture we reject altogether; many we adopt as mere opportunistic habits, and even those elements that we genuinely appropriate we refashion to fit our own personal style.” (Gordon Allport, 1955, 82.)

Allport was one of the fathers of developmental psychology and his ideas were applied to the maturation of individuals rather than to the evolution of species. Thirty years later, the philosopher Karl Popper applied similar thoughts to the development of species when he remarked: “… it seems to me far more important to stress that the organisms find, invent and reorganize their environments in the course of their search for a better world.” (Popper, 1989/1994, viii) The eminent evolutionary molecular biologist, Richard Lewontin (2000), reinforced Popper’s thought: living creatures turn physical settings into environments. Environments do not exist until life responds to a physical setting. Each leaf on a corn plant, for example, adjusts its own temperature and humidity. Allport, Popper, and Lewontin provide the frame for Rebellion. Given the endless differences between you and other creatures, human or not, differences that have substantial contributions from genetics, then you must have a personal will and act upon it. You either find a different home with different neighbors, rebuild what you have, hide in oblivion with pain-killers, television, and the Internet, or renovate yourself with calluses and hair on your hands, butt, and feet. Life is best when you find, make, and defend situations where you can be yourself. That is, you take in the information that matches your needs and, if you are a survivor, innovator, and instigator, you act so that what you have fits you better. Hamlet died, after all, because he talked too much and did too little! In a video store ad about the release of Titanic for home rental, an interviewer chatted with several teenage girls who gushed admiration for the actor, Leonardo DiCaprio. Finally, the interviewer insisted, “What did you think when the boat broke in half?” “There was a BOAT?”

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Rebel’s 1st Quarter: From Numbers to Stubbornness I mentioned to an Indian gentleman of my generation that aspects of statistical physics are part of his common sense and, for that matter, underlie it. He seemed startled: “How can that be?” “You are immersed in the same rules that manage the stars. Statistical physics appears to be tough because of all the squiggles that people invent. Einstein had a rough time with gravity but, most of the time, you and I handle gravity just fine. Physicists, after all, complicate nature to the point they no longer understand her.”

Nature’s shelters give physicists and psychologists their most interesting set of problems and solutions. Physicists must abandon common sense in order to describe peculiarities such as quantum phenomena; psychologist, on the other hand, find common sense itself to be peculiar because they neglect the events studied by physicists, chemists, and biologists. Regardless of a Designer, there are designs. That is, some parts of physics are so woven into your nature that, when noticed, you will find them obvious, comfortable, and dependable unless you happen to be a physicist! Your common sense—things that you do that were easy to learn, shared by most of your relatives, and difficult only when you try to resist—rests in principles that also guide water to become ice or steam or that influence two pendulums to move as one. Your experience of ambivalence, confusion, danger, and even the different roles taken by the average woman or man closely overlap with the behavior of phase transitions, oscillations, synchrony, emergent networks, and exploratory systems … all familiar things with strange names. Eventually, the match between the physics in your mind and that in your universe draws your notice as surely as a flame draws a moth. We study Mother and reflect back to her what we see and she gains self-awareness through her children. 1. To Do or Not To Do: Most of the time, you use instinct, emotions, and logic to complicate or to simplify what you do. When bored, you take on tough projects, needy partners, and a stray cat; when overloaded, you abandon responsibilities, mates, children, and finally that cat. You also, if you are wise, enjoy intervals of “maybe” when you consider a choice between bad or good, fast or thorough; notice the separation between yesterday and tomorrow; and appreciate, ignore, or complain about a member of the opposite sex. 2. Sync: You Do My Thing and I Do Yours. If two pendulums tick at the same instant, they are in “sync.” Sync describes partnerships between electrical generators, connections between transistors. It applies, also, to the chirps of cricket and flashing lights of fireflies, and, surprisingly, to the resonance that exists between two lovers, renters and apartments, artists and paintings, or singers and audiences.

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Sync may even be a string that holds up the yo-yo known as ambivalence and sync could have been the driver in evolutionary theory if Charles had watched clocks instead of birds! 3. Emergent Networks: Life Organizes in a Tinker-Toy Way. Statistical physicists discovered emergent networks, sociologists adopted them, and you can now spot networks in parlor games, professional sports, and the clusters of gossips on the evening news. Emergent networks exist in societies of termites, dolphins, movie actors, or scientists. They also occur in the organization of one cell, in clumps of neurons, or in your vocabulary, obsessions, hallucinations, and demonic possessions. Animism lives again but wears a lab coat.

2nd Quarter: The Pattern-Maker—Brains Are Made to Read! You run your life by the same exploratory tactics that led to flies and film stars. That is, your left cortex handles routines, your right organizes novelty. You expect averages but are drawn to particular arrangements known as power laws. You also have some African refinements to your common sense that guide your friendships, marriage, and sense of beauty, and—contrary to popular scientific belief—your brain was made to read! 4. Exploration: Keeping What You Have and Getting More. “Exploratory system” applies to the growth of immune systems, neurons, blood vessels, suntans, muscles, and minds. Living organizations—including your brain—change size, detail, longevity, and toughness to match demands and opportunities in their settings. Exploratory system also describes the growth of children, vocabularies, and problem solving. Even parenting is an exploratory tactic. Evolution itself is one, whether seen in galaxies, jungles, or a flea infestation. 5. Harrison Bergeron: The Outside, the Average and the Outstanding. First, your attempts to solve a problem usually begin with putting your fingers in it. Further, your curiosity about “out there” has always come before your curiosity about “in here.” Second, statistics in biology and psychology reflect your comfort with average things even if you seldom find them. Third, many characteristics that you assume to fall within a bell curve simply do not. You not only encounter but are drawn to dynamic organizations that are described by power laws: indeed, you are one such arrangement. You evolved according to power laws and you notice and make collections—whether concepts, theories, or an album of stamps—that fit them. Your work, whether as a mom, teacher, or physician, requires you to spend eighty percent of your time on twenty percent of your problems. Your preferences for truth and beauty also lead to assemblies that are not random but emergent, and power laws might be the stage crew for a work by Seurat, Brahms, or Joyce.

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They also may be the unseen lens through which you judge the match between you and a prospective mate. 6. Common Sense: Humans and other primates left each other during the last ice age, the Pleistocene, which started roughly two million years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago. Brains and social organizations grew in sync with each other as your ancestors became taller, ran longer distances, lost hair, and became physically weaker but more clever. You still enjoy most the “Four Fs of fighting, fleeing, feeding, and reproduction” but now you do them with greater imagination and more varied companions, toys, and results. In Loren Eiseley’s memorable phrase, “… a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat.” (Eiseley, 1957, 47–48)

3rd Quarter: Genes, Sync, and Disputes The next three chapters first introduce you to twins and to the idea that you are one. Second, there are rebellions, even prenatal ones, against your parents, siblings, friends, and those strange people next door. Third, the spats between your parents split you up your middle and for all of your life. Fourth, biographical material becomes prominent in Rebellion, including the story of a young Jewish woman in northern Italy who counted cells on microscope slides while the Nazis hunted for her in the daytime and the English bombed her town at night! 7. We’re All Twins reviews identical twins and non twin siblings. Your mirror shows a tiled variation of your parents and grandparents. You may remember them best as they were in their thirties and forties and discover your twinship with them when you reach your own thirties and forties. When you glimpse what you became, you see aspects of what they were. When you see how they are, you find hints about what you might become. When you rear your child, you often meet a twenty-five percent copy of your father or mother as they were at the same age. 8. Conceived to Rebel. Children are not “born to rebel” but do so from conception. That is, the birth order effects that Frank Sulloway attributed to conflicts between siblings may have their onset in the peculiar prenatal events of genomic imprinting. Some of your mother’s and father’s genes arm-wrestle before you are born and influence how much she spends on you and how much she saves for your next sibling’s use. It could be that her running out of assets that defend her tends to make later siblings, especially sons, more impulsive and, therefore, more rebellious. 9. Your Divided Self looks at your internal squabbles that fill your mind while you wait in traffic or at a diner’s counter for your roast beef, canned gravy, and mashed potatoes. That is, the templates from your mother sometimes do not get along with those from your father and you relive your parents’s sync. It is possible

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for you to act like your half of one parent in order to infuriate your half of the other one!

4th Quarter: Regression, Suicide, and Free Won’t In different ways and to different extents, after mating’s psychosis goes away, while your skin wrinkles and your nose and earlobes sag, preadolescent quests again fill your thoughts. Second, you not only collect assets but also trim waste, including sometimes yourself when you lose your connections to the future. Finally, your personal will is a curse and a protector, a demon and a seducer, a restraint and an inspiration. 10. Old Dogs, Young Tricks highlights the tendency for many of us in old age to return to the pursuits of preadolescence. You were one twin of yourself until your fifteenth birthday but a hormone made you, for the next twenty years, a different twin of yourself. As you approach age thirty-five, madness wanes. You rediscover your own versions of “older whiskey, faster horses, and younger women,” and pursue them if you have a little “more money.” 11. Suicide and Apoptosis explores suicide as a decision that comes from within rather than a reaction to something outside. Suicide is another example of how human lives repeat strategies that nature uses elsewhere: assemble lots of materials and later cut away anything that has not found a purpose. Furthermore, suicide may compensate not only for having too little but also for having too much talent. 12. Free Won’t finds personal will to be inevitable and addictive, both a cross that you carry and a wine that you sip. Every one us applies his or her unique combination of talents and liabilities from parents and grandparents. Such is true for the residents of an asylum, a great scientist, or for a small town seeker, one who, surrounded by traditionalists, questions whatever she is told! Like these individualists, you find your own opportunities and temptations. You also discover that you have many chances for success, not just the desk where you now park your feet.

Doing the Best You Can With What You Have Many of us prefer a mental cage like that where you keep your canary. You line both your mind and the cage with yesterday’s news and there is private comfort in what you keep, how often you think about it, and for how long. On the other hand, a few of us, the quirky Myers-Briggs intuitors, the four-percenters, will explore for a different set of explanations for what we do!

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In this case, mothers, educators, and politicians usually anchor their dreams to social learning and to the great similarities thought to be universal to all humans. (Sowell, 2002, Chapter 2) Rebellion, however, steers a different course. While it gives some small attention to our similarities that may come from imprinting and imitation, it gives far more to the prizes and satisfactions that come with being different. That is, the biological differences between individuals, whatever the means by which those differences interact with experience, require that stubbornness be a force in personal development. Therefore, Rebellion starts with the views of physicists—at least those of some physicists—and accounts for the adolescent who wants to see one movie rather than a different one. Variation in natures makes it less important to him which film he sees but more important that he makes a choice. Every living creature, including that adolescent, searches for a better world or tries to arrange or construct one that improves upon last week’s version. Along the way, life and each of its agents, follow a path between what it wants to do and what it has to do, a path between imposed and chosen environments. From the explorer’s and builder’s standpoint, the tolerable becomes the better and environments that suit occupants become more stable and passed between generations. Natural selection is reversed as the elements of a setting, in a very real sense, compete with each other for retention by living creatures! Phoebe was a chocolate-point Siamese cat who spent hours hidden under chairs except for her hiss-scratch-bite-and-run attacks on our other cats. Phoebe also had a tinny, hoarse cry that told me the better half of her genome was lost during meiosis. Thus, my son and I often referred to Phoebe as “Feeble.” Fundamentalist Diane, however, championed Phoebe and captured evolution in one sentence: “I have to respect Phoebe because she’s doing the very best that she can with what she has.” Diane and I read different books but she often understood nature better than I did: the game really is about doing the very best that you can with what you have.

1st Quarter: Your Cradle, from Numbers to Stubbornness “Physics is like sex: sure, it may have practical results, but that is not the reason we do it.” Richard Feynman (en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Science (11/22/2006). In 1965, Feynman shared a Nobel Prize in physics for his contributions to a theory of quantum electro-dynamics. According to Gleick (1992), Feynman had a bright line of patter, played the bongos, cracked safes at Los Alamos, and drew nudes. He also believed that education should increase differences between students, not erase them. (Feynman, 2006)

Physics Crosses Mules with Onions Evolutionary biophysics can be traced to 1642 and Thomas Hobbes’s interest in Galileo’s experiments. The same quirk that helped Galileo to find patterns in nature inspired not only Thomas Hobbes but also Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Gustav Fechner. Charles Darwin, however, was unaware that a bubble in physics softened hostile forces of nature and led to the common sense of living creatures. He did not think of the universe as more his home and less his enemy, or that the physical laws for spinning galaxies also guided him from within!

Synchrony Inside of Bubbles Living organizations search and they are directed by designs, channels inside and outside of biology, that make some outcomes, including intelligent life, more likely than others. (Conway Morris, 2003; Ball, 2004; 2003; 1999; Gould, 2002; Solé and Goodwin, 2000; Raff, 1996; Thompson, 1917/1977) First, you plan, prioritize, stick with one task or return to it after an interruption. These abilities, sometimes called “executive functions,” lead you to larger, delayed rewards rather than the small stuff that is available right now. Executive functions allow you to experience a phase transition, a maybe-zone that exists between having no options and having too many. Thus, one mind contains the



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identical frozen, confused, or semi-structured but evolving arrangements that scientists can find in a cloud of particles. Second, similarity and connectivity influence synchrony and, whether for God or Einstein, synchrony is nature’s Elmer’s. The similarity and influence that connect individuals with each other also partner individuals with environments. For example, farmers and farms influence each other, so do couples such as Bogart and Bacall: “They met while filming To Have and Have Not. The director, Howard Hawks, once commented: ‘When two people are falling in love with each other, they’re not tough to get along with, I can tell you that. Bogie was marvelous. I said, ‘You’ve got to help,’ and of course after a few days he really began to get interested in the girl. That made him help more.’ Of Bacall, Hawks said: ‘She had to keep practicing for six to eight months to keep that low voice. Now, it’s perfectly natural. And the funny thing is that Bogie fell in love with the character she played, so she had to keep playing it the rest of her life.’” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Humphrey_Bogart#Bogart_and_Bacall. (11/29/2006) Third, your mind not only explores but also arranges patterns from what it finds. Your acquisition of language, for example, first goes through pairings of sounds and then certain rhythms and trains of sound congeal. The same occurs when you turn searching, trial and error, elimination of extraneous behaviors, and integration into behavior sequences that become routine and you retain forever. Networks in your mind are never random but become emergent: repetition and contiguity identify and connect the players that have similar interests. Formerly independent islands find each other and synchronize in a Hebbian sort of way. The wall blurs between the living and the never-alive. That is, emergent networks recruit, explore, evolve, and compete with each other just as if they were alive. Those networks lead to obsessions and possession when one of them mutinies against competing interests in whatever poor soul they occupy! As you will see, thinking of neurons and thoughts as particles is a peculiar gambit but not a bizarre one. Unlike a molecule of nitrogen, you do not bump chaotically in a cloud. Individual variation, guided by the organizations in physics, takes you to rebellion, deviancy, and individualism. You apply your unique set of tools and adjust your position between too near or too far, too much or too little, and between right-damn-now or get-a-round-tuit-tomorrow. Rebellion, 

The preoccupations shared by Hobbes and Kant also infected biologists R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright, George Gaylord Simpson, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ernst Mayr, Julian Huxley, E. O. Wilson, Richard Lewontin, Steven Jay Gould, Stuart Kauffman, and a thousand more who were connected to, even indirectly, the Santa Fe Institute. (Lotka, 1924/1956; Fisher, 1930/1958; Provine, 1971/2001; Ball, 2003).

1st Quarter: Your Cradle, from Numbers to Stubbornness



thus, views evolution, physics, biology, and individualism as if Darwin had started a crossword puzzle but left it on a diner counter in front of a vacant stool. In Rebellion, you will sit down, order a coffee, pick up where Chuck left off in regard to similarity and variation, and find that personal will leaps out of 59 Across. As for crossing mules and onions: a trucker once explained, via CB through a foggy 2 am Connecticut drizzle, that you usually get an onion with ears but once in a while, if very lucky, you get a piece of ass that brings tears to your eyes …

Chapter One Phase Transitions: To Do or Not to Do “For the drama of life is like a puppet show in which stage, scenery, actors and all are made of the same stuff. The players, indeed, ‘have their exits and their entrances,’ but the exit is by way of translation into the substance of the stage; and each entrance is a transformation scene. So stage and players are bound together in the close partnership of an intimate comedy; and if we would catch the spirit of the piece, our attention must not all be absorbed in the characters alone, but must be extended also to the scene, of which they are born, or on which they play their part, and with which, in a little while, they merge again.” Alfred Lotka, 1925/1956, 183–184. (Alfred James Lotka, 1880-1949, mathematician, chemist, and statistician, excelled in population dynamics. An early fan of power laws and their role in biology.

It’s a strange thing to find that an organization usually studied by physicists makes you have a personal will but things are where you find them and, sometimes, the greater the surprise, the more important the reasons for it. Phase transitions help to raise your kids or, for that matter, your getting back home after you go for a Sunday paper. You, without noticing what you do, often make one of two decisions, either to complicate or to simplify life. When bored, for example, you might take on a stray cat, a second job, or a course in management; when overloaded, you throw away schoolwork, responsibilities, mates, children, and finally that cat. In such moments, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” becomes “to do or not to do.” You navigate your position in a “phase transition” between too much and too little. Your judgments of bad or good, yesterday or tomorrow, and even the relationships between average men and between average women suggest a phase transition, the 

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Brody J (2002) From Physics and Evolutionary Neuroscience to Psychotherapy: Phase Transitions and Adaptations, Diagnosis and Treatment. In G. Cory and R. Gardner (eds.) The Evolutionary Neuroethology of Paul MacLean: Convergences and Frontiers, Praeger-Greenwood, 231–259. 



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former attracted to chaos and the latter to stability. You will learn here that phase transitions: • Supply a nest for life, but one that allows you to personalize it, • Line up with your sense of the past, present, and future, • Provide a context that requires your searching, arranging, and collecting what you find, • Support one set of adaptive payoffs for women and another for men, • Play a role when you feel bored, overwhelmed, or on top of your game! Thus, phase transitions can be kaleidoscopic places, shifting environments wherein a sense of “maybe” is your greatest tool both for survival and for arranging whatever you find into a closer fit with whatever you brought with you.

Your Most Familiar Phase Transition: Floating on Your Back Life, as we usually think of it, follows water. Water takes three forms and gives a sense of phase transitions. That is, water can be very cold but still liquid until 0 degrees C: drop the temperature one more degree, however, and a block of ice forms. Raise the temperature a hair beyond 100 degrees C and water disappears into a vapor. Water is a very narrow phase, a transition between ones known as ice and vapor, each of which can exist in much greater temperature extremes. For example, the temperatures in the solar system range between a few degrees above absolute zero (0 degrees kelvin or 273.15 degrees below zero degrees, centigrade) and the temperatures at the center of the sun, estimated at 15,000,000 K. Water’s 100 degrees range is indeed tiny! You have other experiences of phase transitions. You have shaken oil and vinegar in a cruet and hurried to pour the cloudy mix onto a salad before the layers separate again. You also live in a phase transition that is about twelve inches thick when you float on your back in a swimming pool, too heavy to fly but too light to sink. There are psychological parallels to what you find in water. On the highway, you have a comfort range for a driving speed that varies with road surface, weather, and the density and speed of other traffic. You are bored if you move too slowly but anxious if you move too fast. Even when you are at work or home, you understand what it means to be overwhelmed, to be productively active, or to be bored 

Phase transitions have multiple peculiarities beyond the basics presented here: www. en.wikipedia.org can introduce you to them! Or meet them in Ball P (2001) Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water.

Phase Transitions: To Do or Not to Do



out of your mind but you seldom relate those experiences to the swimming pool. Furthermore, you do not relate them to the human discomforts that psychologists call internalizing or externalizing disorders, to your confusions when taking on a partner or rearing children, nor to the persistence with which you sometimes defy boundaries or hug predictability.

Chaos and Order: Less Than a Blink Away Do your best to look inside of water and you will find the conditions for life … a churning mix of clumps that change size and rearrange their relationships while you watch. Phase transitions also resemble a trail that runs between a high wall and a deep gully. They can resemble an estuary between solid ground and the sea. Magnetism, electrical conductivity, liquids, gases, and even math problems show phase transitions as do your thoughts when you arrange your list of things to do. Phase transitions package nearly all that you cherish! In order to appreciate the comforts inside of a phase transition, you must appreciate the nastiness outside, nastiness found in much of the universe and only about a hundred miles away, as close to you as Philadelphia is to New York. Chaos is to your right. Think about steam wherein meetings between any two, randomly chosen molecules of water are equally likely. In these conditions, the patterns formed by groups of molecules change constantly and unpredictably. Chaotic effects can last a millisecond or forever and can involve two participants or a trillion. Chaos describes the interactions between particles in a cloud of smoke or, sometimes, the conduct of a small hyperactive child or the behavior of domestic cats when you try to herd them. No matter what the pattern, it passes quickly, never to return and any one moment tells you nothing about what comes next. (Kauffman, 1993, 1995, 2000; Lorenz 1993/2001; Bak, 1996) (Chaotic situations were so annoying that physicists gave up on describing one gas particle and moved to describing groups of them. Statistical physics was born!) Order (also called stasis) is to your left: Think about ice, a block wherein every connection between molecules is just like every other connection. The organization stays about the same no matter how cold you make it. Stasis also resembles five Vermonters sitting around a wood stove. For decades the same individual might take the same chair and these regulars cover the same topics in about the same order and reach almost the same conclusions by means of grunts, nods, scratches, or frowns that summarize chapters! Connectivity between members decides how orderly or chaotic a group is. The amount of connectivity also makes a phase transition. You can study connectivity and phase transitions when you rake leaves. For example, dry, fallen leaves may show chaotic effects: your rake or leaf blower easily moves them in a rasping swirl.



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Mix a few twigs with the leaves and you will find clumps and clusters that separate from each other and you have to work harder in order to move them all. Spraying the leaves with a bit of water further increases connectivity and lengthens what was a fifteen minute job. Get every leaf wet, let them sit a few weeks, and they roll up in thick mats when you try to move them. Even cat litter appears to have one organization when dry, another when damp in a few spots, and a third when soaked! There are human clumps like those of leaves and twigs. A city might have several blocks of people, each block with a different ethnicity, most of whose members arrived in the past six months. In such transitional neighborhoods, safety is uncertain and mothers keep children close. When the same people have occupied the home for a decade, safety is often assured, the neighborhood residents sit on their stoops on summer evenings and swap stories, mothers push strollers up and down the sidewalk, and a pretty girl is less vigilant when she walks alone to the corner store. “One of the core assumptions in the study of complex systems is that there exist ‘universal’ features analogous to those that characterize the notion of universality in statistical physics. That is to say, sometimes the details do not matter: Certain aspects of complex behaviour transcend the particularities of a given system, and are to be anticipated in any system of a multitude of simultaneously interacting components. There can be no tougher test of this idea than that posed by the nature of human social systems.” (Ball, 2003, 190; see also Newman, Strogatz, and Watts, 2000.)

This same challenge also applies to the organizations in your mind.

More Examples of Phase Transitions You are familiar with many types of phrase transitions and you experience them on a daily basis in every imaginable way. For example: 

These changes are not surprising but upset diversity advocates. Robert Putnam, for example, of Harvard University, found that increasing ethnic diversity in a neighborhood destroyed its social capital. “Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: ‘In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to … pull in like a turtle.’” Putnam finished this research in 1991, didn’t like the results, released the data in ten years later, and published the study in 2007. His findings would have been no surprise to Durkheim in 1897. (www.johnleo.com/2007/06/26/ bowling-with-our-own/. See also//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Putnam.)

Phase Transitions: To Do or Not to Do



• Earth’s atmosphere transformed a round rock in vacuum to a moist Petri dish. Most Earthlings, regardless of species, family, or kingdom, occupy a phase transition 25,000 miles wide on the surface but between seven miles below and five miles above. Like a water spider, you easily skate left or right but not too far up or down. • Crime, automobile traffic, crowds of pedestrians, election outcomes, racial composition of neighborhoods, the proportion of marriages, business partnerships, and even diplomatic alliances demonstrate phase transitions. Minor inputs produce large changes on either side of tipping points. (Gladwell, 2000; Levitt and Dubner, 2003; Ball, 2003, 2005; Monassin et al, 1999; Axelrod, 1997) • Thought has the properties of a phase transition. The rules that apply to water fit the organization inside your skull. It does not matter if the particles are protein or water, a cloud of similar particles with mutual influence come into partnerships! (Strogatz, 2003; See Rebellion, Chapter 2) • Language refers to binary states. You are married or single, pregnant or not, white or not, black, brown, yellow, or not, rich or poor, smart or dumb. “Diverse” and “weird” swap places sometimes in relation to how long you have been married. (Beck, 1988) So do “exciting” and “irresponsible,” “thrift” and “stinginess.” And relatively small changes in gossip and circumstance may elicit night-day reversals in what you are called! • Humans, individuals or packs of them, move themselves into greater or lesser degrees of involvement with other humans. This steering is accomplished by a combination of factors, some of which are genes, receptors, channel capacity, hormones, social learning, sudden changes in status, and your executive functions. • “When hell freezes over” signifies a climatic change as well as an attitude we make known. Climate is one of the great simplifiers in geologic time and the expression reflects two sides of a phase transition—the chaotic plasma of heat and the immobilization of extreme cold. That expression also captures our morality: selfishness and social chaos are evil, stability and cooperation are good. The former leads to extreme, eternal, heat called “hell”, the latter gets us to comfort and unity in a peculiar arrangement, a winner-take-all network called “heaven.”

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Satisfiability Problems, Human Decisions, and “Maybe” I sipped a cup of mocha latté while I turned ideas into keystrokes and a passing friend asked if he could buy me a refill. “No. I’m at just the right amount of caffeine: too little and I’m inert; too much and I bounce.” “… humans … live in families where mothers simultaneously care for multiple young. Closer birth spacing … exacerbated dilemmas confronted by mothers who must then decide on how to allocate resources among dependent young with competing needs.” (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, 1999, 203–204) “Boy, you really opened a can of worms with that thought, I don’t wanna’ even go there …” Bubba Bo, American Trucking Network, 12/4/2006, WLW, 700 am, Cincinnati, sometime before dawn.

Ball’s remark about complex social systems also applies to mental organizations. Sarah and Bubba Bo, miles apart in time, location, education, and experience, reflect the importance of “satisfiability problems” (SAT), a mathematics that lists statements about variables and the restraints on each one. Satisfiability problems show phase transitions. Hayes (1997) provides the following example of a SAT for human social exchanges: “You are chief of protocol for the embassy ball. The crown prince instructs you either to invite Peru or to exclude Qatar. The queen asks you to invite either Qatar or Romania or both. The king, in a spiteful mood, wants to snub either Romania or Peru or both. Is there a guest list that will satisfy the whims of the entire royal family?” You can vary the number of actors (king, prince, queen) and the number and kinds of conditions imposed by each one. The number of actors, however, is not usually a difficulty, the number of conditions is. Anderson (1999) explains, “… there is a critical value … below which almost all cases are (rapidly) satisfiable and above which they are almost all unsatisfiable (at whatever length investment is made).” You immediately solve the former but give up on the latter just as quickly. The really difficult problems both for computational scientists, crossword puzzle fanatics, and for mothers of several children lie in the phase transition between possible and impossible, the ones that can probably be solved but require persistence and cleverness. This kind of problem may be far older and more important than it first appears; for 1) every one of us differs in our talents and interests, 2) partnerships allow swaps that reduce or incur conflict, and 3) the protocol example fits huntergatherer variables such as the matching of resources to needs and the giving to each member assignments that match his or her skills. (Not everyone gets to carry

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a spear!) Solutions become more important when there are competitive demands within a group and rival groups within the same territory. People who can manage these decisions should gain influence, control larger territories, parent more children, and raise more of those children to adulthood. Also, when a leader stabilizes several families at once, everyone’s children benefit, not just his own. Napoleon Chagnon (1968) gives an excellent example: a Yanomamo chief in the Amazonian jungle manages the farming, feasts, famines, and wars of the village. He must decide whether an invitation from the next tribe to “come for dinner” is for a good time or whether it is the set up for an ambush. A Yanomamo also will father more children if he is reputed to be a methodical killer. The younger males in the village defend its boundary, go first on night raids, and spend free time sniffing drugs, stealing tools and food, and hitting each other in the head in order to show their ferocity! The impulsive ones die early without moving up: The successful ones line up to become chief. Satisfiability problems could be an important clue for why a bigger brain might be a better brain and possibly make you a chief instead of just a warrior or a main course at dinner: the number of restrictions that can be handled might become an important measure for intelligence. And you may learn something of our evolutionary history if different contexts—farming, hunting, fighting, trading—have different points at which SAT problems become easy or extremely difficult.

Managing Connectivity Inside of a Phase Transition “… Phase transitions are not merely a convenient allegory for abrupt shifts in modes of behavior or thought. They really do seem to happen in society, and the physical theory developed to understand them is to some extent directly transferable to descriptions of social behavior.” Ball, 2004, 82. “Mrs. Jones, have you considered that you might have attention deficit disorder?” “Dr. Brody, have you considered that I have four children?” “Mrs. Jones, would you have four children if you did not have …” but, I didn’t say it.

The number of your partnerships moves you between independence and confinement. One partner limits your choices and slows you down but usually doesn’t paralyze you. Add a child and your goals fade to impossible while you search instead 

The psychiatrist, Murray Bowen, studied “triangles” in family relationships and found effects very similar to those described by Kauffman who studied connectivity in transistor circuits! See Kerr, 1988. Michael and Kathy Kerr are the hubs, anchor for the

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for daycare, baby sitters, and doctors and you juggle visits to schools, grandparents, and stores. A second child makes you look in the mirror at night for the person you used to be; mothers and fathers who have ten children, to be effective, must function like a Yanomamo chief: plan the menu far in advance, prevent ambushes and scars, delegate responsibilities, and promote tribal members who can handle them. Because siblings are usually more different than similar, a parent must deal at the same time with two competing individuals rather than a synchronized pair. You might envy parents of identical twins because they manage one personality in two bodies. Furthermore, sibling rivalry is markedly less in identical twins: rather than making two decisions and buying two different items when you shop, you make one decision and buy two copies of the same thing and not simply to hear “How cute” from all your friends! With ordinary siblings, frustration, panic, and anger go with paralysis and even watching television becomes one more thing that has to be done. There are, however, ways to gain a little freedom without getting drunk or riding a Harley. Hierarchies, for example, form quickly between children and make one decision from two: “I’m explaining nothing, do what I tell you! NOW!” Hierarchies also form quickly when older children take charge of younger ones. The mother who insists that all of her children be equal is the mother who is most likely to develop panic attacks. You also navigate between constancy or unpredictability when you marry or divorce, microwave dinner or mix it from scratch, put out the cat or keep him inside. And every one of us has said to someone, sometime, “You’re more damn trouble than you’re worth!” In the absence of a hierarchy, you instinctively hide, napping on the couch or in front of the television, in your room, under your car, or under your hat and behind a fishing pole! You continuously adjust your surrounding connectivity. Anger, fear, and depression simplify your niche; boredom, elation, and assurance complicate it. The smile from a toddler instantly complicates the life of parents forever, his screaming drives them away! The decisions that complicate or simplify life will occur, whether catalyzed by reason or emotion, by plan or impulse, by engagement or escape.



Georgetown Family Center, for Bowen family systems therapy as it is practiced today. Their seminars occur in different cities and the speakers are divided between evolutionists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and practicing clinicians. Strongly recommended! (//www.thebowencenter.org/) Robert Trivers, the great evolutionary biologist, once described the emotions as regulators for our reciprocity system. He could also have put it that emotions prolong or abort, weaken or intensify, or change the variability in our attempts to simplify or complicate our network!

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Tracking a Niche by Stretching Its Envelope Adam cooked on Mothers Day and had two fights with his wife. He made eggs Benedict but they stuck to the new pan. One kid didn’t like them and the other kid who usually liked eggs Benedict just wanted something different. Adam threw the dishes in the sink, went out back, started the front-end loader, and moved rocks between the fence and a building. He did not have room to turn around because the building was nearby so Adam raised high the loader of rocks and backed out of the area. He hoped that none of the rocks would fall on his head.

Spiders make webs with spinnerets under their belly: humans use science, technology, and culture to bring multiple events into harmony. The equivalent to a spinneret can be found in a pen or a word processor. Spiders hang webs in the damnedest places and so do writers. And humans, especially males, “push the envelope” when theorizing, testing a prediction, climbing a peak or exploring in a space capsule. You once tested how late you could hand in your homework or how many women you could date on Saturday night! Changing too quickly or too much outruns the niche but changing too slowly entails lost opportunities: either gambit leads to a childless heap of dried fur and stained bones. The trick is to stay in the middle, weaving coherence but also taking chances, using tricks that were encoded in your genes or taught by your mother in daytime rants and bedtime prayers or sometimes by your father with a pat on your back or a swat to your bottom. Maturation from childhood to adult recaptures the conditional opportunities that the phylogeny of your remote ancestors had to discover in water: during maturation, fixed decisions become open-ended and you take turns, buy time, rearrange agendas, consider backup plans, or swap a small, immediate gain for a larger, delayed one. (Bronowski, 1977; Barkley, 1997) Immaturity does the opposite. It multiplies individual preferences for chaos or for constancy. Extreme autonomy and a love for change may earn a sentence to Hell. Distrust and exile follow impulsive, selfish, schizoid, bizarre, or antisocial acts. On the other hand, if you find an oil well or a new way to peddle music, then connectivity multiplies and you move to the center of the village! The other extreme of immaturity consists of the endless scrutiny of all possible outcomes, each of them a trap, a reason for changing your plan or for doing nothing. “Inhibited,” “neurotic,” “compulsive,” or “obsessive” can be as deadly for us as for Hamlet.

“Now”: A Phase Transition That Turns Future into Past Your senses of the now, the past, and the future have a digital quality as if the first cleanly splits the second from the third. On the other hand, things are not what

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they seem and, if you watch closely, you will find that your memory and plans expand the width of “now.”. “Past” consists of not only memories but also the clutter on a shelf and trophies become friends that share similarities with memories. Trophies and memories stabilize and amplify each other. For example, I can spend months not recalling my brief meeting with the anthropologist, Iranaeus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, except that his massive book sits near my computer monitor. Past appears to be constant but crises and neglect erode the match between what you swear under oath and what a camera retains. And ironically, a memory is most vulnerable to change at the instant that you recall it: the context in which you rehearse disasters can magnify or diminish your sense of it. Thus, and surprisingly, rehearsal can erode what you recall! (Loftus and Ketcham, 1994; Gazzaniga, 1998; Nader, 2003; Lee, DiCiano, Thomas, and Everitt, 2005) “Future” is only a little less defined than “past”! Future becomes “now,” as if it were a maturing fly egg and larva, through cascades of unfolding events that both proceed independently and periodically check with each other. (Raff, 1996) Plans and memories mirror each other and both of them connect to “now.” As you travel away from “now” in either direction, you lose details or make them up. What we think that we have connects with a short chain both to what we think that we had and to what we think that we want. Past and future butt up against now but accidents, pain, illness, hunger, thirst, lust, territory, and legacy move your attention further to the front or rear. You live in the crosshairs of two phase transitions: confusion and rigidity on your left and right, future and past to your front and rear!

Two Sexes Explore Opposite Boundaries Caught between chaos and commitment, a confused suitor balances on a phase transition when he picks petals from a daisy. “She loves me, she loves me not” ignores the evolutionary truth that she loves him some of the time and in some ways for some of his traits but not for others that she plans to correct later.

The usual evolutionary explanation for our having two sexes is that an “arms race” exists between us and the bacteria and viruses that feed on you, breed on you, and, using you, scatter their children. (Judson, 2002; Zimmer, 2001; Hamilton, Axelrod, and Tanese, 1990; Hamilton and Zuk 1982; Hamilton, 1980) Such par

See Gazzaniga (1998, Chapter 6, “Real memories, phony memories”) in regard to the systematic errors in what we recall with our left hemisphere and the greater accuracy, even if nonverbal, of our right! Our left half can not only make up stories but embellish them over a period of weeks. Gladwell (2005) also discusses similar research.

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asites come in one sex but have shorter times between generations and, therefore, can change their genetic material faster than you change yours. Two sexes, however, are another way to increase the rate of adaptation and improve your chances against bacteria and viruses. Thus, mates choose each other for combinations of traits that are correlated with vitality. Two sexes brings a second benefit but one with a creative tension: men and women occupy slightly different decision spaces in humanity’s phase transition. That is, males often travel closer to chaos and females closer to stability. Males tend to be risk-takers and females to be risk avoiders. Males, on the average, tend to arrive first in a territory and pacify it while working in small gangs of other males and breaking rules; females often arrive later by means of boats and wagon trains or by aptitude tests, grades, and following rules. These are not trivial differences and they go back a long time! Even today, in traditional cultures in South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, young males form a fence, an inhibitory surround, between the core of their society—its senior leaders, older females, and couples with children—and whatever lurks in the bushes, whether wild animals or hostile members of neighboring tribes. These protective arrangements also exist in many small towns and urban neighborhoods and sometimes on university campuses, especially after a series of rapes.10 Men and women continue to occupy two niches. (Cahill, 2006; Coss and Charles, 2004; Murray, 2003; Kimura, 1999) It also tends to be true that singleton males and small groups of them define, pacify, and reform new territories, whether geographic, socioeconomic, athletic, or scientific. Larger groups eventually form after pioneers first write letters home and then return with pelts, gold, spices, perfumes, and tobacco. Social relationships grow more complex in the new territory, more stable, and more apt to be influenced by females. Males compete and make a lot of noise but females, through their longterm stabilizing influence on male characteristics, award the trophies. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy put it well: “… to an extraordinary degree, the predelictions of the investing sex—females—potentially determine the direction in which the species will evolve. For it is the female who is the ultimate arbiter of when she mates and how often and with whom.” (Hrdy, 1981, cited in Buss, 2004, 104) 10 Neurologists have a concept for “inhibitory surround,” sensory psychologists refer to “lateral inhibition,” and network theorists distinguish between hubs and nodes: in any case, a central focus amplifies its importance by manipulating its surroundings to repel or inhibit competing information. Males and females often make arrangements with each other that resemble the sensory arrangements of an octopus: a vital center surrounded by sensors and effectors! A house and its fence have the same relationship as an organism and its skin.

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Handholding between the sexes allows the successes of either one to benefit the other because their partnership faces two sides of “maybe.” Each pulls the other toward the center by means of a mutual influence that emphasizes similarities and reduces contrasts.11 Men tend to live longer when attached to a woman and while women sometimes rein in male rogues, they are look for, cheer for, and put Band-Aids on them. Although men and women continue to occupy two niches, the separation is less than ever before. American culture now drifts away from male dominance in pacified territories such as universities, the professions (the law, ministry, medicine, and education), and in the roles of corporate executive officers, publishers, editors, military personnel, and news anchors. Even the gender of truckers and riders is changing: female truck drivers now win national contests and as many as one-third of new Harley sales are to women!12

Achieving “Maybe” “The radical sign of will, the essential mark of that achieved development which makes man capable of speculating on all things and raises him to his dignity of an independent and autonomous being, is the possibility of doubt.” Charles Bernard Renouvier, 1815–1903, quoted by William James (in Richardson, 2006, 177).

Social psychologists have systematically examined these phenomena but without referring to chaos or stasis. That is, different nationalities seem to have different biases in how they see and explain the world, relate to their families, and evaluate themselves. Richard Nisbett (2003) compared the language acquisition, thoughts, perceptions, problem solving, and social traditions of East Asians with those of North Americans. East Asians tend to be context-oriented in perception, memory, explanations, and social relationships. They believe that a proposition can be true or false as conditions vary. East Asians expect authorities to reduce tension rather than choose between adversaries; error is attributed to differences in situations 11 McGuire and Troisi (1998) report that submissive males in troops of wild vervet monkeys have low levels of serotonin metabolites in their urine but dominant males have high levels. Submissive males, however, became alpha if given medications that raised their levels of serotonin but only if there were females in the troop! Alliances formed from groups of females and a medicated male who then displaced the prior top vervet. 12 Lott & Kenny (1999) studied government revenues and expenditures before and after women’s suffrage was passed in 1920. State expenditures and taxes collected increased in parallel with each other (no surprise!) but also with the numbers of women voting. (See also Lott, 2007.)

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rather than to failures in character. Further, entire families prosper as one of their sons prospers. Religions describe partnerships with nature rather than human ownership. Cuisine, visual art, and architecture strive for harmony and resonance: individual units are less important than the gestalt they make up. East Asians appear to keep an element of “maybe” in their explanations; westerners tend to value explanations that are sharp, reliable, universal, and enduring. Westerners also vary between themselves. Mercenaries, bounty hunters, and outlaws, guided by their self interest, charm you and take your money or shoot you and still take your money. At the opposite extreme, Hamlet, trapped between duty to his dead father and to his living mother, became a western icon for indecision. We find Hamlet’s equal in the anonymous many of us who take action but first consult every relative and neighbor. Others of us, perhaps once a fetus that was imprinted on a screaming parent and hooked on cortisol, marry an abusive partner because they seem so familiar and are forever unable to divorce them. Mothers who suppress their children’s hierarchies and women who go from childcare to attending their ailing parents also wonder, “What the hell happened to me?” Disconnecting frees you as it freed Gulliver. It allows a decision to “do” or “don’t do.” You become a more chaotic, surprising, and interesting but annoying player in your social networks. Such instigators are characterized as reactive, unpredictable, undependable, or immature. And you will be! Conflicting responsibilities can immobilize you. And for you as for a rat in chicken wire, expect panic, ulcers, and complaints about being trapped, helpless, or paralyzed. Some clients, who have difficulty handling “maybe,” also have difficulty with planning, constructive imagination, self-observation, and problem solving. These lapses in executive functions predict erratic application of therapy lessons and unending crises that would have responded to techniques already taught. Such people will need coaches and sponsors to identify strategies, persevere in the use of them, and keep their life in order. “Executive functions,” are mental behaviors that inhibit quick interest in immediate, small incentives but promote sequences of behavior that lead to delayed but larger, more symbolic rewards. (Barkley, 1997) Executive functions let you visit a distraction and return from it to whatever you were doing in the first place; they also allow you to solve problems while sitting under a tree. Clients with intact executive functions should need less help while solving their own problems: they manage, look for, and enjoy “maybe.”13 Finally, an endorsement from Steven J. Gould: 13 There are substantial implications for clinical diagnosis of emotional disorders. See Brody (2002).

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“… I … would argue … that Kauffman and his colleagues … are groping towards something important. If we have been unable … to achieve a rigorous formulation, we should at least recognize that science itself has been so tuned to other, largely reductionist, modes of thought, that the basic conceptual tools have never been developed. I welcome this exploration in terra largely incognita and would only like to point out … that the implications for evolutionary theory may extend even further than the major protagonists have recognized.” (Gould, 2002, 1213. Kauffman walks the boundary between physics and biology. He’s a former professor of biochemisty and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania and faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complex Systems. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman, 10/01/2007) Gould was a paleontologist, historian, baseball fan, proponent of evolutionary-developmental biology, and an annoyance to neodarwinians. His massive Structure of Evolutionary Theory was published in 2002, the same year that he died of cancer. (//en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Stephen_j_gould. 10/01/2007) I consider Gould’s praise for Kauffman the near-equivalent of a Nobel. A despot called his wise men and told them to bring him the wisdom of the ages in a single word or be executed. One sage returned 20 years later: “Your majesty, the word is ‘Maybe.’”

Chapter Two Sync: You Do My Thing and I Do Yours “Sync” applies when two events happen at the same time. Sync is so important that our civilization depends on clocks and calendars to keep large numbers of us in sync with each other. “Oscillation” is the repetitive variation in an event that goes from one state to a second one and back again. Oscillation occurs in physics, biology, and societies. Pendulums, for example, alternate between one position and a second one; living things such as insects and neurons also oscillate. In some respects, you, too, are an oscillator that sometimes moves into sync with other oscillators, whether light and dark, the seasons, or an individual whom you met at the mall. Sync has applications beyond clocks and pendulums that include the relationships between chirping crickets, between fireflies, the pacemakers for your hearbeat, and even between electricity generators. Sync can also extend to the resonance that exists between two lovers, a New Yorker and his apartment, a rider and his motorcycle, an artist and his painting, or a singer and his audience. Sync may be a factor in the yo-yo called “ambivalence” and overlaps the evolutionary concepts of arms races, mate choice, sexual selection, and gene-culture coevolution. Sync describes the relationships between organisms and between organisms and environments and, again, it might have been the driver in Darwin’s theory if he had watched clocks instead of birds! Despite my fascination with sync in human partnerships, I was not prepared for some research by Karl Grammer and his team at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology. His observers left a young man and woman, strangers to each other, together in front of the cameras. Hair flips by her led to fidgeting by him. If he made a remark and she laughed, he felt better although he couldn’t say why. Lots of laughs and hair flips, regardless of what was said, predicted long walks together in the park immediately after their session. (Grammer, 2006; Grammer, Filova, and Fieder, 1997) In a variation, a man stood about four feet from a woman while he rated her dancing. He held a small sign up in his left hand that identified the test session. 19

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An inspired snoop noticed that the sign moved and that it moved more if the dancer were ovulating! (Grammer, 2006) It appears that by fidgets and laughter we move into partnerships and men and women might do it more readily when an egg rolls down her chute. Lovers, too, can be oscillators.

The Recorded History of Doing Stuff Together14 “… It’s precisely because the models are so dumbed down that their fidelity can be so unnerving.” (Strogatz, 2003, 273) Steven Strogatz, an early fan of Arthur Winfree who studied timing in biological systems, contributes regularly on dynamic systems and complex networks. Watts and Strogatz (1998) is the most cited paper about networks in the past ten years and has influenced thinking in sociology, business, neuroscience, and epidemiology. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Steven_Strogatz. 11/05/2007)

Steven Strogatz chronicled western discoveries of synchronous movement. In 1665 Christiaan Huygens, sick in bed, found that pendulums on his clocks moved into phase even if he started them at different moments. Power grids became possible in the 1890s when engineers discovered that correctly-connected generators synchronized themselves. In 1924 Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein predicted the very peculiar synchrony, a Bose-Einstein condensate, of particles in extreme cold. Psychologist Donald Hebb, perhaps with no thought of Huygens, Bose, or Einstein, proposed in 1949 that the link between two neurons should become stronger when the neurons exhibit coincident activity: in Steven Pinker’s words, “neurons that fire together, stay together.” (Pinker, 2002) It was not until the 1970s, however, that Yoshiki Kuramoto, a physicist at Kyoto University, developed a formal proof that similar, loosely connected oscillators, such as pendulums, no matter how many there are or of what nature, will always move into synchronous activity. (Strogatz, 2003; Kuramoto, 1984/2003) That is, similarity and weak, reciprocal influence make one player out of two, twice two, fifty, a thousand, or a million.15 There are consequences: sync appears as pairs, trios, quartets, teams, lynch mobs, and disco raves grow from formerly 14 Adapted from Brody JF (2004) A review of Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. By Steven Strogatz, NY: Hyperion. In Human Nature Review, 3: 494–496. www. human-nature.com/nibs/03/Strogatz.html 15 See Wikipedia, //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuramoto_model. See also the uncanny demonstration at //physics.owu.edu/StudentResearch/2005/BryanDaniels/kuramoto. html. Even before Kuramoto, Alfred Lotka (1926) measured oscillation between the populations of prey and and their predators and first developed the equations—often called Lotka-Volterra equations—to describe it. Lotka credits Herbert Spencer with having similar ideas in First Principles (1862).

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chaotic singletons. Pendulums and crickets satisfy the Kuramoto model for the partnerships between oscillators: so do humans of similar abilities when they share an oval racetrack. Start the runners at different points and they often form a clump as the slower speed up and the faster slow down! Likewise for the traffic that passes my house in bumper to bumper in clusters, each cluster, however, separated from the others by a quarter mile or more. The physical nature of the oscillators does not matter—a pendulum acts like other pendulums and, according to Strogatz, what is true for pendulums is also true for oscillators such as cardiac neurons, crickets, fireflies, runners, and automobile drivers. Similarity and influence achieve sync when one Italian on Ninth Street in Philadelphia acts very much like other Italians in the same block. The amount of postural sync between an incoming client and his interviewer predicts treatment duration and success.16 (Geertz et al, 2006) An American woman from Iowa and a man from Georgia find lots in common when they meet for the first time in Paris. Further, there is reason to expect sync between living creatures of different species, and bidirectional influences between physical settings and their occupants.

Why Is Sync Everywhere?17 • Selection applies to physics as much as it does to cats and rabbits: that is, particles that do not engage in sync do not form organizations. Kauffman (1993) reached the same conclusion about evolution’s requirement for a phase transition. No mutual influence, no similarities, no stability on which selection might act! It may be true, therefore, in both physics and in human life that an absolutely unique entity does not last very long. Further, almost anything that exists is a variation of, and an assembly from, what already exists. When 16 Postural sync is bidirectional: both client and therapist adjust positions during a session and both, therefore, contribute to whatever sync is achieved. Implication: schizoid therapists do better with schizoid clients? Likewise for matches of the suicidal, bipolar, borderline, and narcissists with their clinician? 17 Measured intelligence is one of the more persistent similarities between spouses and between friends and might predict sync between strangers but few of us give formal tests to whomever we meet on Match.com. I suspect that jokes supply material for those assessments: can he tell one that he likes and that she understands and likes? Does he assess the sincerity of her laughter? I also suspect that more jokes are told by males than females and that, while I enjoy comediennes, I don’t want one as a partner! (See Gervais and Wilson, 2005, for more on the evolution of laughter as a social bond and a tool for manipulation.)

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particles exert mutual influence, chaos settles down, particles grow mold, and eight or nine planets circle an average sun. • Compound interest appears as each structure makes many more, similar structures, each of which varies a bit from its parent and explores a little further from its start point. Mighty oaks grow from a slightly erratic photocopier! • Earth has cycles of light and darkness, high and low tides, and of various seasons—spring, summer, fall, and winter. Living rhythms synchronize with nonliving ones. Therefore, you can expect sync in the partnerships between: 1) organisms and environments (Darlington, 1953; Lewontin, 2000; Turner, 2000; Kauffman, 2000; Camazine et al, 2001; and Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, 2003); 2) between behavior and genes (Darlington, 1953; Plomin, DeFries, and Loehlin, 1977; Scarr and McCartney, 1983; Plomin, 1994; Cohen, 1999; Coen, 1999; DeFries, Plomin, McClearn, and McGuffin, 2000; Turner, 2000; Lewontin, 2000; Rowe 2001; Brody, Bloom, and Turner, 2002, and Pinker, 2002); 3) and between human natures and the cultures they make. (Darlington, 1953; Wilson and Lumsden, 1981; Richerson and Boyd, 2005) • Thought requires the properties of sync: similar ideas clump together and influence each other. A jealous idea, for example, recruits other jealous ideas. One powerful gambit of cognitive therapy is to find thoughts that are not in sync with the troublemaker. (Beck, 1976) Minds that depend on sync eventually find it and measures of sync may become measures of social adjustment. For example, sciences, like mushrooms, tend to grow from within and graduate student tend to extend their advisor’s work, a process captured by Thomas Kuhn (1996) in his phrase, “normal science.” Faculty advisors regularly have difficulty making transitions into new assumptions as in a “paradigm shift.” • Reciprocal influence can also be called “signaling” which describes influence at a distance. Fabré found that female moths call males from long distances, perhaps with just a molecule or two of a pheromone. The development of a chick from an egg depends on parallel developmental sequences that periodically speed up or slow each other down. (Raff, 1996)Ants make a trail between their nest and where they found a fresh dead insect; bees do likewise for supplies of nectar and members of their hive. Drums signal raids, a whistle signals a gridiron foul, a green flag tells NASCAR drivers when to race, and a cleric’s

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call draws swarms of Baptists, Witnesses, Catholics, or Muslims to ceremonies from which they disperse with orders to deliver more believers.

Sync in Human Pairs “None of the twins we have seen have felt diminished or de-individualized as a result of meeting another person constructed on the same blueprint. Their reunion does not make them start to feel like robots. Instead they feel enriched, with greater self-esteem and wider horizons than they ever felt as singletons.” (Lykken, 1982, 372)

Friends and mates share characteristics, especially those with substantial heritability. (Martin et al, 1986; Rushton, 2005) Rushton (2005, 496) states: “In a study of married couples, Russell et al. (1985) found that across thirty-six physical traits, spousal similarity was greater on attributes with higher heritability such as wrist circumference (seventy-one per cent heritable) than it was on attributes with lower heritability such as neck circumference (forty-eight per cent heritable). On fifty-four indices of personality and leisure time pursuits, Rushton and Russell (1985) found that spousal similarity was greater on items such as ‘reading’ (forty-one per cent heritable) than on items such as ‘many hobbies’ (twenty per cent heritable). On twenty-six cognitive ability tests, Rushton and Nicholson (1988) found that spousal resemblance was greater on more heritable subtests from the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). When spouses assort on more heritable items, they report greater marital satisfaction. (Russell and Wells, 1991)”

Maes et al (1998) found that psychopathology is often shared when people choose to marry. Alcoholism, generalized anxiety, major depression, panic, and phobias were compared between husbands and wives in two population-based samples of 854 and 568 cases. “Only a small amount of the observed marital resemblance for mental illness could be explained by assortment for correlated variables such as age, religious attendance and education.” Similar results were obtained for the two samples separately and confirmed in the combined analysis. There are implications: • No matter how intense our love for individualism, most of us compromise it in partnerships although individuals vary in how much they will sacrifice for a partner. • No matter whom you see on the couch, their partners are apt to be partial clones. Mothers who bring me a son who lies, cheats, and steals will confess,

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“I did the same kind of things at his age but was too smart to get caught.”18 Expect a mutual amplification of the glee, anger, or despair between the partner whom you see and the partner whom you don’t. Depressed mothers and depressed sons, for example, can make the other worse and more resistant to outside help. Abused spouses may be depressed, in part, because they are in a subservient role. Will they become abusers if they change partners? • Romantic love and sync hold hands but inbreed for madness. Children become not only brighter with each generation but should also get more bizarre. (High intelligence can be a handicap! See Chapter 5, Harrison Bergeron: The Outside, the Average, and the Outstanding.) Thanks to help from the Internet, the local alien will always find his match, whether down the hall in a large high school or across the globe. Further, school principals who send the agitators to an in-school suspension actually make it easier for them to find and train each other! It is also possible that some cultures discovered that romantic love pulls men and women together only for the short term and for destructive reasons. That is, folie à deux may grow from two, matched, follies-of-one and might be lessened by arranged marriages. • Identical twins usually help and defend rather than sabotage each other. (Segal, 1999) This affection is remarkable because they make identical demands on one set of parents and should compete with each other more intensely. The opposite occurs: they often share, anticipate what their clone wants, and each becomes more of himself as the result of sharing the room with a living mirror and echo chamber. Sync is a natural amplifier for shared features, another source for “repeat what works.” Small characteristics become more reliable and sometimes more obvious when done in partnerships. Identical twins feed into each other when they share a home and produce higher similarities when compared with identical twins reared apart. Such effects can occur with non twins but to a lesser degree. Adolescent males traveling together in a car are more apt to have fatal traffic accidents that are avoided if the adolescents are “adulterated.” I always learned more about my son if he had a friend along when we went out, brothers sometimes amplify each other, the similarities in marital partners predict and magnify both their fun and their fights, and the antihero and his girl in Natural Born Killers killed everyone but each other.

18 I have never heard this remark offered by a father! Also, be suspicious if a mother claims her son to be “just like his father.” She, too, will often be like his father and do similar sneaky things!

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• Executive functions, mental behaviors that prioritize other behaviors, cognitive or overt, can make the difference between a self-managed life and an impulsive one: impulsive individuals react too much, too quickly, to immediacy. They often do not plan, stick to plans, or anticipate delayed outcomes. (Barkley, 1997) They should do better if they copy friends, mates, and children, or therapists and parole officers, and should be safer in groups of non impulsive people even if bored by and annoying to them. Unfortunately, impulsive individuals should be more likely to come into sync with other impulsive individuals or groups of them! • Powerful sanctions for nonconformity appear. Strong reciprocity is more conspicuous during times of declining resources, when members of a group not only punish defectors but also punish any member who fails to punish the defector. “Homo reciprocans exhibits what may be called strong reciprocity, by which we mean a propensity to cooperate and share with others similarly disposed, even at personal cost, and a willingness to punish those who violate cooperative and other social norms, even when punishing is personally costly and even when there are no plausible future rewards or benefits for so behaving.” (Gintis, 2000a; Gintis 2000b, 262) • Finally, partners may reduce variation in each other when they don’t match characteristics. As in herds of cattle and Romans, safety usually lies near the average. (Hamilton, 1980; see Rebellion, Chapter 5.)

Neodarwinian Stories about Sync Hobbes argued in 1651 that people expect kings and governments to counter human selfishness. (Sowell, 2002; Pinker, 2002) Two centuries later, T. H. Huxley and other Victorian political philosophers had a similar bias that is still with us today: cooperative living occurs because we choose to suppress instinct, penalize selfishness, and lecture ourselves and each other into kindness! Contemporary belief still finds selfishness to be innate and undesirable but cooperation, which is thought to be acquired in church and public school, represents a greater good. Eeagh! Neodarwinians (especially R. A. Fisher, Sewall Wright, and J. B. S. Haldane in the early 1930s) not only incorporated genetic theory into Darwinism but put it to work to explain cooperation between individuals. That is, communities and governments must somehow make benefits for selfish individuals. The reason is that genes, like chess pawns, defensive blockers, or infantry privates, work in squads. The genes in several individuals, often but not always members of the

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same family, benefit by the sacrifice of one of their carriers. Helpfulness is a matter of biology and taught in public schools for that same reason. Greater genetic relatedness often predicts greater individual self-sacrifice. (Hamilton, 1963, 1964, 1967, 1970, 1971, 1972, Trivers and Hare, 1976) Female ants, for example, are genetic twins that do not reproduce but spend their lives caring for the offspring of one sister, the queen. In humans, one identical twin will often sacrifice himself for the benefit of his copy. (Segal, 1999) And, no surprise, Internet virtual personalities, constructed by a living person, should be a closer behavioral match to their creator, and, therefore, more tightly linked with him or her, than a spouse. Sync also applies to the partnerships between environments and organisms: genes that respond to environments are apt to be around longer than genes that do not. As Dawkins once observed, we find beavers in ponds with beaver dams and, therefore, not only genes for beavers but also genes for making beaver dams. (Dawkins, 1982) Thus, occupants and settings ratchet each other into eversmaller, mutual adjustments. (Darlington, 1953; Lewontin, 2000; Kauffman, 2000; Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, 2003; Turner, 2000; Ridley, 1996) A surprise—components of environments start to compete with each other for retention by their occupants! The sunlight was orange and the air cool. I paced on my gravel driveway and thought about the last quarter century. I added a deck and sunroom to the two hundred, seventy-year-old house, exposed beams in several rooms, removed part of a ceiling, and installed skylights. The acres that once grew wheat, corn, and thistles supported two hundred silver maples that I transplanted soon after I moved in. Now in the October of this year, our twenty-sixth anniversary, I buttoned her up one more time. I resealed the sunroom glass, jacked up a sagging corner of the deck, cleared branches that were too near the roof, cut, moved, split, and stacked firewood, and brushed creosote from the stove’s chimney. The house and I have a rhythm that sometimes I lead and sometimes I follow.

Examples of Cross-Species Sync Dogs and humans come into sync and we bred them for hunting, guarding, racing, protection, or for decorating us at dog shows. Cattle, pigeons and chickens also come into sync with human preferences. Dolphins move in sync with trainers whether in Sea World, submarine warfare, or in a rescue attempt when one of us falls out of a boat. I even saw and heard a whale, resting for a moment alongside a stopped tourist boat, slap her tail in sync with the waves that slapped against the

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boat’s side. No one threw food to the whale and I suspect that she did it for the fun! I have two other examples: 1) Gretchen was a retired breeder—a seal point, apple-head Siamese cat, one whose profound beauty was merely accented by her dark sagging breasts and the gravel in her voice. She knew that she was stunning and that I was obsessed with her. She could also recognize a distressed kitten. A young pediatrician sat on my couch and Gretchen promptly moved to his lap. “Doctor, for how long have you been depressed?” “I just got here. How did you know I’m depressed?” “Gretchen told me …” I once saw her get pregnant in five seconds but she was never wrong about her diagnoses. 2) I put a lit match under the lee side of a mound of dead branches although they were still moist from unusually heavy snows. I spread one tiny flame to half the mound but a commotion from a nearby thatch of yellow grass moved on the fire’s rim. I saw a tiny brown rodent with beady eyes and small ears and stubby tail. She carried an infant one quarter her size in her mouth and disappeared a few inches uphill from the blaze. “Oh crap! A nest! What have I done?” I dug quickly with my bare hands and found a small mass of waving legs and squirming bodies. The heat drove me off but the pups were temporarily protected by their low elevation and by the cool wet earth underneath. I plunged my shovel between them and the fire and moved the dirt, the straw, and the kids eighteen inches towards safety. Now what to do? There was another commotion to my right … mom in its center dug up from below to rescue her litter and, from my point of view, to rescue me. We became partners. She made a hole while I waited. I then searched through the lump of earth, separated her pups from straw and cold dirt, and dropped one at a time onto her new threshold. And one at a time they vanished until eight were gone. She appeared for a ninth time and stared at me. (She had probably learned about male carelessness from her prior lovers!) I went back to the mound of dirt and soft hay, combed it again, and found a ninth infant that I also delivered to her. I rearranged some burning sticks while the little skeptic took the last pup, made two more sweeps around her former nest, and disappeared.

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One hundred million years might have passed since our ancestors last sniffed each other but, despite nine kids, my little friend still looked pretty cute. Similarity and influence work.

Making Deals Sync and Rebellion: The Behavior of Organisms Most partnership studies involve those between people but work by B.F. Skinner and his army reveal partnerships between scheduled events and the conduct of individual rats, pigeons, monkeys, or undergraduates. Skinner, however, may not have noticed that events and organisms influence each other although he did remark that it is in the nature of mice and men to be reinforced in certain ways! (Skinner, 1966) Clocks and counters depend on a program to set up the delivery of a reward but on a sophomore or a rat to accomplish the delivery; sophomores and rats depend on clocks and counters to spit out a pellet or a point when the program so stipulates. Sync appears! Because representatives of four separate species acted so much alike, Skinner knew that he was onto something very basic. He discovered “schedules of reinforcement” that reward behavior on the basis of elapsed time (interval schedules) or on the amount of work accomplished (ratio schedules). (Skinner, 1938) And whether a lever produced only water (rats), a match between two stimuli (pigeons), or an opportunity to watch a neighbor (monkeys and snoops), responses could be rewarded in a predictable manner or a varied one. There are two kinds of interval schedules. • Fixed Interval (FI) schedules reward the first response at the end of a constant length of time. “FI 2” meant that water was available for the first response after two minutes and an efficient rat or pigeon could get his full ration for only 30 responses per hour. Rattus, however, usually scratches, sniffs, and licks himself for about a minute. He then starts slowly and systematically increases his response rate until a drop of water or grain of food arrives. Response rate is most rapid and most resistant to interruptions just before the reward but drops to zero immediately afterwards. (Examples: an extra five minutes for a second cup of coffee at breakfast makes you forty-five minutes late for work because of rush hour traffic or how your thoughts about money increase when payday draws near.) As for rebellion: each furred or feathered critter tries to beat what the clock or counter allows! Environment imposed conformity. If you want to cap-

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ture fury and determination, train rattus that water is due every two minutes, then increase the interval to three minutes! • Variable-interval (VI) schedules have a constant average time between rewards but the time between any two consecutive rewards differs between a few seconds and a few minutes. VI schedules produce a brief pause after each reward and then a moderate rate that continues until the next reward. (Think about mail delivery or promotions or finding the right date. According to one of my students, marriage is a VI schedule: steady work and patience, unpredictably, produce rewards.) The same rebellion also occurs here as in FI schedules: lots of extra responses occur and no one gets thirty drops of water for thirty responses! Punishing responses with a shock merely increases the delay between reward and the start for a next sequence of responses. There is almost no loss of rewards! (Brody, 1968) Ratio schedules—known in industry as piece work—pay according to how much work is completed. • Fixed-ratio 30 (FR30) means that every thirtieth response is rewarded. The typical result is for the rat or pigeon to goof for a moment after a reward and then pound the lever nonstop until the next reward rolls out. The madness here is that there is a trivial difference in outcome for working at maximum rate compared to working a bit slower. This same madness occurs when you buy large engines and drive them at maximum, racing from one stop light to the next merely to wait at each one as the same rusted VW catches up to you again. • Variable-ratio (VR) schedules keep little old men and woman pulling the handles of slot machines, poker and horse players staying for just one more, and little children begging mom for “something” at checkout in the grocery line. Variable ratio schedules reward an average number of responses but the reward can be available for two consecutive responses or after 200 of them. VR schedules usually eliminate the rests that occur in FI, VI, and FR schedules. (When you think of VR, think of gambling. Think of begging or thumbing for rides. Think of sales work and hustling tips in a restaurant.) Sophomores, pigeons, rats, and monkeys rebel against the environments imposed by clocks and counters. That determination arrived when scales became feathers or fur, determination that helps Rebellion make the most of what’s available rightdamn-now. Most of us, you see, still have problems waiting …

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Nature’s Yo-Yo: Approach-Avoidance Conflict The grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Well, maybe not but you have to find out.

Stability in a changeable universe needs oscillators that go in one direction, pause at a boundary and then cross average and go to where they were at the opposite extreme. Oscillation shows up nearly everywhere and is sometimes called negative feedback—as seen in the behavior of a thermostat, going in a straight line against the wind by sailing to starboard or port, or, in this case, approach-avoidance behavior. A true story: an imposing Irishman wanted a squirrel, Rocky, to eat from his hand. The Irishman held out a few peanuts and made squirrel noises in a brogue intended to mean “We’re both great guys: let’s share a nut, swap stories, and be friends.” Rocky had two motives: hunger (the peanuts look great) and fear. (“That big ugly Boston mother will cook me.”) He approached the Irishman but stopped about eight feet away. Rocky then flicked his tail, moved his head left to right, and scurried off. The Irishman—filled, of course, with rejection sensitivity—had a tantrum: “Rocky is in my tree and, therefore, he’s my squirrel and he will eat what I tell him to.” Rocky disagreed. Some history: Rocky displayed approach-avoidance conflict, analyzed by Neal Miller. (Miller, 1959) Miller trained rats to run down an alley to get food at the end. Once the rats moved pretty quickly, he electrified the food cup. Miller’s first interest might have been in how much shock equaled how much food deprivation: the rats should either go all the way or never leave the start box, but the rats didn’t cooperate. They ran halfway to the goal and stopped. Miller, on to something new, reasoned that approach motives were stronger than fear when the rat was further away from the food cup. The rat also ran faster as he got closer to food when there was no punishment. Punishment, however, created fears that were weak at a distance but stronger when punishment was closer. Fear increases faster than desire, overpowers it, and rattus stops: “I’m hungry but that dish will fry my lip.”19 19 I recall these conflicts in my disco missions. I locked my radar on a dimly lit blonde thirty feet away and initiated approach but my control tower flagged me off: “She’s drunk, dumb, diseased, bleached, in debt, and has six children by seven different illegals, all of whom use cocaine.” I aborted my approach, veered away, and listened to my second control tower: “She’s brilliant, wealthy, sensitive, a possible collaborator.

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Outcome: force you into a difficult situation and you panic; deny your access to that same situation and you have a tantrum. Why would nature make you ride a yo-yo? I have another story. Three brothers lived in a tree perhaps 200 million years ago. They scampered down one day to locate food but were chased back up the tree by a hungry cat. The one brother remained in the tree and starved. The second forgot the cat, scampered down, and was eaten. Neither brother became a father. The third brother scampered down the tree, remembered the cat, and made a left turn, going elsewhere for food. The system that works is to get moving, consider risks, change plans, and you neither starve nor become a snack. More subtly, approach-avoidance conflict allows your adjusting a relationship according to changes in your own needs. Conflict can prevent your escaping from situations that could be tolerable if you keep an eye on your exit. Rocky can move further away but not leave completely. He stays in the neighborhood and when hungrier, finds the Irishman to be nicer than he first appeared. Approach-avoidance conflict, thus, allows your generating some kindness when you’re not trapped. (Think about visits to relatives and in-laws!) You will also find that local conditions vary: on some days you stay a little further off; on other days, you move closer. Although these arrangements may give you a headache, they may also keep you alive. Oh yes! The Irishman could have put down the nuts and moved eight feet away, let Rocky eat several times, and over a series of days, slowly move closer in small steps. In any case, don’t yell at Rocky and don’t grab him.

Tit-for-Tat: The Mysterious Case of Sync between Strangers “The beauty about Tiny is that nobody can trust him and you know it. You get somebody somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody.” Willie Stark to Jack Burden. (Warren, 1946, 16, All the King’s Men.

Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), subject of a book by William Poundstone, demonstrated another expression of sync and conditions for rebellion against it: partners in short term relationships often take advantage of each other. Long term relationships are maintained by a stream of small benefits. (Axelrod, 1984; Poundstone, 1992; Ridley, 1996) These compromises occur even in desperate times. During the Her square jaw means that she bubbles with testosterone and will make noisy sex. You both should talk.” Pursuit-escape oscillated until three bloody marys past eleven and I eventually wove home alone, somewhat relieved to escape not from her but from indecision. Of course, I often returned a week later to look for her.

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trench warfare of WW I, “live and let live” occurred about one-third of the time between German and British soldiers. That is, each side aimed artillery rounds at the same location and at the same time each day! Warnings and apologies were common: “Don’t blame us, it’s those damned Prussians!” Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher of the RAND Corporation performed the first studies of PD in 1950 and Princeton mathematician, Albert Tucker, developed today’s standard PD script, the one used in basic economics and in classes on the evolution of cooperation. Two guilty prisoners are interrogated separately by the authorities in regard to the same crime. There is no direct evidence; a confession or a witness is needed. Either prisoner may betray the other or lie to protect both of them. The largest gain (freedom) goes to the player who sells out his partner; the second highest (freedom after some beatings, water boarding, and sleep deprivation) occurs if neither prisoner betrays the other; the third (jail for both) if both players betray their partner, and punishment (lots of jail time) to the guy, the “sucker,” who was loyal but betrayed).20 Logic advises betrayal on the first round, last round, and on all rounds in between except in stable partnerships. Despite logic, individuals with new partners often take a smaller payoff on the first round. Poundstone comments: “In a true one-time-only prisoner’s dilemma, it is as hard to justify cooperation as it is to accept mutual defection as the logical outcome. Therein lies the paradox.” (Poundstone, 1992, 122) Sync accounts for the paradox. Similarity and influence are established with eyecontact, a smile, parallel postures, and vocal quality. Compromise and sharing follow. A private car seller and a buyer often split the difference between what was asked first and what was offered. In contests where two players have to cooperate but only one of them gets to decide how to split a prize, fifty-fifty is more common than not, even for strangers. You leave tips for waitresses whom you will never see again and in religions, “Do unto others …” may well have more popular application than the no-gods-before-me clause of the first Commandment. Tit-for-Tat comes in versions called “Simple” and “Generous.” Simple means that you open with kindness but next do whatever was done to you. If cheated, then you cheat on the next round; if you met kindness, then you remain kind. Obviously, Simple supports long feuds because one betrayal, intentional or not, produces an indefinite chain of retaliation.

20 According to Axelrod, the reward for cooperation must be greater than the average rewards for betrayal and costs for being betrayed. Otherwise, players could take turns betraying and being betrayed!

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Generous Tit-for-Tat, in contrast, repairs itself after a mistake: the first betrayal elicits cooperation instead of retaliation; the second betrayal elicits retaliation until the other party cooperates. In other words, two strikes and you are out until you are nice again. Thus, open with kindness when facing a stranger. It may be that moving into sync is more a part of our nature than is often appreciated and Tit-for-Tat stabilizes what you are inclined to do anyhow so long as there are similarities between you and whomever you meet.21 Cheating, however, can still be expected in the first and last swaps such as those with poachers, salesmen, or waitresses in a singles bar. As one cutie told me, “We girls all look alike in our uniforms in the dark and I just disappear with your change.” You also need caution with real estate developers, Internet contacts, airline terminals, and the crowd in Times Square. Cross your fingers and hold on to your wallet not only when you say “Hello” but also “Good bye.”

Raise the Stakes: Superior to Tit-for-Tat?22 I lived in the basement and Charley, a lawn and garden guy, lived two stories above me, up on the top floor. He, similar to a bird on a telephone wire, sometimes enjoyed a beer and lectured me from his balcony while I sat below on the sidewalk. Charley, for example, had a system that signaled when a woman was interested in him. He simply greeted her and counted the words with which she answered. If she used as many or more words than he had, then he pursued the conversation.

Roberts and Sherrat (1999) showed in computer simulations that a strategy of “open small and raise the stakes if matched” (RTS) invades selfish strategies and was superior to “cheater,” “give as good as you get (tit-for-tat),” “short-changer,” “occasional short-changer,” and “occasional cheat.” Raise the stakes could act as a homing device for creatures screening prospective mates and in ways that parallel the computer simulations. There are obvious links to sexual selection—that is, as in various male displays, if a little is good, more MUST be better. Infatuation causes a similar amplification. (Beck, 1988, views infatuation as a passing manic episode. He’s right!) 21 Chapter 5. Harrison Bergeron, discusses regression-to-the mean as a powerful influence on our daily behavior. We may notice extremes and judge them desirable but distrust them. Tit-for-Tat levels out differences between the fortunes of two competing individuals. It achieves not only sync but also regression to the mean! 22 This section was presented as “Raise the stakes: A new reciprocity gambit,” NY Chapter, Association for Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Conference at St. John’s Cathedral, Manhattan, November 13, 1999.

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Raise the stakes is consistent with: • The growth of obsessions for a hobby, an individual (falling in love), or a set of beliefs. • Spouse abuse in which mutual criticism, sarcasm, threats, and violence escalate. • Thought distortions such as “The sky is falling!” and amplification, either of love, dread, panic, or hatred. • Many cultural annoyances such as the tactics used by advertisers. • Research strategy, recruiting students, and submitting grant applications. • Recruiting by various religions, civic organizations, and hate groups. • Behavior seen in both hypomania and dysthymia. In the former, positive consequences elicit disproportionate optimism. Individuals with the latter expect negative information and find it regardless of the speaker’s intention. • The crowds at music concerts, revival meetings, faith healings, and special religious gatherings. • Spending time in places and with individuals who let you have your own way.

Freedom in Several Book Clubs While there is truth in the slogan that we are all alike, it is of great importance that we are all different. Rebellion springs from dissimilarity and resists influence: “Don’t tell me what to do!” As you get older, partnerships may be more difficult because heritability increases for I.Q., several personality factors, and who knows what else. Living with someone can make you similar but mostly for the short term. Self-chosen environments eventually take charge and become overt. Thus, rebels always have a cause, even if only that of rebellion, but not always for one shared by a crowd. Many of them will not enjoy Saturday Night Live or listen to rap, drink cheap beer, burp a few times, go to sleep, and get up late on Sunday. Some rebels, in contrast, mow the lawn at 8 am on Sunday, listen to conservative talk radio with the car windows open, and drink raspberry iced tea. Thus, book clubs and magazine racks draw addicts for photography, fishing, hunting, sailing, flying, riding boats, bikes, cars, or horses, driving fast or driving old, dating women, dating men, or just looking at people in better or worse condition than you are.

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Because the similarities and differences that matter for the long term are often a function more of genes and less of environments—conformity depends both on similarities and on consequences Most of us, by definition, prefer self-arranged environments to those supplied by presidents, popes, university deans, police officers, or, especially, our neighbors. We engage in petty, secret rebellions that might take the form of approach-avoidance, lies, stalling, and making excuses. There are many ways, however, to loosen your harness. First, if trapped in situations that bore you or cost too much, then erode connectivity: hide, lie, delay, give rain checks, change the subject, or get not only sick, but tearful and depressed, or enraged and aggressive. Instead of staying home for the evening because you are not yourself, the truth is that you are too much yourself! Second, a trick, seen often in humans and displayed by my cat, consists of being in sync with a separate group for each of your special interests. Max is in sync with me for food and naps but with Daisy for grooming and stalking mice. Humans find sync in Alcoholics Anonymous when each member tells a story to the chorus and promises to walk their twelve steps. Political parties, church groups, discos, dating services, or Rotary meetings also are arenas that multiply sync by controlling who comes through the door and keeping them penned together. Choosing multiple clubs, unlike choosing multiple women, is easy and costs you little. That is, you have a very large number of twins only a few steps away, and you can escape local snoops for a different neighborhood. (See Chapter 3, Emergent Networks, for how this works.) Anyone who wants to travel to New York takes a shortcut known as the Interstate or a commercial airliner. These freedoms occur within communities in the suburbs and city neighborhoods. Small time deviants usually find that urban life offers more choices than rural and, therefore, more satisfactions. Any freak tired of pizza can jump a block and order Chinese, cross-dressers who like Rush Limbaugh can surely find other crossdressers who do the same, and the nearest movie house or a Barnes or a Borders supplies trails for rabbit-minds and caffeine in two dozen mixes and three concentrations. It gets better! Connect to the Internet and no matter what your craziness, you will find a soul mate. Even a Darwinian might comfortably hide in the Muslim section of Brooklyn if he has an AM radio, a television, a cell phone, the Internet, and knows of the Starbucks on Seventh Avenue.

Chapter Three Emergent Networks: Life Organizes in a Tinker-Toy Way23 “First, there is not a single and obvious way to partition an organism into ‘organs’ that are appropriate for the causal analysis of different functions. Second, the organism is a nexus of a very large number of weakly determining forces, no one of which is dominant. Third, the separation of causes and effects becomes problematical. Finally, organic processes have a historical contingency that prevent universal explanations.” (Richard Lewontin, 2000, 75–76.

Statistical physicists discovered emergent networks, sociologists adopted them, and, once you are alerted to their existence, you will find them in parlor games, professional sports, and clusters of gossips who talk about you. Emergent networks also occur in societies of termites, dolphins, movie actors, or scientists and in the organization of one cell, in clumps of neurons, or in your obsessions, hallucinations, and demonic possessions. Thus, a news analyst refers to Iran’s “hallucinatory aggression,” a center in Amsterdam treats video game addictions, and both Elvis and Einstein still earn money. None of these bits is surprising and each shares foundations with the nightmares that once demonized French nuns. Animism is with us again but now wears a lab coat. Blame physics!

23 A shorter version of this chapter was part of Brody, J (2002) Linked: Barabási ratifies Kauffman, demotes the social gene. A review of Barabási, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus. Human Nature Review . Closely related papers were given at the Association of Politics and the Life Sciences (Brody, 2003a) and at the International Society for Human Ethology, 2006 Biennial Congress, Detroit, MI, July 31–August 3. 36

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Meet Two Kinds of Network: Random and Emergent Albert Barabási (2002) gives a fine introduction to emergent networks in a fine mix of stories about scientists. Paul Erdös and Albert Renyi analyzed random networks and began contemporary network research. (Barabási, 2002) Random networks—such as those studied by Kauffman—occur when connections between any two points are made by the toss of a coin. Or, take a collection of buttons and, for one at a time, flip a coin: heads, you attach a thread to the button; tails, you move to the next button. You turn the buttons into a random network. (See Newman, Strogatz, and Watts, 2000, and Kauffman, 1995, for phase transitions in random networks.) On the other hand, start with one button, bring it to life, and let it recruit more buttons. This odd-sounding strategy produces a nonrandom, or emergent, network. As you will see, emergent networks usually produce orderly communication patterns in which a very few nodes handle most transactions and very many nodes talk mostly to two or three of their best friends. Most wonderful of all, emergent networks usually have extraordinary stability that resists accidents. Your grandmother’s wicker basket is one example of such a network. So is what you see in your bathroom mirror, your collection of friends, or the relationships in a termite nest. When you hear “emergent,” think of small things becoming bigger as when spores and seeds become trees. Or a religion grows from a prophet. Or a major corporation develops from a mall kiosk. Think of bottom-up growth instead of top-down orders from an authority. Also think of power laws, not bell curves that you learned in psychology; path analysis, not straight lines; doodles rather than outlines; a computer mouse rather than a key-accessed directory tree; and, most importantly, the glories of animism and demonic possession!24

The Importance and Properties of Emergent Networks First, emergent networks are bottom-up organizers that take in assets, expel liabilities, and evolve as if alive! They guided your long evolution from one cell first to a cluster and then to a very large community of clusters. Such networks exerted— and still exert—more influence on you than the teeth of any damned cat! And 24 Psychologists trained their students in the power of statistics and the tricks necessary to assure random assignment of subjects to experimental conditions. The reasoning: if the groups were the same, any differences that develop can be attributed to the experimental conditions. This exercise has been difficult. It has been expensive. It also has been relatively sterile in comparison with the rich, dynamic effects waiting to be discovered in emergent networks.

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in a replay of evolutionary history, emergent networks also guided your personal development as the unique product of two gametes. Emergent networks underpin the organization of your thoughts and the societies that grow around you. Second, emergent networks are like used Volkswagens! After you buy one, you see them everywhere. Emergents networks exist in living cells, neural assemblies, and families of vocabulary words. You find them in city neighborhoods and groups of actors, scientists, business executives, dolphins, termites, and electric power grids. Expect to find them in paintings, photography, sculpture, music, theater, or literature. Expect also to find them in the essays you write and the thoughts, written or not, of your true love. Third, emergent networks can follow rules of utility and information flow. Nodes have strategic importance according to the services they provide. Indeed, you can watch the operation of an emergent network anytime that a club finds new recruits or selects between existing members for a special project. For example, one set of Rotarians organize the golf outing, a different set batons the annual Pancake Breakfast or Project Outreach. The Internet has a similar organization, one that was latent in the first cell but 600 million years passed before physicists noticed how that organization was put together and why it works so well. • Networks are often scale-free: that is, relationships between members are the same regardless of their number, nature, or size. The branching in a river duplicates that in your blood vessels or the air passages in your lungs. The patterns found in human vocabulary resemble those in electrical power grids or those in living cells. (Barabási, 2002; Jeong et al, 2000; Solé and Montoya, 2001) • Connectivity is close: network membership can vary from three to millions but the number of steps from any one individual to any other individual remains small. (Watts and Strogatz, 1998; Barabási, 2002) Donne’s Meditation XVII, “No man is an island, entire of itself …” captures close connectivity. • A cluster (whether neurons or row houses!) allows detailed monitoring and sharpening within it. Each cluster in a network retains substantial autonomy but, like telephone operators in small towns, also has an ear tuned to whatever might be happening next door, a few blocks away, or across the country. (Watts and Strogatz, 1998) • Emergent networks can handle tremendous volumes of information but resist jamming. (Toroczkai and Bassler, 2004) Hamilton (1971) accounted for clustering in herds as an outcome of genetic interests and safety from predation: stragglers get picked off. Information flow, more so than genes, also accounts

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for herds and for the relationships within them. Genes might stay in the game because they respect information flow.) • Emergent networks are bottom-up organizations in which smaller things become larger things by recruiting other small things. (Barabási, 2002) And similar to theories by the evolutionist, Ernst Mayr, the first node in a new territory becomes part of the environment for later arrivals. (Mayr, 1976) This “founder effect” grows when partners choose each other on the basis of self compatibility and makes their children recognizable as kin. It may also attract one kind of predator rather than another: that is, rabbits that make lots of rabbits also make more cats. • Emergent networks differ from tree networks that you used to find on your computer. Trees in a computer directory require that you to move up and down trunks and retrace paths. Going out on a branch usually means using that same branch to get back to the trunk. Emergent networks, in contrast, have shortcuts so that information, like Tarzan, moves directly from one branch or tree to the next.25 Like Tarzan with a vine, a computer mouse in a click avoids lots of branches and trunks. • Tree networks gave Linnaeus a model for the relationships between species. Network models, however, account for circular relationships between animal kingdoms and between the families and species within them. There can be enormous advantages to lateral swaps of information as is demonstrated by bacteria and by any child who, in a game of Fish, says, “Give me all your threes.” • Emergent networks hook up several of Kuramoto’s clusters: it is as if the members of a small neighborhood develop their own rhythm but sometimes help the guys in the next block who have a slightly different rhythm. Your heart rate, respiration, urine flow, and making lumps of this morning’s oatmeal—all usually proceed with no direction from your brain unless it declares an emergency. Small worlds also allow a man who is in sync with one woman for sex to be in sync with a second one for sharing great ideas.

25 The computer became more “user friendly” when it allowed you to move from one file directly to another without typing lines of DOS commands. English teachers who require outlines that resemble trees work against the nature of their students. Activities cycle in emergent networks; feedback from endings modify beginnings. Except for the restrictions of time and opportunity, a composition should never end. Fortunately, Internet links allow jumps and thought no longer follows a tree trunk!

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The Parts of Emergent Networks: Nodes, Hubs, and Links Buying a motorcycle is like marrying a woman with a new religion: a lot of things show up that you didn’t expect.

Networks contain nodes that can be an individual, a business, a web page, or an amino acid. Nodes can also be a social function such as reproduction, food gathering, or guarding a perimeter. (Fewell, 2003) Nodes resemble Tinker Toy spools but ones whose size changes with the number of connections going into and away from it. Nodes with many connections are known as hubs. Hubs and shortcuts between them allow for the rapid collection and distribution of information between any two nodes even when the network becomes quite large. Links, like the sticks in a box of Tinker Toys, connect the nodes and consist of influences such as telephone lines, letters, Internet addresses, axons, or swaps of substrates and products within a cell. In emergent networks, the relationship between the number of nodes and the number of links for each of them often fits a power law. That is, a handful of nodes have lots of connections but many, many more nodes have only one or two. In random networks, a bell-curve usually describes the relationship between the number of nodes and the number of their connections: there is an average number and a symmetrical scatter around that average but random networks have very few scores that are extremely large or small and the tails on either end of a bellcurve taper to zero. The tails of an emergent network avoid zero frequencies as oil avoids water. Both boredom and disasters, either on Wall Street on in Chicago winters, will be more frequent than bell-curves lead you to expect.

Stages in Network Organization Emergent networks are, like organisms, pragmatists that use whatever happens to work and in the order of its effectiveness. Such networks will not have identical structures regardless of assets nor, if they have identical assets, will they necessarily be arranged in the same way. Networks will reveal their history and partnerships inside of those environments once we know how to read them. Variation in networks will also imitate variation within species: that is, if variability reflects an absence of selective pressure, then simplicity might either reveal youth or signal what has been important in the past. Despite so much variation in networks, they appear to have developmental phases that apply to the communities in an anthill, the ecology of a swamp or tourist resort, the mind of a teenager in rut, or a mix of economists in a crowd of drug-dealers.

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First Arrivals In emergent networks, as in evolutionary biology and sociology, the first arrival influences whatever arrives second in the neighborhood. (Mayr, 1963; Barabási, 2002; (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect. 11/05/2007) In nature, the “founder effect” may be important on islands, after disasters, and when a large population loses most of its members and, as in a movie about a colony on a new planet, only a few parents sire future generations. In Barabási’s model, the first arrival recruits the second. The second arrival, thus, moves into an environment that resembles that of the first but one possibly that it changed. Given sufficient resources for both participants, Kuramoto and good sense predict that Number Two should have a better chance if it copies Number One. An identity exists between what Hamilton described for inclusive fitness and the networks people describe for emergent systems: two sets of formulae must eventually become one. That is, similar entities cluster, joined by mutual benefits (Hamilton 1963, 1964; Barabási, 2002; Buchanan, 2002; Strogatz, 2003) Bees group with similar bees, elephants with similar elephants, and a business-owner often hires relatives. Break up similarity and the network frays as Durkheim (1897) and, very recently, Putnam (www.johnleo.com/2007/06/26/bowling-with-our-own) found for human communities. (See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie.) Whether in sensory systems or neighborhoods, the similarity between participants favors close reciprocal monitoring and mutual error correction. More simply, members watch each other, amplify their similarity, suppress differences, and increase attention to small details. The entire cluster responds as if one organism and, no different from a paramecium, takes in an array of data and makes a communal decision to go forward or back.26

Fitness (Scale-Free) Networks If one cluster recruits partners and sets the pace for them, the clusters tend to form a scale-free network. “Scale-free,” again, means that identical relationships exist between the participants regardless of their physical nature. Jonathan Swift’s observation that fleas have smaller fleas gives a sense of scale-free networks. Scale-free networks can make arenas for fitness contests between their occupants. That is, That is, the first arrival screens and modifies recruits but not all recruits are equal: a later but more competitive arrival can take over the network 26 Mutual stabilization resembles the behavior of tuned oscillators in which changes in one partner are corrected by adjustments in the second (Strogatz, 1993). One result is that most of us are less crazy when strangers are in the room. See McGuire and Troisi, 1998, 76.

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even if it were not first. Barabási (2002) applies “fitness quotient” to nodes and “fitness connectivity quotient” to the speed with which a new one finds partners.27 Compact disks, for example, displaced vinyl recordings but were, in turn, displaced by mpeg files and downloads: getting one piece of music no longer requires that you must get a dozen other songs that you don’t like or that you pay for any of them. Early small differences between scale-free networks, and components within them, tend to multiply as the network collects assets or to throws off invaders. Eventually, one hub influences and is influenced by massive numbers of nodes. At the same time, because of shortcuts between nodes in different clusters, there is little effect on the number of steps needed to get from any one member to any other. (Watts and Strogatz, 1998) Thus, a network can have massive numbers of members but retain a short path length between them. (Watts and Strogatz, 1998) The sequence from Interstates to highways to streets to alleys captures what is seen in emergent networks For example, forty-three species were mapped for the average number of links between chemicals in their cells. Regardless of species size, the number was approximately three: a few biochemicals participated in the majority of the reactions but lots participated in only one or two. (Jeong et al, 2000; Albert and Barabási, 2001; Barabási, 2002) Species in large ecosystems are generally connected by two links on food chains, about six links separate any two Americans, four to six connect most scientists, and nineteen will take you, if you know where you are going, from any web page to any one of a billion others.

Winner-Take-All Networks Sometimes one hub maintains its percentage of influence in a network regardless of competition from new arrivals: the dominant hub cannot be displaced by newcomers. Barabási (2002) compares these hubs to astronomy’s “black holes” that take in everything around them, and applies the metaphor to Microsoft’s dominance of operating systems for personal computers. You can also compare them to tribal chiefs or to dictators in modern societies united by mass communications. Winner-take-all has been widely noted by economists. (Levitt and Dubner, 2005; Gladwell, 2000; Frank and Cook, 1995) Singers of popular music, movie actors, and even cocaine distributors face winner-take-all competitions: thousands contend but only a few achieve success. Twenty-two-year-old Texan Ben Spies, 27 Barabási, thus, gives “fitness,” long a controversial term in biology, a politically neutral meaning although the new edition may be as difficult to measure as the old one. (Paul, 1992; Dawkins 1982)

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for example, a champion motorcyclist who rides for Suzuki, faces a very large pack of rivals who compete for several seasons and drop the contest. (He may be more successful because his main challenger has been Aussie Matt Mladin, who also rides for Suzuki and held the first position for six consecutive seasons before Spies. Each of these guys probably responds to the other more powerfully than to the cash prizes for being first! Spies won again this year, by one point earned by a come-from-behind finish, and that one point will make the kid a lot of money!) On the country and western top-forty, the most turnover in performers appears to be in the bottom twenty positions, while a song by Tim McGraw, George Strait, or Toby Keith will often linger in the top ten. Levitt and Dubner (2005) report a similar effect for your chances to be a successful drug dealer: all by a very few not only sell coke but also have Mcjobs and live with their mothers.

Pythagoras Redux: Surprises in Emergent Networks28 Helmet Effects: Small Worlds Can Help or Hurt You The radio host announced: “We have royalty on the line! How are things in Peabody?” A crackling voice responded, “It’s Friday, Friday!” Gina Rosa was 88, her son, 67, and today was his birthday. Her tea kettle whistled in the background. She calls the evening and late night hosts nearly every Friday night and is known to anyone in thirty states who listens to that station. Although she might have no immediate awareness of her millions of listeners, her impact is the same as if she lives just next door and will sit with me later for morning tea.

This intimacy is called a “small world” (Watts and Strogatz, 1998) and radio or television hosts invoke it when they say to anxious callers, “It’s just you and me.” Synchrony and focus develop when host and caller ignore unknown numbers of eavesdroppers. The entire truth is that it is “just you and me and the eastern United States.” Each listener also imagines a small world relationship with the host and with the caller, at least until the listener tries to make his own call to the station! (Even in these times of Internet connectivity, few of you worry that strangers with indirect, unspoken connections may influence what you do.)

28 Adapted from Brody, J.F. (2006) Emergent Networks: Our Original Evolutionary Environment. (32 pages, 65 refs) Poster presentation, International Society for Human Ethology, Detroit, July 30-August 3.

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Small world applies to your focus on a limited circle of friends and tasks while you, or one of your friends maintain indirect connections that keep you in sync with other societies, sometimes at great distances. Such things are possible because a cluster of five friends may connect to five other clusters and each of those five, and so on forever. Watts and Strogatz (1998) found that adding a few shortcuts between members in different clusters greatly reduced the number of steps required for access between any two members even if in different clusters. For example, if a New Yorker develops one contact in Tokyo, he also gains second, third, and fourth degree contacts with other people in Tokyo.29 And information from another cluster to your barstool, telephone, or computer can be fast, abundant, and detailed.30 Here are several examples of small worlds:31 • I rode my motorcycle south towards Washington, D.C. A Yamaha passed me, its rider in a helmet, T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. “SQUID” is sometimes applied to such riders: “stupidly quick, under-dressed, imminently dead.” I wore a padded jacket, leather gloves, helmet, riding boots, padded cordura jeans, and leather chaps. The sensations, however, were probably quite similar for each of us: our helmet made a calm spot like that a pilot finds in the eye of a hurricane. Padding and leather protect a rider who slides on asphalt but do 29 Granovetter (1973) is often credited for finding that job leads come not through friends but through friends of friends and pointing out the advantages of indirect, “weak” connections (Strogatz, 2003;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Granovetter, 6/2/07). One impact: you might, but rarely do, wonder about the connections and skills of everyone you pass in real life and the webs they occupy. 30 I encountered small world effects when I walked away from the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit and got lost. Alcoholics and schizophrenics approached me but no volunteers said, “You seem lost, can I help?” And I thought to ask, but did not, “I’m Dr. Brody, do you know where I belong?”! My problem could have been serious: The thermometer said 95 degrees and I, a by-pass recipient, had neither water nor a hat but knew that I was all right so long as I could make stupid jokes. I approached younger informants: none of them had heard of Wayne State University although we were within a few blocks of the campus. One of their supervisors couldn’t help and exclaimed with a wave of her hand, “Don’t ask China neither, she don’t know nuthin.’” I decided to find a hub! When I approached mature people behind cash registers, the first two gave me the same directions back to the campus that a lady cop on a bike gave me. Only an isolate would have left his map in the hotel room and used Barabási to get back home! 31 A prior version of the next paragraphs were appeared on May 5, 2007, at www.behavior.net/bolforums/evolutionary with the title “Small Worlds Inside Helmets“

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nothing for the blunt impact from a VW or Peterbilt. Helmeted or not, either of us was happy although imminently dead! • I passed a bicycle rider in DC traffic: she wore a foam headpiece, T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. Despite her head protection, she may experience whiplash and never again have all of her self. She could also lose skin or break an ankle, femur, hip, back, jaw, nose, or neck. • Terry Anderson, a minister, talk show host, and a rally speaker in Washington, D.C., opened with “White people are stupid” and five hundred of us cheered him! He next summarized the “illegals” mess, pointed across Lafayette Square, and screamed: “The man responsible is right there, third window from the right. His fence works, why can’t we have one?” George was, however, soundproofed in his helmet—a ring of guards, carefully chosen aides, reinforced glass, air conditioner noise, cement walls, and, of course, the steel fence. Traffic was no longer permitted on his block of Pennsylvania Avenue and the cobblestones were too few for barricades and too heavy to throw. • It might be argued that no bee in a swarm needs a helmet: his small world consists of a bee to the front, back, left, and right. He matches pace and moves neither too near nor too far from another bee. He obeys Craig Reynold’s rules for ‘boids”: move to the center, move slightly faster than your neighbors, and don’t hit another ‘boid. (See Ball, 2004, 124) Schools of fish and bikers in traffic do the same thing, so do herds of lemmings and politicians. It is only near the perimeter where a different set of facts intrudes and where you meet chaos and death.

Bose-Einstein: When Shops Congeal into Wal-Mart, Thoughts into Obsessions, Psychiatry into Managed-Care, and Nations into Swarms32 “We find that, under natural physiological limitations, an optimal decisionmaking system can involve ‘selfish’ agents that are in conflict with one another,

32 “A Bose-Einstein condensate is a phase of matter formed by bosons cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero (0 Kelvin or-273.15 degrees Celsius). Under such supercooled conditions, a large fraction of the atoms collapse into the lowest quantum state at which point quantum effects become apparent on a macroscopic scale … This state of matter was first predicted as a consequence of quantum mechanics by Albert Einstein, building upon the work of Satyendra Nath Bose in 1925.”// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate

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rebellion even though the system is designed for a single purpose.” Livnat and Pippenger, 2006. “Organisms are extremely internally heterogeneous. Their states and motions are consequences of many intersecting causal pathways, and it is unusual that normal variation in any one of these pathways has a strong effect on the outcome. To be ill is precisely to be dominated by a single causal chain. To be obsessed by an idée fixe which motivates all one’s actions, or to be convinced that all behavior on the part of others, without distinction, is hostile, is a form of mental illness … Indeed, we may define ‘normality’ as the condition in which no single pathway controls the organism.” Lewontin, 2000, 93–94.

Measures of evolution relate changes in the variation of physical resources to the variation in the traits of a species. The survival-relevance of a trait is suggested by how similar it is between different members of the same species. For environments and for organisms, necessities result in characteristics that look and act alike. Such is orthodox Darwinism but its principles need not be restricted to entities surrounded by skin. (Edelman, 1987, 2003; Calvin, 1994, Sporns et al, 1989; Sporns and Tononi, 1994; Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005. See also Hayek, 1944/1994; Sowell 2002; Goldberg, 2007) Think of a living mind as an ecosystem with competing organisms, called ideas and habits. Ideas, like species, vary from each other not only in their content but also their appetites and accomplishments. Further, any one idea makes different demands at different times of day for internal resources (temperature, water, salt, sugar, hormones, neurotransmitters) and for external ones (time, people, and money). Where there is variation and competition, Darwinian selection appears to be inevitable: that is, one idea gains influence at the expense of other ideas. A hobby, job, sport, or relationship suppresses competing expenditures of internal and external assets. Sync, and, sometimes, raise-the-stakes, grow between a hunger and the materials that satisfy it. Imagine also that developmental failures lead to more impulsiveness, less concern for other individuals, a lessened sense of the future, a failure to inhibit a particular class of habits, and a failure for habits to move into sync with competing events, internal or external. Prenatal trauma, neurotoxins, restricted maternal investment, head injury, and high-stress post-natal environments and perhaps a shorter serotonin transporter gene (Lesch, 2003; Viding and Frith, 2006; Baldessarini and Hennen, 2004) mean that there will be fewer players on the field and more ratcheted, all-or-none, relationships between them. As a result, the thoughts and behaviors that exploit whatever resources remain will become stronger, acquire dominance, and diversify their influence. Weakened and dying

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competitors either mimic the winner, feed from them, hide, or roll over—paws up, mouth open, and ready for baking. When resources plummet, organizations, whether in ethology, population genetics, or economics, collapse into simpler ones just as if everyone were put into a prison where everyone eats with a spoon that he carries with him at all times. (Levi, 1958, 1986). After a large meteor strikes, a volcano erupts, or there is a burst of radiation, many evolutionary clocks reset towards zero, sometimes mediated by molecular chaperones, known as heat shock proteins. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Meteor_impact, 8/19/07; Queitsch, Sangster, and Lindquist, 2002; Rutherford and Lindquist, 1998) Thoughts and habits sometimes do what we see in heat shock proteins! That is, changes induced by stress in the brain can be transient or permanent depending on the timing, intensity, and duration of the stress. Limited resources should bias mental networks toward simplification, particularly after injury, fevers, depression, poisoning, extreme thirst or heat, oxygen deprivation, cold, hunger, or sleep loss. You also find immaturity, heightened emotionality, all-or-none judgments, over-generalization, and the selective retention of some rules and memories but not others. And the ones that you keep are more jagged versions of those you had before. Without the restraint of competing tasks, both stereotypic conduct and thoughts become more likely. Delusions get tougher as competing ideas get weaker. In a Bose gas (Bose-Einstein condensate), as temperature approaches absolute zero, separate bosons merge and act as if one. There are five events—some of them both frightening and rampant—that resemble a Bose gas. • 1) Ginestra Bianconi and Albert Barabási (Bianconi and Barabási, 2000a; Bianconi and Barabási, 2000b; Bianconi, 2002. See also Barabási, 2002) converted networked hubs and links into concepts from quantum physics. She equated the fitness of nodes to the energy stages in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Specifically, the more connections to a node, the lower its energy level! Isolated nodes, perhaps comparable to outer electron shells, had higher. The inverse relationship between hub size and energy level might give a fitness advantage to larger hubs. Bose gases, grand theories, and Wal-Mart follow similar rules and cold thoughts, like cold molecules and cold sheep, clump into one mass! • 2) Evolutionary change arises from a) gene duplication with modification, b) the partial inhibition of existing developmental cascades, c) existing developmental paths find new goals, and d) synchronization can change between parallel developmental programs. (Raff, 1996) A new trait that finds a use is more likely than an idle one to return in the next generation.

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Changes in the outcomes are usually restrained by developmental compartments but not always to the same degree. One compartment can follow an evolutionary path somewhat separate from that of other compartments (Carroll, Grenier, and Weatherbee, 2001; Carroll 2004, Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005. See also Rebellion, Chapter 4, “Hox and the Mall Chicks.”) In contrast, environmental stress—heat, poisons, or radiation—can release more primitive features and in bigger jumps. A restorative protein, Hsp 90, usually repairs damage to genetic material but Hsp90, sometimes called a “capacitor for evolutionary change,” will sometimes stabilize the damage. The mutation is then transmitted to the offspring of the stressed organism, thereby resurrecting the primitive phenotype. (Queitsch, Sangster, and Lindquist, 2002; Rutherford and Lindquist, 1998) • 3) Even mild head injuries can lead to depression (Dubovsky, 2002) and include not only problems in moods but also in concentration and planning. (Clark, Iversen, and Goodwin, 2002; Cavanagh et al, 2002; Ferrier and Thompson, 2002; Robinson and Jorge, 2002) Obsessions, delusions, and stereotyped, repetitive thoughts and action also follow infections. (Torrey, 2002; Ewald, 2000) So can psychopathology such as obsessive compulsive disorder, Tourettes Syndrome, panic disorder, eating disorders, hypochondria, delusions, personality disorders, false memories, or, sometimes less destructively, recovery from anesthesia, hypnotic states, love, religious ecstasy, and scientific quests. • 4) Pennington (1991) observed that executive functions—behaviors that help us to manage other behaviors—evolved most recently and, therefore, require the integrity of underlying systems. Injury makes rigidity and impulsiveness more likely along with their frequent companions … obsessions, compulsions, and infatuations.33 • 5) Networks are sensitive to strategic attacks but not to random ones; likewise, marketing targets hubs that will, in turn, recruit the small-timers. (Watts and Strogatz, 1998; Barabási, 2002) Executive functions manage the contributions of experience, instincts and emotions and, as hubs, might resist erasure but will be sensitive to distortions relayed from small-time players. A clever obsession gains takes hold and markets itself as if it were distributed by a pharmaceutical company. 33 Suitbert Ertel (1981) rated “dogmatism” in Hitler’s speeches and in Nietzsche’s compositions. Hitler’s vocal patterns signaled future attacks; Nietzsche’s essays changed in relation to his bouts of cerebral meningitic syphilis and with outcomes similar to what Ertel observed in Hitler’s speeches.

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The Promise When Networks Evolve Peter Csermely’s recent book (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex System from Proteins to Social Networks, came to my attention in mid-December 2007. He’s originally a chemist who worked from physics to problems in psychology and sociology; I started in clinical work and reached to physics for an understanding of how selection results in personal will. We arrived at same destination although what I call individualism he, Gerhart, or Kirschner might call a weak link! Weak links—somewhat like bungee cords—provide resilience and adaptability in complex networks. (Kirschner & Gerhart, 1998, 2005; Csermely, 2006) That is, weak links form new partnerships that only react some of the time or may react in more than one way. One advantage is that nodes that sometimes respond and sometimes do not can keep shock waves from spreading through the surrounding network. In a similar manner, “loners” sometimes buffer the relationships between cheaters and cooperators, and personal will may serve the same functions as a weak link. Self-interest, often seen as disruptive, can make a team more adaptable! A graph on page 75 of Weak Links illustrates relationships like those described by Barabási and Bianconi (2000) for changes in network conformation in response to energy availability. It also reminded me of what I glimpsed several years ago in Barabási’s work and applied to human psychopathology. (Brody, 2003, 2006, 2008) This vision also captures the evolution of cultures, neighborhoods, motives, and memories, and even to some forms of madness. (This is one heck of a graph and I adapted parts of it for Rebellion’s cover!) The vertical scale is called “complexity” as reflected by the number of players in a network and the connections between them. The horizontal scale reflects changes in stress and resources: stress increases as you move to the right, resources diminish. The data points consist of four networks that make an arc that starts low, peaks, and declines as resources diminish. The bottom left point is a random network; the second is a scale-free network that forms when participants join not by chance but for reasons for similarity and mutual influence. The third is a star pattern for winner-take-all and the fourth point, bottom right, is a disconnected scatter of the original components that break apart and either become independent or go through salvage and incorporation into new organizations. The oscillations between scale-free and winner-take-all, once understood, are to be respected, admired, and often left to run their course! Entire cultures can show these effects when they oscillate between bottom-up conservatism (scale-free) or top-down collectivism (winner-take-all) and may demonstrate these oscillations as resources flow either from bottom-up or top down or back again!

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(Hayek, 1994; Sowell, 2002; Goldberg, 2007). Lewontin’s observation that obsessions are a form of mental illness applies to societies as much as to individuals. Call them “weak links,” (Kirschner & Gerhart, 1998; Csermely, 2006); “loners” (Zhong et al, 2005), or “volunteers” (Hauert et al, 2002): political independents, however unpopular, may both stabilize groups of cooperators and increase the adaptability of their society. and Edmund Burke sensed these things in the 1790s, physics now offers some foundations for those beliefs. Increase cross-talk too much, however, and networks freeze as if in an anxiety state. Reduce it too much and behavior ratchets into preoccupation, hallucinations, and impulse disorders. (Brody, 2002; 2004, 2005) Mismatch worsens because, in Lewontin’s concepts, the organization no longer takes small steps to adjust to small changes in its environments. It forgets Einstein’s rule and expects different results from one set of behaviors. I like Barabási’s and Csermely’s graphs. So would Toynbee! So would Smith, Burke, and Hayek! Barabasi and Csermely raise the possibility that network configuration responds to resources and to challenges. Individualism and conformity will vary with the direction that resources move—in the former case, from nodes to hubs and in the latter, from hubs to nodes. The adaptability of an organization may be reflected less in the proportion of individuals in hubs or in nodes but in the turnover of such individuals. After all, changes in variation was relevant for evolutionary theory and could be interpreted in numbers and words by such as R. A. Fisher and Alfred Lotka. Similar computations may eventually help us to measure the adaptability of societies. The movement of individuals and clusters between the “top” of a society and its bottom could be a more sensitive index than absolute numbers of players and the magnitude of their assets.

Caged with a Demon34 Archy-the-cockroach described a moth that incinerated itself on a cigar lighter: “… i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself.” (Marquis, 1973, 108) I understand that moth and so does every actor, writer, painter, poet, playwright, and lover! So should you!

Living systems can be defined by not by protein, carbon, or skin but by (1) replication and (2) the completion of work cycles. (Kauffman, 2000) Adjunctive tools detect variations in the energy levels of surrounding elements and their associated behaviors extract energy from those differences. According to Kauffman, organizations that find resources also find self-interest: and self interest leads to competi34 This and the following sections were adapted from Brody (2004; 2005).

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tions for limited resources. Kauffman’s idea should apply to enduring patterns of CNS activity just as much as it does to bacteria, flies, mice, or Meg Ryan. Kauffman’s ideas are unsettling because mental organizations may pursue self interests that override the welfare of their carrier. You are not surprised when organisms with separate skins feed off of you and have offspring that do likewise, but it’s difficult to accept betrayal from inside of your head. Passion steals promises and money before you can spend them on whomever you pick up for the dance and take home later. Your love for Meg cares not at all about your responsibilities to Jane. Therapists nod their head, look over their glasses, lower their voice, and call you addicted, obsessed, borderline, or manic when mutinous pleasures take you over. Theologians find you possessed when thoughts, either from devils or about them, dominate your mind and you tell their stories and pass them after midnight to other susceptible minds that listen to Coast to Coast. Clergy or counselors expect you to dampen your zeal, save your marriage, and protect your children’s interests. By wearing one hair-shirt or another, you are to stay out of mischief. Sanity, however, can be so damn boring! Most of us prefer possession to medicine and want help on terms that protect our obsession. Even a misery defends itself when you expect your healer to scratch its ears! One irony: intense quests can be a more clever, stubborn, and pervasive confinement than a bad marriage! You are trapped and betrayed by what you love and “cure” sometimes requires a type of murder. A second irony: the thought that you are inhabited by a demon may be a useful one. Ideas, seeded by genetic propensities and circumstances, arrange your other thoughts and their artifacts in ways that make you, their carrier, as an environment to be harvested. Paranoid individuals, for example, not only look for scrutiny but also produce it, obsessive-compulsives scan for dirt and find it, and manic-depressives find reasons to be elated or discouraged. Many normal souls also seek compatible delusions when they ask a prospective mate, “What do you like to do?” or “How do you arrange your videotapes?” Worse! Obsessions can lead to innovation, wealth, and greatness such that obsessive people find obsessed partners (Maes et al, 1998) and possibly make children more obsessed than either parent. Driven individuals are up late and talk about, with, or to their quests; they also pace laboratory halls at midnight, sometimes with a roll of data in one pocket and a pint of scotch in another. For fun or fear, you feed your demons.

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Mental organizations, thus, acquire the “ultimate adaptation” (Wilson, 1975) and modify their environments but in ways that such environments, once modified, further nourish their greedy occupant. A bacterium moving to a richer glucose concentration changes its world. So does my girl, Meg, when she dictates the terms of her next movie. And so does a delusion that runs its carrier’s life. The conscious impact of these outcomes can be like that of an invader that takes over the mind of its host, commandeers resources, and resists suppression or dispersal while it grows and jumps from its original carrier to a second one.35 • A radio host once referred to an “ear worm” when he couldn’t get a melody out of his head. (I usually play a second song and displace the first.) Ear worms may reflect small rebellions in our fragile union: they also hint of their rapacious siblings, hallucinations. According to Wikipedia, in a survey of more than 13,000 people, almost thirty-nine percent reported hallucinations, twenty-seven percent in the daytime and predominantly by people who were not sick, drunk, or drugged. Smell and taste were most common! (Ohayon, 2000. See also Sagan, 1995, in regard to hallucinations and to space aliens; Mackay, 1841, in regard to episodes of mass hysteria in European history.) • A narrow preoccupation can enlarge its scope. Tony’s conviction that his wife had sex with their neighbor grew to include several neighbors, his brother, and his physician. It also reached across ever greater intervals into Tony’s past. Such a preoccupation could expand from its concerns about sexual infidelity to your money being taken, your children hating you, or your wife’s poisoning you. You might eventually sleep in a flame-retardant suit after your spouse noticed your casual smile to a stranger! • Delusions and moods can flare, subside, idle for long periods of time, then kindle to take over your mind once more. Delusions and mood changes can show increased resistance to medication and may become more frequent with time. • Fads, delusions, and obsessions appear to jump from one mind to another. That is, you choose friends and lovers on the basis of their similarity to you, not only in values and interests (Buss, 2003) but also in psychopathology. (Maes et al, 35 Dawkins (1976) offered a similar model for “memes,” units of cultural inheritance, but without reaching to physics. Dawkins also focused on the growth, stasis, and erosion of memes in cultures rather than in a single mind. Dawkins reversed selection’s arrow. That is, organisms choose and modify their settings, including their thoughts. Elements in environments compete with each other for retention by their occupants. See Turner, 2000; Brody, 1999; Brody, Turner, and Bloom, 2001.

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1998) There are genetic contributions to all of these factors (Eaves, Martin, and Heath, 1990; Martin, et al, 1986) and according to Rushton (2005), the greater the heritability of a trait, the greater its influence on your choices of friends and mates. Eye contact, laughter, what you wear and where you—all telegraph your openness to particular ideas. Goths, metals, jocks, and preps wear uniforms. Large public secondary schools make it easier for quirky youngsters to find partners with matching quirks; for those of you in fly-over-country, the Internet supplies an international list of prospective soul mates. • Delusions, like infections, reproduce best if they imitate a successful bacterium and spread before the symptoms are obvious. (Ewald, 1994; Breznitz, 2001) They can travel to your children if the infection is still tiny and you reproduce when young. After all, too much deviance in a rutting adolescent scares away mates and allies. With time, those same quirks ripen within marriages, parenting, and careers. Small wonder that teenagers swear to “never act like my parents,” the middle-aged angrily deny these similarities in marital spats but admit to them in quiet moments with a therapist, but when older, both acknowledge the resemblance and take pride in it. These ideas are part of your common sense and also part of cognitive therapy, reorganized somewhat recently by Aaron Beck and his students, and an important tool in clinical interventions for anxiety, depression, and, for that matter, most human complaints. (Beck, 1976) That is, your thoughts about a problem come into sync with the problem itself. The two amplify each other because they share similarity and influence. Managing your thoughts and breaking sync with the problem should give you leverage for managing the problem itself. Christ and Nietzsche had similar ideas! If you lust for your neighbor’s wife, you have already possessed her. Jesus also handled Satan by moving him out of sight. The philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), didn’t believe in Jesus but anticipated Beck by nearly a century. “Self control, says Nietzsche, consists merely of combating a given desire with a stronger one. In general there are but six ways in which a given craving may be overcome. First, we may avoid opportunities for its gratification and so, by a long disuse, weaken and destroy it. Secondly, we may regulate its gratification and by thus encompassing its flux and reflux within fixed limits, gain intervals during which it is faint. Thirdly, we may occasionally give ourselves over to it and so wear it out by excess—provided we do not act like the rider who lets a runaway horse gallop itself to death and, in so doing, breaks his own neck, which unluckily is the rule in this method. Fourthly, by an intellectual trick, we may associate gratification with an unpleasant idea as we have associated sexual gratification, for

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example, with indecency. Fifthly, we may find a substitute in some other craving that is measurably less dangerous. Sixthly, we may find safety in a general war upon all cravings, good or bad alike, after the manner of the ascetic, who, in seeking to destroy his sensuality, at the same time destroys his physical strength, his reason, and not infrequently, his life.” Mencken, 1908/2006, 161.

Our Constant Companion: Animism “Zone Alarm needs to check with the Internet …”

Zone Alarm is computer software that detects viruses and spyware, computer commands that mimic life. Zone Alarm, however, is in an arms race against the people who write viruses and in an odd expression of sync, each party needs the other. Further, the “viruses” are computer codes that have some properties of life and my favorite antidote, Zone Alarm, uses animism when signaling me. (It also takes advantage of average folks who are more likely to grant a favor if the recipient shows beneficence and mentions a need rather than an arbitrary demand.) Although scientists dislike animism, it is an old habit in human stories. We attribute life to seas, trees, winds, and fires; growth and intricate movement through an environment often suggest life and purpose. Brownian movement in water reflects molecular collisions but was been attributed to a life force. You still tend to make the animistic judgments in your casual moments, whether talking to your computer, automobile, or chainsaw, although Newtonian science tried to substitute mathematics, mechanics, measurement, and reductionism for mythology. Animism returns now as scientists tell stories about emergent systems that adjust to and arrange their environments, grow, travel, reproduce, and show self interest. I surrender to animism every day when I practice psychology or when I gossip at noon in a small town cafe. I can lay a yardstick up against a small part of my world, but clouds of probabilities and mutually contingent events seem to devil me everywhere. It’s simpler to blame fate than to trace the paths that led to a particular outcome. When emergent networks take on living properties, we might as well use the same concepts that we apply to moving things that have skin. It may be that science is ready to cross again, but in the opposite direction and with greater comfort, the frontiers between the living and non living and to consider organizations that have some of both qualities. If I can have motives, so can my cat, so can my obsessions, so can the grove of trees on my side lot. Some of us are more inventive when we take our adversaries personally. Considering delusions to live and to express self-interest should help empathy

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with a client’s experiences and creative redirection or weakening of unwelcome companions. We can reify clusters of symptoms and talk with our client as if a separate living being rides within him. Our clients share this viewpoint when they talk about “having a good week” instead of “making a good week happen.” Our client’s instinct is that “I’m OK but something else moved in.” Teachers and parents exclaim about a student, “I just don’t know what came over him.” Addicts and their counselors argue in unison the impossibility of “kicking the habit all by yourself.” In contrast to science, the traditional professions of the law, education, and theology never abandoned the idea of invaders for human minds. Lawyers debate whether their client had the capacity to exert self control. And if not, then therapy—sometimes a form of exorcism—is indicated instead of punishment. In a parallel world, some religions accept the theory of evolution but retain the concept of free will: theologians make their followers eligible for punishment or forgiveness in the same ways that lawyers do. Animism, carefully used, might pay off because (1) we and our clients understand the sense of it, and (2) animism is a common sense way to think of dynamic networks. We might agree with clients who have these beliefs, encourage them to distinguish between what they want to do and what their visitor wants, and to treat a bad habit in the same ways they get rid of visits from relatives: boredom, ridicule, neglect, scheduling other company, and starvation.

2nd Quarter: PatternMakers—Brains Are Made to Read A child collects not random objects but similar ones and makes them into one arrangement. An old man with glasses scribbles on a stack of Post-Its at 3 am and later turns them into one arrangement. With a different side of the brain, mothers, teachers, and scientists regularly tell familiar stories and a copyeditor scans manuscripts for proper use of the em dash. “To produce something both novel and meaningful one must have a period of preparation. This involves acquiring a large fund of information. Next comes a period of incubation during which time the information is rearranged, typically while one is unaware of the process. Then follows illumination. Almost everyone is familiar with the cartoonist’s use of a lightbulb to symbolize the instant illumination of an idea. There is then necessary a phase of deliberate reorganization and refinement, readily describable by the creator, to test and refine the final product.” Joseph Bogen (2000, 30)

My latest preoccupation had been Arthur Wigan’s conviction that two personalities live inside one head, one in the left cortex and a different one in the right. Wigan (1944) anticipated by more than a century very similar thoughts from Joseph Bogen, Peter Vogel, Roger Sperry, and Michael Gazzaniga—four near-geniuses and not one of them mad!36 Their gist was: 1) your two minds often get along with but sometimes contradict each other, 2) your right is not heard but inferred when you manage math, geometry, music, and the visual arts, 3) your left arranges language for you and generates new combinations of words. Your left also explains to you, and helps you explain to others, what you already accomplished. It doesn’t lead your conduct but follows along behind by 300 milliseconds. Similarity and influence achieve adaptive outcomes but injure either partner and the remaining one becomes noticeably erratic even in its specialties. (Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell, 1991; Gazzaniga 1998) 36 Sections posted earlier on Behavior onLine, the Evolutionary Psychology Forum.

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Of course, grand, simplifying theories light me up and the dual personality metaphor tugged at my leash until recently when a different animal took over. That is, if you can be said to have dual minds, they handle different phases of your experience. Elkhonon Goldberg and his associates described your right half as an architect that assembles regularity from novelty, your left is an engineer that applies solutions that were derived last week. (Goldberg, 2001) Goldberg’s ideas also line up with what you already know of Kaufmann’s on chaos and order and with important concepts you will soon meet from 1) Rudolf Raff (1996) about the pivotal role of exploratory systems in evolution and, 2) those of David Haig and Robert Trivers about genomic imprinting! According to Goldberg: “The two hemispheres are functionally different in ways not adequately captured by the classic distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic processes. The right hemisphere is critical for processing novel cognitive situations. The left hemisphere is key to the processes mediated by well-routinized representations and strategies. The left frontal systems appear to be critical for the cognitive selection driven by the content of working memory and for context-dependent behavior, the right frontal systems for cognitive selection driven by the external environment and for context-independent behavior. The crucial role of the right hemisphere in processing cognitively novel situations underscores the importance of the right frontal systems in task orientation and in the assembly of novel cognitive strategies.” (Goldberg, Podell, and Lovell, 1994, 371) This analysis 1) incorporates past data from auditory, visual, and verbal tests, from the results of head injury, and from brain scans, 2) accounts for orphan data that did not fit into the language-non language descriptions of the cerebral cortex, and 3) predicts new findings. (Goldberg, 2001; Goldberg and Costa, 1981) For example, Goldberg (2001) points out that infants are more impaired by damage to their right cortex, adults to their left. (Infants need to develop routines, adults need to apply routines they already have.) Another example: not only familiar language but also familiar music and familiar faces are managed by your left. New tunes, new faces, and new language fall to your right. The popularity of a linguistic-non linguistic dichotomy and our emphasis on the left side may have been a miscue from sexual selection: that is, language is something of a crab’s claw, a conspicuous adaptation, noticed by nearly everyone, but the claw is not the whole reason there is a crab. There is more: the human cerebral cortex exhibits “Yakovlevian torque.” That is, in primates, humans, and fossilized human ancestors, the frontal right pole is

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larger than the left and the left occipital pole is larger than the right! (Yakovlev and Rakic, 1966; Lemay, 1976; Goldberg, 2001; Bruner, 2003) If morphology and its timing reflect environmental demands, then the right keeps you in step with changing environments and may lead to your changing those environments. These effects are more pronounced in adults than infants (infants usually have a larger left cortex), more in right-than in left-handers, and more in males than in females (Goldberg, 2001; Toga & Thompson, 2003), and their absence has been implicated as a developmental factor in schizophrenia. (Petty, 1999; Hornea et al, 2005; Mitchell & Crow, 2005) Along these lines, dopamine, a “get started, get finished, and enjoy” substance that is of considerable focus in scientists’s attempts to understand distractibility and impulsive behavior, occurs in greater amounts on your left side; norepinephrine, a stress hormone also made in the adrenal glands, is found more in your right cerebral hemisphere than in your left. If your left is injured, you become despondent and sometimes suicidal. Injure your right and the left chatters as if it were C3PO … a likeable but annoying market analyst, disconnected from reality but, nonetheless, with quick explanations for everything. The term “pattern-maker” popped to my consciousness about 3 am on a Sunday and the idea took control of me later that rainy afternoon, helped along by a cup of latté and my walk through a busy mall. Nature explores with a gambit of duplicate, copy, vary, and select (Raff, 1996) The brain’s two halves do one thing but for different classes of events: your right appears to manage novelty and your left keeps house for what you already know. The left is not only a pattern-maker but also a “patter-maker.” It matches data with stories but has problems with either new data or abandoning an old story. The left manages sync between what you say, find, and already believe. The left will also lie and become indignant when contradicted. (The right probably lies just as much when it invents arrangements that can be neither repeated nor extended. For reasons related to your left and right, beware of what you read and what you think you want to find!) My wonderful right half often surrenders its insights at 2 am and I have no clear sense of what my pen will write. Far-fetched? Yes. Unique or mad? No! Such are the moments of “illumination” mentioned by Bogen and they occur when painters, sculptors, and composers talk about their work but only after it is finished: their verbal apparatus is idled or given other things to do while their fingers, following a different master, push clay or move paint. Pattern-making, fortunately for human accomplishment, is consistent with Geoffrey Miller’s concept of an evolved adaptation: easy to learn, fun to do, seen in every normal human, and most evident when men and women advertise for

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friends and mates. Pattern-making creates from whatever is at hand, whether a collection of symbols or a deck of cards. Poker, canasta, backgammon, and Monopoly all require that you make orderly arrangements from the random ones of cards or rolls of dice. Musicians make patterns, so do painters, novelists, mathematicians, and codewriters for computers. So do small children when they draw on cement walks; adolescents when they paint railroad cars, trucks, and walls; and so do old men who tell stories about God or gods. Adolescents who fight wars on computers win not by reacting to each event in isolation but by finding the patterns in what the electronic enemy does. Fortune tellers make patterns and scientists give prizes to finders of a new pattern. The distinguished biologist, Edward O. Wilson, is only one in many tens of thousands who take messy collections and “… put things right, so to speak.” (Wright, 1988, 138) Bottom line: brains make arrangements and put them to work. Gazzaniga (1998, 6) remarked that brains are not built to read. He is one of our premier neuroscientists but, in this case, he’s wrong!

Chapter Four Exploration: Keeping What You Have and Getting More Exploratory Systems37 “According to the engineer, ‘If it ain’t broke, it doesn’t have enough features!’” Bill Bennett, Morning in America, Spring 2007.

“Exploratory system” applies to cellular microtubules, immune systems, neurons, blood vessels, bones, muscles, and even to your ability to produce suntans and calluses. (Gerhart and Kirschner, 1997; Gerhart and Kirschner, 1998) Exploratory system also describes the complementary roles of your right and left cortex. (Goldberg, 2001) Vocabularies, social organizations, parenting, science … all can be said to explore. So can the arrangements of statistical networks (Thadakamalla et al, 2006), hox genes (Carroll, Grenier, and Weatherbee, 2001), fossil genes (Carroll, 2006) and clusters of unknown genes. (Eisen et al 1998) Evolution itself is an exploratory system, and, very possibly, so are galaxies. 38 37 This chapter does not include material on imprinting (in the sense of Konrad Lorenz and the baby geese who followed him around): the topic appears rich, however, in regard to human behavior. Fetuses will imprint on and like anise if it was given to their mothers. (Schaal, Marlier, & Soussignan, 2000) I also know of cases of newborns who smiled at their father’s booming voice instead of showing the expected startle response as described by Fernald (1992). Adults who are attracted to abusive partners and have difficulty leaving them, despite “knowing better,” may possibly have spent their gestation hearing loud voices that became a familiar thing. Did they also respond to changes in their mother’s cortisol levels in a similar manner and later discover familiarity in discomfort? 38 This strategy was dismissed by one of my contemporaries as “only a basic learning model.” It, however, not only parallels Thorndike’s Law of Effect and operant conditioning’s concept of “shaping” but also DarwinError! Bookmark not defined.’s concept of natural selection and basic premises of evolutionary-developmental biology. 61

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Exploration is the product, of course, of natural selection: survive, duplicate, and vary in ways that are heritable: each of these three steps is a way of choosing genes that find environments! (Gazzaniga, 1992; Sporns & Tononi, 1994; Darwin, 1859) The trophy for living is in evolving better ways to make a living—even if you have to move—not merely doing something different in order to stay where you are. The first steps in selective organizations can take almost forever; the later ones require comparative microseconds. Twelve and one-half billion years set up the foundations for one and one-half billion years of life. Roughly one billion years were needed before the multiplication of life forms in the Cambrian era. Of the next five hundred million years, modern humans have emerged mostly within the last one hundred thousand! Similarly, human history began with long static intervals, such as the million-and-a-half years that your remote ancestors made first Oldowan, and then Aucheluan, axe heads. History later moved much faster for the few cultures that discovered systematic exploration. No surprise, much of modern tension between civilizations exists between those that encourage systematic exploration and those that forbid it! These notions are consistent with modern evolutionary thinking. Earl and Deem (2004) argue that evolvability is itself a selectable trait in rapidly changing environments and found computer simulations to support their position. That is, evolutionary changes can occur in larger steps as seen in stressed bacteria, viruses and cancers, HIV-1 protease, sites in the major histocompatibility complex of the immune system, and in heat-shock protein effects from exposure to heat, poisons, and radiation. The transition from prokaryotes to metazoans also reflects a gain in evolutionary speed. Earl and Deem believe that “… selection for evolvability occurs even when viability as a function of genotype is an extremely complex function, with exponentially many optima, and when the evolving system is unable to reach the global optimum of viability in any one instance of the environment.” (Earl and Deem, 2004, 11531) “Not only has life evolved, but life has evolved to evolve.” (Earl and Deem, 2004, 11536) Of course, variations that are adapted to one set of conditions have more difficulty than generalists when the environment changes! Haldane (1932/1990) speculated that the large claw on a crab becomes a liability when conditions change: he may have been correct not only for claws but also for other sexually selected traits whether giraffe necks or human intelligence.

There are strategies that work and if this is “only a basic learning model,” the Hope Diamond is “only” a carbon crystal!

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Rudolf Raff ’s Model of Exploration Rudolf Raff and T. C. Kaufman (1983), both of them explorers and assemblers, chose to extend and adapt the path that Gould found in 1977: evolution often works by changes in the timing—the onset, duration, and termination—of ancestral, interconnected developmental cascades. Raff and Kaufman and others also insist on the unity of evolutionary and developmental biology (evo-devo). Evodevo affirms that evolution is not only about systematic changes in adult traits but also changes in the developmental sequences that produce those traits. (Gould, 1977, 2002; Raff and Kaufman, 1983; Raff, 1996) Raff (1996) explained evolutionary development—whether for genes, organisms, or superorganisms—as an algorithm: 1) Duplicate whatever works. 2) Compartmentalize functions and depend on random variation to change some of them in one of the compartments. 3) Use the older version alongside the newer. 4) Selection and accident choose between the patterns and make that choice known through more offspring. (Raff, 1996) The challenge is not only to win any particular game but also to be represented in the next one. Fundamentally, eight hox genes (in flies, mice, and men: labial, proboscipedia, Deformed, Sex combs reduced, Antennapedia, Ultrabithorax, Abdominal A, Abdominal B) are a sequence of architects shared to one degree or another by nearly all living things. (Raff, 1996; Carroll, Grenier, and Weatherbee, 2001; Gould, 2002; Carroll, 2004, 2006; Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005) Further, the physical sequence in a train of hox duplicates the physical sequences in whatever they build as if Eve sang “… head, shoulders, knees, and toes …” when she carried Cain and Abel! By whatever means, one cluster of eight genes became two and then four as fish and humans emerged from the platforms that today still make a barnacle, worm, or fly.

Recognizing Exploratory Systems “… Organisms do not find already existent ecological niches to which they adapt, but are in the constant process of defining and remaking their environments. At every moment natural selection is operating to change the genetic composition of populations in response to the momentary environment, but as that composition changes it forces a concomitant change in the environment itself. Thus organism and environment are both causes and effects in a coevolutionary process.” Lewontin, 2000, 125–126.39 See also Darlington, 1953. 39 These ideas have a large literature. Start with Dawkins, 1982; Wilson, 1976; Wilson and Lumsden, 1981; Plomin, 1994; Laland, Odling-Smee and Feldman, 1999;

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On a winter’s sunny Sunday morning, I sat in front of a flat slab of granite, perhaps eight feet tall, next to a half-frozen stream. The one slab protected my back from the wind; smaller slabs accomplished the same purpose on my left and right. This platform faced south and I, in jeans and a T-shirt, baked in this natural oven while I read and napped.

Exploratory systems are emergent networks that have a core and a multitude of specialized nodes, recruited sometimes from passers-by and sometimes by experiments that were a little careless when copying what already exists. Exploratory systems also resemble an octopus: a central core is surrounded by a ring of sensors and tools. John Gerhart and Marc Kirschner describe many examples of exploratory systems: the immune system has a huge library of antibodies that confront pathogens but those antibodies must first discover which of themselves will be effective. Growing blood vessels (angiogenesis) track through muscles, fat, and skin according to the relative availability of oxygen. Neurons live or die according to whether or not you use them. (Use them too much and some of they die anyway!) Suntans become lighter or darker in response to sunlight. Bones become thinner or thicker according to their loads. So do calluses and muscles. (Gerhart and Kirschner, 1997; Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998, 2005)40 A child is an exploring vortex when she smiles or screams in order to use her parents as her extended eyes, ears, legs, and arms. Parents track her moods and supply a bubble, a nest, between her and her setting. She controls a pair of 150pound apes equipped with credit cards! In a similar manner, the fine straw that makes up a vole’s nest keeps her offspring both warm, dry, clean, and surrounded by her odors while she stretches, scratches, takes a hike, or feeds herself. Parents also vary the features that worked last week. A crib and bedroom become a playroom, mobiles that hang over a crib turn into Game Boys and DVDs, and patty-cake changes first into T-ball and then football. In other families, Baby Einstein opens the path to Disney films, chat rooms, and Internet battles. Lewontin, 2000; Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman, 2003; Richerson and Boyd, 2005). 40 This book is itself an exploratory outcome: each chapter ran its own cascade of adopted or rejected modules. Each chapter, early in the game, linked to the other chapters. Much of Chapter 12 was finished before the introduction and unlike high school outlines where I had to make things so linear and hated it, the last segment of Rebels influenced the shape of the first! Deciding what to say, starting at the beginning, and ending at the end does not work so well for me. Sometimes what I must say is different from what I first meant to say!

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Scientists, gamblers, amorous males, actors, singers, and ethnic groups as well as termites, ants, dolphins, and ethnic groups—all explore and sometimes with tools such as the scientific method, the Law of Effect, approach-avoidance conflict, and gossip about the Second Coming and about where you play the slots for nothing and the drinks are free. Cultures sometimes provide the latest finesses on exploration. Instead of anchoring you to yesterday’s news and hiding your blemishes, doubts, and perversions, cultures may let you change your niche no matter what directions your nature takes you. Political parties, opinion polls, new religions, and sciences are exploratory systems.41 Grange halls and telephones allowed larger emergent networks that formed quickly and over greater distances in the American Midwest. New fads came by way of telephone instead of time alone with a Sears catalog in the outhouse. The Internet does nothing but take exploratory strategies to new speeds, more details, and larger territories.

Evolvability and Acquiring Tools42 “Biospheres, as a secular trend, that is, over the long term, become as diverse as possible, literally expanding the diversity of what can happen next. In other words, biospheres expand their own dimensionality as rapidly, on average, as they can.” Kauffman, 2000, xl. On the other hand, a traditional externalist view is represented by Ernst Mayr: “No case is known to me in which a change in body chemistry initiated a new evolutionary trend. Invariably it was a change in habits or habitat that created a selection pressure in favor of chemical adjustments.” (Mayr, 1976/1997, 68)43

Gerhart and Kirschner mention the bar-head goose that changed one proline to an alanine in its hemoglobin, increasing hemoglobin’s affinity for oxygen but without changing its 3D structure. (Gerhart and Kirschner, 1997) Bar-heads can 41 The web site, Wikipedia.org, nominally an encyclopedia, is designed, I think with brilliance, as an exploratory system. “Calculus,” for example, leads to an emergent network of major and minor topics and cascades of symbols and definitions modified for particular uses. And Wikipedia’s organization allows readers to change its content, perhaps allowing them each, subject to editorial review, to have the encyclopedia they want! 42 Taken from Brody, JF (2002) HBES Annual Meeting, Rutgers, NJ, July. 43 From Brody JF (2003) Rebels, deviants, and individualists: Reactions to Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach by Steven Gaulin and Donald McBurney, 2001, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. The Human Nature Review. 3: 59–66. (//humannature.com/nibbs/03/rebels.html).

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now fly over Mt. Everest. Did Everest arise underneath a goose and force it to fly high? And how many geese collided into Everest before one made it over the top?44 Or did it happen that a hemoglobin-mutant gander explored higher altitudes, made it look easy, and impressed a lot of ladies? Further, did that gander have an organizational structure that allowed for rapid increases in the variation of its metabolism and, indirectly, its phenotype? Evolvability describes the ability of cores to add programs and options and might be assessed in the number of niches that a species occupies and the rate at which they were acquired and starts to resemble Barabási’s fitness connectivity quotient. (Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998, 2005; West-Eberhard, 1998; Earl and Deem, 2004) One factor in evolvability is the capacity to make connections easily and to disconnect them just as easily. Proteins and their assemblies resemble Legos! Evolvability, of course, is not a constant factor for all species. For example, the one-celled, one nucleus prokaryotes remain about the same after roughly three billion years. In that interval, however, they survived massive planetary changes and imposed one of their own when they made an oxygen blanket for Earth and adopted mitochondria so they could live inside of it. (Lovelock, 1979/1995) Prokaryotes, otherwise, could be seen as an example of missed opportunities and underachievement. Metazoans, in contrast, not only linked to a lot of environments but they also invaded and recruited them in only six hundred million years, an overnight mushroom in the four and one-half billion years that Earth has existed. (Gerhart and Kirschner, 1997, 1998)

Exploration: Building Inside Phase Transitions “An organism’s life consists of constant midcourse corrections.” Lewontin (2000, 93)

Genetic variation almost guarantees discomfort, an itch to find or make more of some things but less of others. Clothing replaced fur, callused soles became Rockports and Crocs, tribal guards became Harley riders, and forest nests became $300,000 houses where most people, like any sensible chimp, still sleep upstairs. Bees go on solitary flights and signal the rest of the hive about the direction, distance, and richness of food. Ants also branch out and wander alone. Eventually, a scout makes a find, returns directly to the colony, and elicits a “go-no-go” deci44 Fang size in Bornean frogs is sexually dimorphic. “… analyses suggested that malemale competition contributed to the evolution of enlarged male fangs, which subsequently led to niche divergence due to improvements in the males’ ability to capture larger prey.” (Coss and Charles, 2004, 206)

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sion from the larger group. (Allman, 1999; Camazine, et al, 2001; Solé and Goodwin, 2000) Neurons possess these same exploratory strategies: one of them collects a large number of inputs from many sources and combines them into a go-no go decision that fires a signal down its axon. A stockbroker acts like a neuron or an ant when he compresses information from many sources into one decision: to buy or not to buy. (Allman, 1999) And if he is successful, other brokers buzz around his decision. You also find exploration in the partnerships between men and women, partnerships that allow two individuals, while intoxicated by hormones, to merge into one. Similar to the wandering ant, Genghis Kahn, Marco Polo, Alexander von Humbolt, Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and Alfred Russel Wallace left trails for their peers to follow, NASA sent Voyager to the stars but designed it to radio Earth, and there was not a dry eye in the house when ET phoned home.

Getting from Shared & Nonshared to Imposed & Chosen Environments “Adaptation of organization to environment has been effected by the double process of selection by environment of the most appropriate organization and by the organism of the most congenial environment.” C. B. Davenport, 1903, taken here from Darlington, 1953, 299. “In this world no two individuals have to put up with the same environment: we have a choice … It may be a passive choice in which we accept one of the possibilities that is offered to us. Heredity may then indeed be said to ‘respond’ to the environment as the textbooks tell us. But it may be an active selection. We may even create to a greater or less extent the environment we want.” (C. D. Darlington, 1953, 302; also quoted in Plomin, 1994, 1) “If we are concerned with assessing the relative effects of changes in heredity and changes in environment under natural conditions our experimental standardization of the environment is misleading. A single gene so alters a plant or an animal that it alters the reaction of the environment to it. The separation of heredity from environment that we achieve is clean experimentally but not physiologically. The tall pea meets a different world from the short one. The hairy leaf registers the harsh affronts of wind and drought with greater or less accuracy than the smooth leaf. Even where there is no choice of environment it is thus clear that heredity determines what is effective in the environment.” Darlington, 1953, 299. (Also, compare with Lewontin, 2000, 56, in regard to microclimates controlled by a leaf on a corn plant and, 2000, 48, to environments as defined by organisms). “This mutual or double selection, as Davenport calls it, must enormously increase the efficiently and speed of the adaptive and evolutionary processes.

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rebellion It represents one of the great advantages of animals over plants. At the same it supports the illusion that both individuals and races are moulded by an environment which they have actually chosen: any variable animal species in a variable environment is said by the most experienced naturalists to ‘respond’ to the environment with a wonderful ‘plasticity.’” (Darlington, 1953, 299–300)

Your body follows the strategy of an amoeba in a pond. The pond does not direct food to the amoeba’s address, rather the amoeba searches and lives where the food is. The pond has no supercomputer and no postal service; decisions and initiative, instead, occur where they make the greatest difference, inside of the amoeba. Likewise, hormones are mixed in your blood stream, sent everywhere, and your adrenals, pituitary, or thyroid pick what they need from the passing broth. Similarly, males go to bars where there are females rather than order one from eHarmony. While parents can target materials for their child, their child picks out what it needs. Much of life—through exploration—turns an imposed setting into a chosen one. I give you here two approaches for looking at environments: that of the observer (the behavior geneticist) and that of the observed (any one watched by a behavior geneticist). 1) Behavior geneticists distinguish between common and unique environments, also called “shared” and “nonshared.” (Galton, 1883/1907/1911, 173; Darlington, 1953, 302; Plomin, 1994; DeFries et al, 2000) Their research with these concepts is international, several decades old, and has become a part of Thomas Kuhn’s “normal science”! Shared environments are those experienced by more than one individual such as when children are reared by the same parents and have the same home, breakfast table, television set, and teachers. Shared environments, contrary to parental wishes, often have temporary effects but few or no enduring ones. (Parents, therefore, repeat “How many times to I have to tell you.…”) Further, shared environments are most persuasive before you are eight years old but lose potency thereafter: heritability gains influence, rather than loses it, as you mature and even, in some instances, as you pass into old age. Scientists invented the concept of nonshared environments to account for the behavioral and physical differences between monozygotic twins who are presumed to have identical structural DNA. (The concept of a nonshared environment, measured by differences in between monozygotic twins, on the one hand, and dizygotic, fraternal, twins on the other, produced a tsunami of insight!) Nonidentical outcomes from identical genes imply different experiences that turn on or turn off particular combinations of genes. The same genes, depending on con-

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text, can make an eyelid or a nose. The same genes, depending on diet, will make a lean, winged grasshopper or a stubby land-bound version. Nonshared environment also accounts for the fact that fraternal twins who are born at the same time and, therefore, should have many shared environments, often behave as if they never shared a womb, parents, books, and toys. Nonshared environments are unique to one individual and especially important if they have lasting effects. Children may have a different teacher; older siblings experience a younger, less experienced set of parents. Parents also tend to earn more as they age and younger children, therefore, tend to have more comfortable rooms and a greater choice of toys, electronic or not. These sorts of environment, however, are “imposed” just as having the same teacher is. In other words, there is no reason to expect that a “unique” teacher will be any more influential than a teacher you “shared” with your sister! 2) The rebellious, as well as the compliant, will describe things somewhat differently from the scientists who watch them. Nonshared environment comes from within and feels like a choice: there are things that elicit “Don’t tell me what to do” and things that elicit, “Don’t tell me not to do it.” Furthermore, “imposed” and “chosen” perhaps fit better what you experience when you are on the playing field instead of up in the stands. Chosen environments are quickly taken on, carted along, and reassembled if destroyed. Your child remembers your lectures if he agrees with them in the first place and, half the time, will say things that you wish you had said or swore never to say because your own mother said them! That is, after your eighth birthday, you increasingly choose what you keep in memories, on your shelf, and stored in your television remote. You also pick your friends, the games you play, and the puzzles you solve but experience each of them in a different way than would be true for you brother or sister. These choices are usually classified as nonshared environments, just as was true for your teacher, Miss Jones, count for thirty-five–eighty percent of the variance in what you will be and, therefore, are the environments that really matter.45 (Plomin, 1994; DeFries et al, 2000) Even if two children have Miss Jones, each child will sometimes take home a different set of lessons. The essential push in nonshared environments comes not from the teacher but from the unique collector sitting before her. Genetics and sync, of course, are the invisible players here. Environments and occupants amplify each other with the result is that some traits, measured intelligence for example, grow from a 0.20 heritability when you are four years old to 45 Chapter 7, We’re All Twins, has a number of anecdotes about individuals who started, before they were eight years old and despite strong parental resistance, on careers that led to fame. Also, see Steptoe, 1998, on results from studies of creativity and temperament.

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0.80 when you are in your sixties. (Plomin, 1994; Segal, 2007) The problem for science is the extent to which your differences at age sixty are a more a product from your biology or from the accidents that happened to you along the way. Miss Jones may be little different from parents, neighbors, policemen, and probation officers who also impose environments that you escape by means of daydreams and doodles. For example, most of us drive within a cluster of cars, all moving about the same speed. The cluster often, but not always, slows when it passes a patrol car. If there is no cluster, you tend to watch carefully for speed limit information and cautiously move in sync with the patrolman’s speed. Further, give you dry, smooth pavement and no cops and you tend to move in sync with the noise from your engine and the needle on you gas gauge. With a smoother engine, better tires and suspension, and more horsepower, you may go looking to pass a psychologist on his sportsbike! In any case, your biological endowment gives you an antenna and a fence; you search for and take in some kinds of information but exclude others just as if you were a cell, a cluster of dedicated neurons, a stock speculator, a tribal chief, or an octopus in the sea.

Hox and the Mall Chicks46 I’m a girl watcher who, after six decades, still does what he has always done. I find that each girl displays her personal choreography when she strolls, strides, or struts through the mall. Her hips, waist, shoulders, and arms each sway in its own andante, allegro, or vivace. The head targets here and there, and, sometimes, her eyes get larger and her lips smile when she sees another woman, a man, or a sale sign. Her arms and legs, however, may consult with her right cortex but not her left and she stops at a sale one-third second before she can tell you what’s on the sign.

46 Adapted from a posting on Behavior onLine, 5/23/04. Carroll (2006) and Kirschner and Gerhart (2005) also discuss the advantages in parallel but somewhat independent evolutionary paths for the segments of an organism. A similar story could be told about motorcycle design. Tires, lights, chains, windscreens, and instruments evolve independently of each other but also in synchrony with the bike’s purpose and market. The selective environment for bikes, as is sometimes true for humans, is both the psychological environment of humans and the physical environments where it exists. Further, as selective pressures relax, comforts such as heated vests and rain gear become more available. Pick up a current issue of Cycle World or Sports Rider and study evolution, developmental cascades, and hubs, not only in the articles but also the ads! The tools that make a bike go faster sometimes evolve faster than the bike’s fundamentals.

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Raff ’s book induced an epiphany: I still watch a female’s concerto but I now find that she has sections similar to those on a crayfish or grasshopper and, although her proximal segments are closely synchronized by her spine and her more distant ones by the stops and goes from a central metronome, each segment also follows its own pace. Yes, “segments”! A sequence of eight Hox genes arose by duplication, variation, and specialization. One course followed by this set of genes led to insects with an external skeleton and a nervous chord that runs down the stomach, the other course to vertebrates with an internal skeleton and a spine that runs down the back. Meg Ryan not only has a segmented backbone and brainstem, she is inside-out and backwards from a fly!47 Nonetheless, her lovely abdomen, thorax, head, and long heat exchangers grew from the 500 million year collaboration between the Hox genes called Ultrabithorax and Abdominal A and B and their duplicated, mutated, recruited add-ons that we call Antennapedia, Proboscipedia, and Labial. (Labial is not necessarily all that you think and God knows where we hominids use our homologous genes for Deformed and Sex Combs Reduced!) Raff describes parallel, loosely connected, developmental cascades, each of which does its own thing but in synchrony with other cascades. Look at a girl and you see multiple evolutionary histories, a separate one for the segments of her head and mind, her chest, stomach, arms, and legs. Each of her compartments traveled its own course through millennia and through the last twenty years. Thus, a mall chick might have an incredible face, waist, legs, and breasts but toes that were almost webbed. Hox developmental sequences are started by the first transcription factor in the chain and each succeeding link is regulated by earlier ones. The composition from a Hox sequence parallels that of your nervous system. And developmental events can skew the unfolding of any one of her segments without disrupting that in others. Each of a woman’s segments—indeed, each of her cells—has its own evolutionary fitness whether defined by Darwin as length of life and numbers of children or by modern network theorists who measure the number of links that one of her nodes achieves.48 When I admire a waist, I possibly admire the junction of two different ancestral genes, Abdomimal A and B, the second of which might have been a dupli47 See Raff, 1996; Gould, 2002; Carroll et al, 2001, 2004; Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005. See also Gerhart (2000) for the inversion hypothesis and an alternative to it for origins of architectural differences between insects and Meg! 48 The imagery here could be incredible: picture each of her hubs with its swarm of admiring gnats and guys!

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cate and inversion of the first. Likewise, when I notice a long neck, tapered chin, large eyes, flushed cheeks, and pink lips, I look for seams between developmental plates. And the shape of her legs may have only a modest relationship to the quality of her mind. Furthermore, few of us are perfectly proportioned and similarity is a significant component of mate selection. Is there a trend for barrel-chested individuals to be attracted to each other? Or is there a special magnetism between individuals with larger-than-average heads? Do spindles like me and broomsticks seek each other? (I tend to think so.) And what is the effect when head proportions match but none of the other segments do so? As to environment, I thank whatever mutagens may be for a small Oriental girl seated fifteen feet away. I first watched her forty-two years ago when I lived in Yokohama: she spoke Japanese, wore white socks, wooden getas, a blue and white baggy kimono, and pedaled a bicycle with a six-foot stack of wood over its rear wheel. She sits today with her books exactly one table distant in a Barnes and Noble Café. She wears a ponytail, denim shorts that are not only very short but also very snug, and a light pink, bare-midriff blouse, all of which support an intent symmetrical face and a mouth that probably speaks better English than I do. She absorbs organic chemistry through big eyes and a mind once adapted to avoid enemies, attract mates, and find hanging ripe fruit.

A Yanomamo Exploratory System49 Cultures, like other superorganisms, explore. They also have hubs and nodes. Napoleon Chagnon (1968), when a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, went to the jungles of South America in order to define the kinship networks in an Indian tribe that called itself the Yanomamo, “the fierce people.” He was met by a ring of young males who drew bows and aimed arrows at the center of his chest! Chagnon quickly found the Yanomamo to be smelly, assaultive, paranoid, drug-abusing monkey-eaters, farmers, and hunters of other Yanomamo. So much for Rousseau and his “noble savage”! Many of the Indians chewed tobacco incessantly, regularly blew a psychedelic up each other’s noses, and dripped spit and nasal mucus everywhere, even when picking through Chagnon’s clothing, food,

49 Revised from “About Chagnon’s Fierce People: Admissions to Humanity,” 7/4/2005, posted on Behavior onLine, www.behavior.net. Lawrence Wright (2006) describes a similar organization for Islamic terrorists: a core of wealth and persistence but surrounded by impulsive fighters.

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or tools. When he complained, the Indians spit tobacco juice onto their palms, rubbed them together briskly, and returned to their searches! Chagnon felt like a lower life form: the Indians approached his camp only when they wanted to steal, beg, or take advantage of someone who didn’t matter. Instead of becoming even more insular, Chagnon retaliated and won respect from the older members not for fighting but for cleverness. He worked from the tribal perimeter to its center, from the company of impulsive, unattached, expendable thugs to that of families and leaders at the tribal core, a core where being included depended not only on being strong but also on being smart. William James, who once praised the role of great men as catalysts of societies, would have praised Kaobawa, the tribe’s headman. He hunted along the village perimeter for evidence of pending raids, used scouts to locate both enemies and future garden sites, managed fights so that combatants made scars but not corpses, and measured his political support by the tribe’s core in order to prevent a hot-head from taking command. He also needed a sense of the future because eighty percent of the tribe’s calories came from farming and some plants required several years to be productive. During raids on neighboring tribes, Kaobawa both restrained the hotheads and bullied the cowards. Furthermore, being chief required that he produce enough food to give away at feasts where he not only negotiated alliances but also risked an ambush from his guests. Future-doctor Chagnon first attempted to keep himself clean, shaven, combed, and fed but discovered that he completed more research if he bathed, laundered, and ate less. Despite his clumsy language, questions, camera, and notebook, he fit in better when he became a smelly nuisance. Near the end of his visit, Chagnon hid Kaobawa’s allies in the bottom of his boat and navigated past a ring of enemies from surrounding tribes. He also put away his notes and withdrew to his hut after one death in the village: he explained his sadness when the children asked “Why?” and at that moment penetrated the tribal core, gaining acceptance as a human, a Yanomamo.

Swarms and Spirituality “To live gregariously is to become a fibre in a vast sentient web … it is to become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air; it is also to become the occupier of every bit of vantage ground whence the approach of a wild beast might be overlooked. The protective senses of each individual who chooses to live in companionship are multiplied by a large factor, and he thereby receives a maximum of security at a minimum cost of restlessness. (Galton, 1883/1907/1911, 52.)

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rebellion “One feature of a shoal is the strong resemblance between member fish. Fish use many traits to choose shoal mates including size of shoal, species type, body size, health of shoal members, and kinship.… Fish often choose to be in a shoal that consists of individuals similar in appearance to themselves; the ‘oddity effect’ posits that any shoal member that stands out in appearance will be preferentially targeted by predators. The oddity effect would therefore tend to homogenize shoals.” (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm. 11/05/2007) Gnats formed a small cloud at my back door: Omigod, they were in church! Am I Lord of the flies?

Humans swarm and Charles Mackay (1841) collected stories about some of our largest. He included land schemes in the New World, South Seas Stocks (UK), tulipomania (Holland), alchemists, the Second Coming, fortune tellers, Mesmerism, the crusades, duels, witches, haunted houses, famous thieves, and religious relics. Mackay would certainly include global warming, the stock market, social security, and health insurance in his book! Far more recently, Sagan (1995) compared UFO abductions to demon possessions in Europe. Such things continue today, easily learned and fascinating to nearly every normal human and include rock stars (the Beatles! Elvis!), political figures, film actors, particular movies, and sports, in addition to the usual religious attractors! The ordinary business of a swarm, on a highway or in a chapel, was captured by Craig Reynolds in a computer simulation: ‘Boids: each particle responds to the movements of others within just a certain radius. Each particle matches its speed to the average speed of others within that radius. Each particle moves towards the centre of mass of this local group. Each particle aims to avoid collisions with others. (See Ball, 2004, 124) Human swarms have a second, unifying function: they keep their members pointed, as if fish into a current or birds or bikers into a headwind, into the future and an afterlife. The matter, for the defiant, is less one of a bribe but more one of a purpose. Religions: - Provide help in this life, - Hold members to plans and reward persistence, even when death approaches, - Assess commitment volunteerism.

through

confession,

- Define territories and seek to expand them.

gossip,

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- Encourage sync through selection, examples, rewards, and punishments. - Warn about sickness, care for the ill, and process the dead as if for rebirth. - Define the fundamentals of a culture with a success that relativism has never achieved. - Pull strays back into the main flock where they are less apt to betray everyone or to expose themselves to robbers, rapists, murderers, and dealers in souls, - Arrange access to approved mates and punishment for taking the wrong ones. - Help to rear children. - Invade remote locations and dismantle local resistance. - Endorse the murder of agnostics and atheists but accept believers of competing faiths. - Incite adherents to attack in swarms and punish those who fail to attack. - Sometimes protect, correct, and revere members who see or hear invisible things. - Establish continuity of sync up until and beyond death: dying individuals share their worldly assets instead of using them up before death. - Provide occasions similar to football games, conventions, raves, and mall sales wherein countless individuals make a churning mass and for no other reason than to be in that mass. These gains are so important that it is of no consequence if there is nothing more. Further, their common occurrence and power suggest genetic foundations. As every minister knows, spirituality differs from attending church! Heritability for self-transcendence is about 0.40 for men and women, church attendance is weakly influenced by shared environments. (Kirk, Eaves, and Martin, 1999; Eaves, Martin, and Heath, 1990; Martin, et al, 1986) Believers differ from me through the product of genes and environments. The differences between us, I am convinced, is apt to be one of genes. Believers may, for reasons of genetic influence, conclude that I see with eyes of this world rather than with a spiritual vision. And, unlike Dawkins who rants against believers, I refuse to argue a gene out of its expression. Finally, there is an irony: some evolutionary scientists ignore or dislike the notion of a creator but also find in religion a possible survival tool for individuals and for groups! (Wilson, 2007) They compound this irony through a suicidal

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strategy when they attempt to convert believers to an evolutionary, secular relativism! (Dawkins, 2006) After all, swarms fight as if a single organism. Religion takes individuals and gives them one focus, a very useful maneuver when invaded or invading. That is, religions function much as hives, herds, schools, and swarms— exploratory systems that defend, refine, protect, and extend their core. Thus, I am agnostic but, no pun intended, respect the “power” of what religion accomplishes. Toynbee was correct and will remain correct in his thought, “For religion, after all, is the serious business of the human race,” and for reasons that apply to millions of other species. (Toynbee, 1958, 89. See also Murray, 2003)

Thought and Language Speed Things Up Language: Another Exploratory System50 “From time to time, a few truths are revealed, tiny pieces of the vast mosaic of things. Better to divulge the discovery no matter how humble it may be. Others will come who, also gathering a few fragments, will assemble the whole into a picture ever larger but always notched by the unknown.” (Fabré, 1902, 67.)

Language is like your immune system, the formation of blood vessels, or the growth of bone and muscle. Language creates links between developing individuals and between individuals and their settings, links that endure over time and distance. As in other exploratory systems, one component, grammar, whether in Japanese, Russian, or English, remains comparatively uniform but another, vocabulary, infinitely varies across languages, cultures, and sometimes week-to-week. (Pinker, 1994; 2002) Vocabulary can be seen as an emergent outcome from the environments that genes notice and manage. Vocabulary connects individuals to each other, to local history, and to current opportunity. Exploratory effects occurred when one word for “snow” became lots of them in northern cultures and once more, a complex, moving growth, a grammar, takes on limitless numbers of nouns and adjectives. Grammar, however, is considerably more uniform and in ways that suggest genetic contributions. (Pinker, 1997; 2002) Emergent network organizations in vocabulary were perhaps first noticed by George Zipf (1932) who concluded that only a few words are used very often and most are used rarely. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf. 11/07/2007) Almost 70 years later, Cancho and Solé (2001) found, based on the 100 million word collection 50 Taken from Brody, 2004

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of British National Corpus, that only 2.67 steps connect any two words in British English. Clustering of word associations was four thousand times greater than random. (See also Strogatz 2003; Albert and Barabási, 2001.) Yook, Jeong, and Barabási (2001) linked words if they were synonyms according to the MerriamWebster Dictionary. The average path length was 4.5 for a network of 22,311 words, the clustering coefficient was 0.7, compared to a value of 0.0006 for a random network of the same size. (See also Albert and Barabási, 2001.) Words are stored in clusters that have close connectivity and, also with clusters, we expanded our cultural boundaries and sometimes stepped a little beyond.

Executive Functions and Taking Advice Her jaw, a stubborn clamp under her freckled nose, was an expression of confinement by marriage, children, and a consulting job. Red ink for what she gave versus what she got soaked her ledger. She also hated the idea that she needed help. I moved our sessions from my office to my family room where we sat next to the wood stove and I pulled ideas out of her. She separated what she needed to do from what she thought she had to do and the choices that worked from those that did not. She gradually reorganized what she had to do, decided that she could keep on doing so, and disconnected from me.

Executive functions are mental behaviors that arrange sequences of other behaviors. (Pennington, 1991; Fletcher, 1996; Barkley, 1997; Goldberg, 2001) Executive functions, often defined by intuition rather than observation, consist of using working memory to plan, make agendas, delay tasks and return to them after interruption, imagine alternative outcomes, and implement choices in an experimental manner. Executive functions allow you to experiment without getting dirty, sweaty, or bloody. They are a necessary thing for orderly transitions from nasty, brutish, and short to kind, thoughtful, and sustained. Executive functions explore. First, strong executive functions should predict quick recovery from a crisis almost regardless of “therapy.” A history of erratic conduct or of systematic deterioration is not a good sign. (It may be that, like major universities, successful practitioners recruit successful clients and therapists risk being another of Skinner’s roosters: we do again whatever we did not only when our last client recovered but what we did to find him or her!) Second, the abruptness of switching between confusion and routine can be softened by any procedure—whether experience, alliances, maturation, or the latest California stress management fad—that slows the oscillation between confusion and routine. Stall the urgency of “now” and you let ideas and urges make their own hierarchies that might be rearranged later.

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Third, decrease those influences by injury, infection, intoxication, or social isolation and decisions become more ratcheted, staccato, and stereotyped. Impaired executive functions will let winter cold, gloom, pain, and illness make tormenters from annoyers. Fourth, clients with intact executive functions (or a recent history of such) should be more deliberative and discover their own solutions. Such clients will better share plans and integrate the information from advisors. Completing therapy homework and designing assignments predict a good outcome. On the other hand, clients who have difficulty with planning, constructive imagination, selfobservation, and systematic problem solving will often be more reactive to environmental changes in their job, sleep pattern, family status, friends, and seasonal activities. These clients will need help to discover effective changes, generalizing what works in one situation to a new situation, and sometimes help in finding other allies to maintain changes. Impaired executive functions predict continued dependence on family or friends, barmaids and preachers, for their help as an extended neocortex.

Chapter Five Harrison Bergeron: The Outside, the Average, and the Outstanding She overdosed after dumping all of her parakeet’s food into his cage and remarking, “You’re on your own.” She woke up the next morning and called me after calling her mother. The girl blamed her move away from home and into an apartment in a strange neighborhood. I mentioned her history of suicidal thoughts, mood changes, and social anxiety that predated both her medication and her move. She didn’t see a connection.

Three classes of events—externalism, your comfort with averages, and your attraction to arrangements that fit power laws—resemble psychological adaptations. That is, often fun to do, easily learned, and relevant to your survival and reproduction. Externalism describes your bias that looks to the outside when you want to explain and repair nuisances. Second, psychology’s use of averages calls to mind Plato’s concept of an ideal that hides behind the clutter that you see. And there are useful outcomes for psychologists, horse players, and weather forecasters who deal with averages. Third, because they deal with averages, psychologists, horse players, and weather forecasters underestimate the number of either disasters or bonanzas—all of which conform more to power laws than to bell curves. Because power laws are often associated with phase transitions, it is probable that you evolved in the middle of them. You will notice their arrangements and be drawn to them in art, music, literature, or in the talents of a prospective lover. Indeed, power law arrangements hint of life!

Externalism: “Out There” I ate in a mall food court and saw a spinning little boy stumble and bang his head into a chair. He wailed and his father jumped up and shouted in broken English: “Bad chair, bad, bad, BAD chair!” Dad, however, scolded the wrong

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rebellion chair and his son wailed some more. I interrupted: “Excuse me, it was the other chair.” Dad scolded the correct chair and his little boy shut up.

Externalism … no irony intended … lies deep within you. An organism that survives must scan outside of itself. That is creatures not only collect, arrange, and defend their necessities, they look for sync between what they need and what they might put to work. Gun butts can be used as hammers, dead computers become doorstops, and I can imagine an adolescent with an extra finger who invents a seven-string guitar. Even Skinner’s rooster was a pattern-maker that evolved a ritual for getting grains of corn. Because creatures, until recently, had few tools for changing their nature, their focus had to be on changing their nurture. There are consequences for biologists and for their stories. “Externalism is the view that selective pressures are determined by the environment of the population, and adaptive change is a response to the problems the environment poses. Features of the environment explain features of the organism.” (Sterelny and Griffiths, 1999, 255)51 There is, however, a bit of magic in this thinking: environments change and by chance, organisms eventually discover and grow adjustments to those changes. Such appears plausible. On the other hand, I also vote with Lucretius: “For nothing is born in the body in order that we may use it but, rather, having been born, it begets a use.” (On the Nature of Things, 95 BC–55 BC. Taken from Darlington, 1953, 136) Externalism also means that you look for your challenges where you can see and finger them. Externalism describes your conclusions and those of the rooster … both of you are pattern-makers … when two events occur within a half-second of each other or when novel foods are followed by nausea at delays up to 51 Internalism considers the effects that organisms have on environments. For example, E. O. Wilson asserts: “Manipulation of the environment is the ultimate adaptation” (2000, 59). He, in a different section, takes an externalist view when he says: “Social behavior, like all other forms of biological response, is a set of devices for tracking changes in the environment” (2000, 144). Neodarwinians tend to be externalists who assume that genes change organisms in order to conform to environments. On the other hand, evo-devo thinkers tend to be internalists who view genes as sometimes doing things almost on their own but as irrelevant to the fundamentals of human nature. (Gould, 2002; Gerhart and Kirschner, 1997; Raff, 1996, Carroll, 2004; Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005). Waddington’s concept of “canalization” also fits into an internalist view: developmental outcomes are constrained by the nature of the developing organism. (See also Maynard Smith, 1989, 81–85; Pinker 2002, 2004.) Contemporary philosophers also spend a lot of ink on externalismError! Bookmark not defined. and internalism in regard to morals, the origins of knowledge, semantics, and the nature of mind. (en/Wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalism. 6/23/2007)

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twenty-four hours. In both cases, the first “caused” the second and acquired properties from it., (Gaulin and McBurney, 2000; Garcia and Koelling, 1966; Garcia, Ervin, and Koelling (1966) Externalism permeates your language for past, present and future: “I had a bad week,” “I knew it was going to be a terrible day,” or “Only God knows what will go wrong next.” Externalists identify with fresh clay that hardens forever after it recorded meteor impacts as well as scratches and fly tracks. Externalism is your first assumption when fixing blame.52 You have a destiny that emanates from stars, phases of the moon, the bloody evil eye from an old woman, or the annoyance of a creator. Externalism is the public defender for husbands against lecturing wives and, perhaps more true for little boys than for little girls, for children confronted by parents or teachers. It is the message of schools when they teach that character is a product rather than an architect. It is also implicit in Darwin’s reference to the “hostile forces of nature” and evolutionary stories that ignore the role of organisms as the architects for environments.53 Externalism is widespread, easily learned, robust, and found in other species. Put a monkey in a training chamber and teach it to press a lever for food or water. Add a second monkey. Deliver a mild shock to the trained monkey and he will immediately bite the second one! Rats will do the same thing. Rats, pigeons, monkeys, and social scientists look to change features in their personal conditioning chamber rather manage their genes differently. Similarly, the comedian, Flip Wilson, sometimes put on a baggy flowered dress and floppy hat and assumed the character of “Geraldine” who always got into trouble and shouted, “The Devil made me do it!” A lot of impulsive sons use a similar argument on their annoyed mothers and psychologists in court testify “the test finds.…” Externalism, however, neglects the influence that you exert on the week that you had, on what occurs right now, or on what will happen next. You may be clay but one that chooses what it records. You make a contribution not only to what happens but also to what you remember and the emotions that you had. That is, 52 Psychologists distinguish externalizing and internalizing disorders in regard to where the target sits when an individual directs his lectures and conduct. Males first aim their thoughts, comments, fingers, and fists at other individuals, females at themselves. 53 I remember a story but cannot find its source. A little girl experienced an earthquake. Her mother explained falling rocks and shaking ground but the little girl, a few hours later, announced to her father when he came in the door, “Daddy, daddy, a nasty man made the ground shake.” Maybe God is where we put blame when we have no other male to carry it. A variation: if you take your talents as a pattern-maker, a talent for blaming males, and mix these two things with externalism, stories about space aliens become more likely! See Sagan (1995) in regard to hallucinations and to space aliens.

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1) you look for positive or negative aspects of any event, 2) many of your outcomes are thirty to eighty percent heritable, 3) heritability, a measure of genetic contributions to how much you differ from other individuals, begins small but increases across the duration of your life, and 4) after you pass your eighth birthday, up to eighty percent of the variation in what you have and what you become reflects environments that you chose, refined, or invented for yourself. (Cohen, 1999; Plomin, 1994, Dunn and Plomin, 1990) Externalists prefer that the opposite occurred: that you become more different from your parents and grandparents as you get older. Not so! Blaming “something out there” or “way back when” will often be wrong when you consider the trail that you hiked. Such blame also prevents your looking for the stuff inside of you that chose which trail to take and whether to turn left or right at each fork. That is, you can blame your parents or the lack of them, your being the only child, the middle child, the adopted child, the child of a divorce, or the child of alcoholics. You can also find shamans who encourage your blaming the constellation of your birth, the phase of the moon, ancestral memories of your grandparents, or your reading Richard Dawkins books at midnight.54 As Darlington put it, “… all these things seem also upside down in much the same way as the notion that differences between people are due merely to differences in their environment.” Darlington, 1953, 143.

Regression to the Mean: The Average One Whom You Trust “THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.” Vonnegut (1961/2006, 7)

Quételet explored normal distributions in the 1850s and Galton extended his work. Average came to represent “ideal,” variations from average became error, (Boring, 1929/1950; Ball, 2003) and Platonic essentialism, a mainstay of biological science since Linneaus, still haunts parts of psychology and the diagnoses that clinicians make. Essentialism appears to be collapsing in clinical thinking, it survives in concepts of evolution not because of theory but because human minds 54 Dawkins is known for arguing with an instinct and his career glows with this folly (The God Delusion, 2006) but I doubt he has converted anyone not already susceptible to his message!

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need it to think. Economists, biologists, and psychologists have also depended on the concept that “average” has a symmetrical distribution of errors on either side—a bell curve—and have done so for almost as long as they have measured what they choose ot measure. Darwin’s fundamental contribution, however, was his measuring not the size or color of any particular trait but by how much those things varied across time. (Lewontin, 1985) R. A. Fisher (1930/1958), J. B. S. Haldane (1932/1990), Sewall Wright (1932), and Alfred Lotka (1924/1956) picked up on Darwin’s gambit: evolutionary population genetics resulted. As Lotka put it: “… fundamental equations assume the simplest, the most perspicuous form, when they are written relative to rates of change of the state of the system, rather than relative to this state itself. That is to say, it is found that the expression for the rate of increase in mass, the velocity of growth, of the several components, are simpler, more primitive in form than the expressions giving directly the mass of each component as a function of time.” Lotka (1925/1951, 41) Life has moving midpoints and the size of the variation around that midpoint reflects natural selection, an imposed environment that limits the range of phenotypic expression. The salience of “average” in our theories about natural selection suggests the possibility of a instinct that notices, arranges, chooses, and retains average in matters important to survival. There are exploratory advantages to being average, that is, neither too organized nor too disorganized but, in Goldilock’s language, “just right.” Evolution requires variation but, on the one hand, neither so chaotic, fast, nor great that natural selection cannot act; but, on the other hand, not so frozen and limited that natural selection finds no choices. (Kauffman, 1993) To the extent that mate selection pivots on small variations from generation to generation, mate selection follows guidelines that Raff described when it nudges human evolution to a slowly moving average every time that a mother either invests in her infant or holds back. Mother cats reject kittens that are too different, human mothers do likewise to their infants and do so from conception and for at least the first eighteen years. Humans also keep average in mind when it is time to pick a lover or to whip a son or daughter into shape. Following a middle course is good selective sense—make only small changes to something that works—that shows up everywhere in biology. (Kauffman, 1993, 1995; Raff, 1996; Barabási, 2002; Ball, 2004. See also Bloom, 2000, on “conformity enforcers.”) There are many times that you cut the tails from your dogs.

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1) Armies, flocks, and swarms of whatever species or faith act as if they follow from simple rules that were developed for “boids”: “Each particle responds to the movements of others within just a certain radius, each particle matches its speed to the average speed of others within that radius, each particle moves towards the centre of mass of this local group, each particle aims to avoid collisions with others.” (Ball, 2004, 193) Flock members on the periphery become easier targets for predators: this is true for antelope or for motorcyclists or scholars. Outliers may be there because of their mental quirks or because of illness, injury, or lack of maternal investment. Outliers are also more likely to commit suicide. (Colt, 2006; Jamison, 1993, 1996, 1999) 2) Powerful sanctions exist for nonconformity. You see them captured in Gintis’s concept of “strong reciprocity” when individuals reward sharing with others in a common cause and punish those who do not or who, instead, share with the opposition. Schadenfreude, a German term, refers to the joy that average individuals experience when a successful someone else experiences failure. According to Wikipedia, twenty-six other languages in Europe and Asia have concepts that resemble schadenfreude. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude, 6/24/2007) 3) Parents demonstrate preference for the average when they want their children to share. It also shows up in gossip, public education, imposed environments, exhortations from pulpits (the rich, proud, and wealth rarely get into heaven), and political philosophies (Karl Pearson: “Whatever is social is right.” Also, Marxism: “… from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.…”) Scientific peer review has the same outcome until it is upended by a revolution in fundamental concepts. (Kuhn, 1992) 4) Exceptionally strong performances deteriorate the second time around but bad performances tend to improve. Very tall or very smart parents tend to have children who are a little shorter or a little less gifted. Do poorly on a test and you are likely to do better on the next (but don’t count on it!) The children of high achievers often do less well than their parents, not because of bad parenting but because the parental combinations of genes and experiences that made them successful were unlikely in the first place.55 5) Contests between imprinted genes appear to seek average as the genes of mothers and fathers replay the tactics of their carriers. A roaming male benefits if his genes take control of placental size, uterine blood pressure, and fetal blood 55 “Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and economist, remarked that “… because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.” (en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Regression_to_the_mean, 6/24/2007)

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sugar. The expectant mother attempts to retain control of blood pressure, sugar levels, and placental size. In so doing, her genes benefit because she saved some of herself for the offspring from her next mating. (Haig, 1999; Burt and Trivers, 2005) These effects also occur in female extramarital affairs: such tend to occur when she is most likely to become pregnant by short term acquaintances, males who are muscular flashy dressers and who won’t be around tomorrow morning. (Buss, 1994) Conformity and the exceptions to it challenge each other and, by one trick or another, most of us trim the extremes from whatever we find. Whether a talent or a liability, you leash yourself to conformity or else your friends, wife, psychiatrist, and zoning board eventually do it for you. “Average” favors your interchangeability with your neighbors and your moving into sync with more partners. Average also means that neighbors worry less about your pulling them out of sync with whatever environments they already made.

Power Laws and the One You Really Want,56 “And then, neutralizing gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time. Vonnegut, 1968/2006, 13. “By contrast to fat-tail distributions, the normal distribution posits events that deviate from the mean by five or more standard deviations (“5-sigma event”) are extremely rare, with 10-or more sigma being practically impossible … Thus when data naturally arise from a fat-tail distribution, shoehorning the normal distribution model of risk—and an estimate of the corresponding sigma based necessarily on a finite sample size—would severely understate the true risk.” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_tail_distribution. 11/05/2007) Or, for that matter, the probability of a winning streak.

Living events occur in extraordinary mixtures of components that have different sizes, intensities, and durations: power laws, fat-tail distributions, and geometric means describe those mixtures. Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) noticed them in the distribu56 Power laws predict that catastrophes are more probable than formerly expected. Power laws, however, also allow for more small events than expected. Barabási (2002) introduces them well, so does Brian Hayes (2007). Hayes also recommends several reviews: Mitzenmacher, Michael. (2004) A brief history of generative models for power law and lognormal distributions. Internet Mathematics 1(2): 226–251, and Newman, M. E. J. (2005) Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf ’s law. Contemporary Physics 46: 323–351.

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tion of wealth, George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950) in word use and social groups, Alfred Lotka (1880–1949) in population dynamics and in the frequency of scientists’s publishing, and Benoit Mandelbrot (1924) in financial markets. Power laws occur in phase transitions when disconnected events discover mutual affinities and make partnerships. Power laws were introduced in Chapter 3, Emergent Networks and are particularly interesting because they reveal a process of similarity, self-organization, and recruitment between the units in a collection. Because you evolved in a soup of power laws, you may be tuned to find organizations that have power-law features similar to your own, whether a painting or a furniture arrangement: you seek, choose, arrange, and nurture them, and when they vanish, you may grieve just as if something died. Power laws are associated with dynamic collections that acquire new components by means of recruitment, copying, deleting, or reassignment. Membership is not by chance but by similarity. Power laws allow for more extreme participants and retain differences rather than blending or discarding them. It may be that power laws accelerate the evolution of organizations, and, in the language of Kauffman (2000), Kirschner and Gerhart (1998) or Earl and Deem (2004), help evolvability to evolve. Power laws not only apply to your neural organizations but also describe your judgments of weight, light, sound, pitch, and length (Stevens, 1975) and research may yet discover more relationships between what you notice and how what you notice is organized. Seekers may look for their soul mate when they choose a crossword puzzle, an author, or a collection of wall decorations according to their elements. Some of them also want friends that play bridge instead of hearts, or chess instead of checkers: all of these examples might be quests for matches to the searcher’s own complexity.

What Power Laws Describe Life must occupy a phase transition and power laws often describe the dynamic organizations in them. Expect, therefore, power laws to have great relevance to the directions life has taken for 1,500 million years. Expect also that you find them to make the difference for you between the fun and the tedious. Power distributions not only describe your place in the big scheme of things but also the patterns that you find in disasters (earthquakes and storms), the severity of injuries in an emergency room, price fluctuations in stocks, and even the sizes of grains in a pile of sand. According to Wikipedia, the following examples fit into power distributions: frequencies of words in longer texts (a few words are used often, lots of words are used infrequently), the sizes of human settlements (few cities, many villages), file size distribution of Internet traffic which uses the TCP protocol (many smaller

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files, few larger ones), clusters of Bose-Einstein condensate near absolute zero, the values of oil reserves in oil fields (a few large fields, many small fields), the length distribution in jobs assigned to supercomputers (a few large ones, many small ones), the standardized price returns on individual stocks, sizes of sand particles and meteorites, numbers of species per genus, and areas burnt in forest fires. (en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto distribution. 11/22/06) There are differences between thin-tailed bell curves and fat-tail power curves. - Power curves resemble bell curves but float above the graph’s horizontal axis and rarely touch zero at either end of their horizontal platform; bell curves eventually touch the ground when they reach zero for the number of very large and very small events. Statisticians, to get bell curves, “normalize” rebellious data through medians or by converting raw scores to logarithms. Power laws, in contrast, accommodate multiple large scale events and far greater numbers of very tiny ones. “Pareto’s Law,” named for economist Vilfredo Pareto, for example, states that twenty percent of the population will accumulate eighty percent of the wealth. And conversely, the group that consists of eighty percent of the population gets only twenty percent of the wealth. - Graphs of power laws on log-log paper are straight lines, often described by slopes with values between two and three. (Barabási, 2002; Barabási and Albert, 1999; Albert and Barabási, 2001)57 - Power laws often signal the presence of a self-organization whereas bell curves apply to collections of events in which there is no influence between the members when they were selected. According to traditional (eeagh!) experimental design, “self-selection” of a group of research participants allows for extra variables to influence the differences between groups. - Power laws signal the presence of a phase transition, a “bubble,” a haven between disorganization and immobility, wherein natural selection can operate: there is enough variation and stability. (Waldrop, 1993; Kauffman, 1993, 19) - Power laws, but not bell curves, describe the connectivity within the brains of C elegans (a tiny worm with about 900 neurons), cats, and rhesus monkeys. That is, most links are short and between adjacent neurons, many travel further but within a brain area, and others make bundles that go long distances. (Barabási, 2002; Buchanan, 2002) - Differences between nodes in an emergent network in regard to the number of links that each of them has. 57 “One rule of thumb is the distribution conforms to a power law if it is straight on a log-log graph over 3 or more orders of magnitude.”//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_ law (11/22/06) (per Wikipedia: See also Benford Law, Lotka’s Law, Zipf ’s Law, and the Zipf-Mandelbrot Principle)

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- Intelligence itself may be measured better with geometric means and allowance for extreme scores.58 Remember: the parts of a mind are not a random assembly and the organization in a brain duplicates that in the number of blood vessels of different diameters or in the alleys, streets, and highways of a city. Power laws might also describe the number of words of varied lengths in a crossword puzzle, the number of living creatures of different sizes in a house (three humans, two dogs, a dozen mice, hundreds of fleas, and zillions of bacteria!), the patterns of r-selection and K-selection that biologists sometimes use to describe new and mature ecosystems, and matches between the complexity of your mind and that of the art that you hang on your wall, your music collection, the films that you enjoy at the theater, and your ideal marriage partner.

Power Laws in Human Sensation and Preferences “… on all continua governed by the power law, a constant percentage change in the stimulus produces a constant percentage change in the sensed effect.” (Stevens, 1975, 16)

Your mind evolved twice by power relationships, once in phylogeny and again in ontogeny. On log-log graph paper, power laws produce straight lines for the sensory impact of changes in stimulus intensity whether for brightness, loudness, taste, smell, warmth, cold, vibration, and electric shock and do so for five-yearolds, college students, and adults. (Stevens, 1975) Thus, you notice differences in stimuli according to a power law and your neural organizations can themselves fall into power law configurations. Kuramoto again comes to mind: similarity and influence lead to the development of synchrony. It’s a small step that power laws may be associated not only with external change but also with your first noticing it and later attending to it. Expect also to find a relationship between the complexity of a mind and the art and literature that it collects as well as between the “fitness” of that same mind and the clutter and repair of the nest around it. Another small step in the same direction: you may seek individuals and events that match your own complexity. Your mind becomes a transmitter, antenna, and receiver that finds matching external 58 The puzzle of ethnicity and intelligence is still to be understood. “Average” conveys information but neglects the possibility of disproportionate changes in the variation within a group and the frequency of gifted individuals. This possibility is politically, logistically, and empirically difficult to assess but it would be consistent with suggestions that variation increases in harsh conditions. It is also obvious that high intelligence can often be a handicap rather than an asset! (See Rebellion, Chapters 1, 5, and 11.)

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events and to a certain extent, may temporarily adjust its own level of performance!59 It advertises your own complexity and draws you in when you find someone whose variability matches yours. Overreach and you experience confusion and a sense that you were disconnected; under-reach and you find boredom and pull the plug yourself. “Soul mate” may have an organizational substance that applies both to living and to inanimate arrangements! Whether a story, a painting, or a partner, you seek a resonance, a synchrony, between what you bring and what you found. Finally, power laws describe how emergent organizations grow or shrink. Since your receptive tools are biased to detect changes, the arrangements of power laws, because their high and low scores, reflect growth and surprises and should fascinate you. And one event sometimes predicts a second or third one and its impact. You may both notice such things and respond as if they live!60

Making Intelligence Obvious for Mate Choice Because power laws have more high scores as well as lots more low ones, the salience of intelligence in social connections may well be greater than commonly recognized. That is, people of similar complexity notice each other, come more easily into synchrony, and share more than their attitudes about Darwin, Marx, or Wagner. As a result, you tend to become friends with and marry people similar to you in intelligence. (People who don’t believe in intelligence also follow this rule!) Many scientists consider intelligence to be a normally distributed asset. Reasons, however, exist to view it as a power law phenomenon. First, intelligence is an emergent event, a self-organized product of neurons and experiences but by chosen experiences more often than imposed or random ones. Remember: bell curves, however, apply to random collections, not to selfassembled ones. 59 Receptor and target characteristics usually match in regard to some aspect of frequency. For example, the sensitivity of some lyriform organs (found in slits near the first joints in a spider’s leg) lies between 60-1400 cps but varies with the angle of the spider’s leg and helps the spider distinguish between wind noise, a possible mate, and a struggling fly. One study found a peak response to 500 cps, the frequency of a struggling fly and vibrating the web at 500 cps was followed by the spider’s approach to the vibrator. 60 The occasional big outcome in a power distribution may offer a larger step for natural selection’s contests. William Provine (2001) tells of the acrimony between big-step and small-step evolutionists. Darwin saw small steps as the ratchet for evolutionary changes; his friends Galton and Huxley favored big steps. Neither Darwin nor his followers, however, were aware of power laws and emergent networks that allow both big steps and small! Their unnecessary dispute continues even today.

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Second, those who study psychophysics found that you judge events to be just noticeably different if the physical intensities of the stimuli changed according to some ratio. The same principle should apply to your estimates of intelligence in other people. No one, to my knowledge, however, has applied a psychophysics paradigm to judgments of intelligence. There are reasons to do so. The more heritable the trait, the greater its similarity between mates and good friends (Rushton, 2005): G for example, is both more heritable than special mental abilities and appears to be the more important when we partner and for our later satisfaction with the partnership. If tests were restandardized and scored to allow for more extreme high and low scores, correlations should increase between the heritability of a trait and its influence on mate selection and contentment. Just as you can estimate the absolute and relative brightness of lights and loudness of sounds and even compare directly how much change in brightness equals how much change in loudness (Stevens, 1975), you possibly evaluate friends, competitors, and mates on the same basis when you choose which ones to keep. (Buss, 2004) You resemble an oscillator that attempts synchrony not only with a painting or a piece of music, but also the mind of your dinner companion.61 You might accomplish these calculations for intellectual complexity in the same way that you do so for the “Big Five” of personality characteristics: sociability, emotionality, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. (You might also reach conclusions about narcissists, depressives, manics, schizoids and paranoids!) Whether at a party, on a bus, or during the first date, brief conversations sometimes allow reasonable estimates of not only a newcomer’s dependability and trustworthiness but also their smarts. Even children make these assessments of a strange child on the playground and according to Russell Barkley (1990), they do so within twenty–thiry minutes. General intellectual ability is reflected in vocabulary, the number of odd facts that you know, and your quickness in solving problems. In social contexts, it could be reflected also in the subtlety of your outlooks and humor, and if you are adept at matching jokes to audiences, you should have a larger say in the course of 61 Therapists are sometimes asked to estimate whether they were able to “connect” with a client and possibly do so on the basis of eye contact and matched body postures, emotional changes, and rates of speech. Religion also arranges fat tails: multitudes of smaller things around a few major ones. And most gods know everything and can do everything but retain assistants and department heads! It is a safe prediction that a statistical approach to scriptures, similar to those already done for vocabularies, would show us linear relationships on log-log paper between the importance of an individual and how many there are like him, and an 80-20 rule likely applies for the amount of ink given to each player and topic!

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a partnership. Furthermore, the order and variety you see in a friend’s wardrobe, home, and friends can also reflect the order and variety in his mind. Experimenting with power laws may increase estimates of the strength of relationships between measured intelligence and social economic status, educational outcomes, impulsiveness, and criminal behavior. (Rowe, 2002) Further, could it be that females match themselves to each other and to males on the basis of mental complexity? Could it be that the tension with a boring partner or an unpredictable one lies in the mismatch between her emergent networks and his? “While not necessarily changing the population mean of the attribute in question (unless there is directional dominance of the genes involved), positive assortative mating will increase variability (emph. added, JB) and thereby have a substantial influence on the genetic structure of the population.” (Rushton, Littlefield, and Lumsden, 1986) Whatever the contributors to intelligence, they are unlikely to be independent of each other and no matter what special abilities are included, G remains their core. Any reasonable person, therefore, would damn Quételet and label as chicanery statistics that normalize I. Q. scores.

Power Laws in a Picasso or a Thoreau62 “Once you get the composition to work, you can do almost anything and it still works.” Roger Kotoske, abstract expressionist and instructor for Basic Design, September, 1960.

It’s probably also true of a story. Make a hub, one so big and juicy that it dominates you, hang on a few supporting ideas, and then load up whatever details you want. The composition appears to organize itself and if you talk about the composition while it appears, you weaken it! Outlines for written compositions? You must be a high school newbie or damaged in your right cerebral hemisphere to need one.63 Emergent networks may have an important role in our arts that is undetected. Kotoske’s remark shows a sense of emergent networks although no one thought much about them at the time. He also commented on their resistance to random attacks without knowing that he did so. The Adapted Mind (1992) has chapters on the evolutionary foundations of visual and spatial esthetics and ethologists continue to study such things. (Orians and Heerwagen, 1992; Coss and Goldthwaite, 1995; Coss and Moore, 2002; Coss, 2003; Keltner and Wilson, 1993) E. O. Wilson (1998) summarized them in 62 Posted on Behavior onLine 6/30/06: www.behavior.net/bolforums and included in a poster on emergent networks in 2006. 63 Chapter 10, Your Divided Self, continues the discussion about the sometimes synchronized, sometimes competing roles of the right and left cerebral cortex.

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Consilience. That is, you are drawn to arrangements similar to those of an African savanna with near, middle, and far elements and Japanese gardeners trim trees in a shape like that of one kind of acacia tree found in Africa. Most of us sense comfort with images of water, sunrises, or sunsets and the sound of white noise or the feel of rushing water or air on our face. Further, of equal importance is biophobia, our modern fear of characters and situations that presented dangers in the old days. Stagnant or turbulent water, dead animals, snakes, blood, groups of strange males, thick undergrowth, high places all elicit more avoidance than modern dangers such as a frayed wire or an automobile (Ulrich, 1993) African savanna scenes, however, may not be the backbone for our esthetics. Wilson (1998) described the importance of a twenty percent redundancy factor in calligraphy, decorations, and paintings but couldn’t account for it except to correlate it with CNS arousal. Emergent networks could be a clue not only to the twenty-percent-phenomenon but also to the success of modernism in the arts. If your mind organized by means of emergent networks, you will seek or create, independently of formal content, external networks of similar complexity in regard to the number of their members and the organization that unifies them. And you will tend to do it in photographs, paintings, collages, and arrangements on your fireplace mantle. An example: I went to the mall on a rainy morning and passed an abstract painting, the kind that I would like to create, in the front window of an art store. The composition showed three women sitting in a bar and from left to right, light background became light foreground; dark background became dark foreground in the opposite direction. Large moved to small in both directions and forms of similar color or value often made a triangle. There were other emergent tricks discovered and exploited by artists: we become watchful when darker tones and simpler forms alert our brain stem that something important happens. And consistent with Kauffman’s models from statistical physics and Murray Bowen’s for family relationships, colors and values are often triangulated: one large anything can often be balanced by two smaller anythings of about the same hue or brightness. There is still another level of organization. Did the elements in the painting have a fat-tail distribution? Probably. Can a painting by Vermeer or Seurat be captured by a log-log equation? Almost certainly. And can such equations capture changes in either artist as they matured, prospered, or failed? Give it a look! Ertel’s findings in regard to Hitler’s speeches and Nietzsche’s writing are consistent with this possibility! (Ertel, 1981) Even the Law of Effect might operate not only on the basis of the half second between associations but also in a more selective, less accidental way. That is,

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some events may be rewarding not for their sugar content or their similarity to a naked lady but because of power law relationships within them. After all, most nudes can be boring! And some visual and auditory sequences, especially of nudes, will draw us in for reasons that predate our time in a primate’s suit. “Polygenic inheritance, also known as quantitative or multifactorial inheritance refers to inheritance of a phenotypic characteristic (trait) that is attributable to two or more genes and their interaction with the environment. Unlike monogenic traits, polygenic traits do not follow patterns of Mendelian inheritance (qualitative traits). Instead, their phenotypes typically vary along a continuous gradient depicted by a bell curve.” (emph added, JB) (//en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/ QTL, 6/9/2007) Probably not so.

Chapter Six Common Sense64 A stubby old guy with a book sat in a stuffed chair in Barnes. He eventually lifted his legs, rotated his body to the side as if cradled by a tree branch, and drifted to sleep. I stared at a television in a bar. One kid on a bike raced down a ramp, off its front lip, and into the air while he pushed away from the bike, spun it several times underneath his legs, lined it up again in his direction of travel, and regained his seat before landing. The kids on roller-blades were next and, after them, teen girls and boys on skateboards became human pendulums that zipped down one slope and up the opposite one, accelerating until they went four feet up and over the top, reversed in midair, and rode down that same vertical face. Forwards, backwards, spins, and flips—we haven’t lost it after millions of years on the ground.

A Very Brief History65 Phase transitions, synchrony, and emergent networks supplied our ancestors with on-off switches, bubbles of relative safety, and friends in neighborhoods within bubbles where biochemicals congealed into complex organisms. Cells made walls for the same reason that Skinner put pigeons in a chamber: restricted movement increases the probability for some classes of behavior while lowering that for oth64 Adapted from Chapter 5: Psychological Adaptations, Healing the Moral Animal, Cape Cod Institute, Orleans, MA, 1998. “Evolutionary Psychology” (EP) is no longer a seedling but a matured plant with a trunk of standard beliefs and many branches that are less substantial and sometimes less a product of nature and more one of human quirks. I summarize here the trunk of EP but leap immediately to my favorite, and sometimes, very personal branches. Do not pretend that you know EP from what you read here. Go to the reading list! As for clinical work, few of my clients have been infatuated with ideas from evolution and it may be that the characteristics that lead an individual to seek help would also make him or her less likely to be a fan of natural selection. 65 “Instinct” and “psychological adaptation” are interchangeable here. 94

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ers: walls keep some things in and competing things out. Chemicals in cells more easily made partnerships, copies, sometimes mistakes, and discovered new sources of energy. The teams that prospered formed more partnerships, all the while moving within physical constraints while conforming to them. (See Lehn, 2002, on chemical evolution; also Kato 2002; Hollingsworth 2002; Whitesides et al, 2002, in that same issue of Science) Life’s complexity grew at geometric rates. The first changes in prokaryotes were tiny and took almost forever; the metazoans later would make changes faster and in more varied ways when they changed their external tools rather than their internal chemistry. The difference is just as profound as going to Sears and buying a wrench instead of growing a new hand. (Gerhart and Kirschner, 1997; Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998) At an unrecorded moment, one simple cell surrounded several others, burped, and made inclusion bodies from them. One inclusion body became a mitochondrion that turned oxygen from a poison into a necessity. Living creatures could then escape one ocean and strike out long distances across a second one, crossing the dry ground underneath a sea of nitrogen and oxygen. A second inclusion, chlorophyll, turned carbon dioxide and water into adenosine triphosphate and oxygen: plants, from that moment, carried a factory and made their own food. A green film eventually covered continents, flowers appeared and used networks of bees and birds to scatter pollen and seeds for greater distances and to more specific targets than could be expected from the wind. (Eiseley, 1957; Margulis, 1995, 1999; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis, 6/15/2007) In exchange, the seeds and pollen paid their taxis with concentrated forms of energy. Scales and fins were followed by feathers and claws or by hair, toes, and fingers. Rudolf Raff estimated that primitive genetic sequences can remain intact even if unused for five–twelve million years. What is true for genetic sequences for wings, arms and hands can be true for behavioral assets: humans still do what we did long before we were human but, sometimes, more of it. You, for example, still obey organizations and rules that guided your remote, single-celled ancestors to face upstream in order to eat. You move a little faster than what is behind or next to you, thrill when you gain on whatever is ahead, and look for openings to the left or right, up or down. Even when driving an automobile, you may know for a quarter mile exactly where you must stop but, instead of slowing or accelerating gradually, you may enjoy the pull in your middle ear, neck, and limbs from sudden starts, turns, and stops.66 66 Brace yourself! Brigitte Bardot and a fish have similar faces—large eyes, turned up nostrils, wide mouths, and thick lips, features exploited by Disney cartoons such as

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Motorcyclists today resist wearing a helmet, parachutists delay pulling their rip cord, children spend dad’s money on roller-coasters that loop upside down, and, adolescents—their mother’s voice replaced by an elastic cable—dive from cliffs, tall buildings, or bridges … all reminders of what you did, perhaps sixty million years ago, before you became a “magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees.” John Gillespie Magee’s poem, High Flight (1941) captures another aspect of our doing what we once did, first in water and, for some members of our extended family, in air. “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings … wheeled and soared and swung/High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along.…”(//en.wikipedia. org/wiki/John_Gillespie_Magee,_Jr.; also, of course, in Bike, Sept. 2007, 107) Human thought and song appear to glorify the instinctive things that you still do. Love is one example that is embedded in your core, war is another. According to Steve Pinker (2007) so are power, intimacy, fairness, divinity, degradation, danger, well being, and free will. In other words, larger brains both invented tribal conniving, managed it, and gave you options to be a more subtle lover, thief, or killer. Once human scheming began, it collected myriad variations and decorations. The critical environment for human intelligence was not so much ice and cold but contests between human intelligences. Variations in abilities that led to greater economic success should also lead to and benefit children who have those same traits. Similarity makes, protects, and amplifies more similarity. Sync, in this case, shifted evolution into the next higher gear when it introduced systematic, reversible experiments conducted through imagination. In addition, female preferences for taller, smarter males—ones who plan better, get more, have more influence, live longer, and are more apt to share—almost certainly contributed to the evolution of higher intelligence (Miller, 2000) and the ability to scheme and to achieve a conquest without bleeding and limping afterwards. By the end of the Pleistocene, a revised standard version of your common sense emerged. Such changes turned rugged individuals into hairy Legos that can be partners with nearly anyone, and at the same time, communities into superorganisms. Eiseley’s words again come to mind: “… a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat” (Eiseley, 1957, 47–48) but in many respects, we are still a Devonian fish!

Finding Nemo. Not only are physical similarities there but also primitive motives such as parental investment, jealousy, abandonment, and fear of getting lost. Adults in the audience respond in sync with small children and some old guys cry when Nemo is found.

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The Pleistocene Bottleneck and Psychological Adaptations The Pleistocene is considered by many to be the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” (EEA) for your most human characteristics. (//en.wikipedia.ort/ wiki/Evolutionary psychology#The environment of evolutionary adaptedness, 6/8/2007; Buss, 2004; Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, 1992; Glantz and Pearce, 1989; Bowlby, 1982) One “story” has been that climate changes and long treks in search of food and better weather refined human intelligence when humans were forced to live in small groups, establish hierarchies, and divide labor. Another story, shared by not only Lucretius but also Simon Conway Morris (2003) is that variation in neural capacity leads to individuals—whether human, dolphin, elephant, or whale—who are more skilled in taking charge, preempting or avoiding fights, and recruiting or capturing females. Of course, a parallel group of females became more skilled in order to find, train, and nurture such males. We grew leaner and lost hair, jaw size, muscle mass, and longer legs, becoming taller perhaps to shed heat, see further, or attract more mates! Individuals with larger brains in lighter skulls applied strategies that reduced the need for a massive skull and brow ridge. Getting a harder head, after all, merely invites someone to find a bigger stick! During this interval, we changed the ways that we mate, rear children, and work together in small, emergent networks wherein each member specializes in one job and makes deals with other members who have a different set of skills. Not all environments have the same challenges. Social aptitudes, language skills, and pattern recognition require a lot of neurons but must fit a particular context. A large brain helps little before you are born and makes it more likely that your mother will die in childbirth. Delaying brain growth until after the child was born saved mothers and meant that neuron’s connected with each other in social contexts. Neurons survived as they became matched to a particular setting, including the odors and voices of a child’s parents. Human families formed clans and tribes that allowed ever wider networks of resources and enemies. The foresight that allowed extended alliances, however, also made humans the most dangerous predator, not just for other species but also for other humans. Remember, emergent networks are sensitive to strategic attacks that target their hubs, human minds organize in emergent networks, and humans, ironically, became smart enough to identify hubs as targets and to become their own most capable predator! Even chimps on a raid, work in a cluster, signal each other with gestures, isolate a strange male, and first rip off his voice box and testicles before beating him to death. (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996) The selective pressures for humans changed from throwing the largest ax or spear to contests that required subtlety. That is, if you are going to attack, what is

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the decisive strategy? Can you escape bites, blows, broken bones, and murder if you lie well, manage your place in a hierarchy, and know when to trust whomever walks behind you? Grunts became bad jokes and deep discourse; discourse and bad jokes became signs of health and intelligence and predictors for the next raid’s winner and, therefore, an attractor for allies and mates. Much of your refinement, therefore, was in less brawn but more routines that are now called “psychological adaptations” by a very few psychologists or “common sense” by nearly anyone else. Thus, you are more afraid of snakes and strange males than of electrical outlets or automobiles that are, in modern times, more dangerous than snakes or most strange males. You approach someone with a smiling face, feed and hug crying babies, and often get help from relatives rather than strangers, especially for rearing your children. You also have a very hard time defying your common sense. It is hard for most people to pet a snake, greet a scowling individual, or care for an infant that is fussy, rarely sleeps, and doesn’t make eye contact, smile, or return hugs. You almost cannot “will” your hand and arm not to shoot out when you fall forward. And, aside from me and some characters played by Jack Nicholson, few adults frown at a smiling child! Thus, your design does your business in particular ways and fits key-in-lock, keeping you in sync, with what you own, what you want, and whom you know. You share widely the slots and tabs that make your reputation and hook you up to other individuals. For example, Asians, Europeans, Africans, and Pacific Islanders tend to make similar interpretations of facial expressions (either photographs or Kabuki masks!), show empathy, and tell similar stories when asked to account for those expressions. (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1972; 1989; Ekman and Keltner, 1997; Ekman, 1998) Bottom line: the politics in Congress or the local Moose Lodge parallel those in a troop of chimpanzees thousands of miles away in a Nigerian forest. (Goodall, Whiten et al, 1999; de Waal, 1982/1998, 1989, 2001)

Thoughts as Psychological Adaptations “Common sense” describes your behavioral heritage: “common” because the judgments it makes are ratified by your parents, friends, and enemies, and “sense” because it usually works well. For example, thoughts of an adulterous wife often elicit in husbands hatred and anger, changes in heart rate, dilation of pupils, and increased blood pressure, searching and guarding behaviors, threats, clenched fists, and ambushes. (Buss, 1994, 2004) Likewise, the death of a child elicits family grieving that varies with the child’s age at death. Finally, male chimps give raw meat to females before intercourse, male scorpion flies often give the female a fresh bug before intercourse, men take women to dinner, and methodical contem-

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porary human females assess men at lunch rather than after dark, several glasses of wine, and a load of fats! Thoughts are not floating things, a mosaic from happenstance. They have a structure, seeded by in instinctive hub that you may not always recognize and that you might share not only with a chimp but with a bird or a cat. (Pinker, 2007) Thoughts are often domain-specific. That is, you rely less on sending lots of different problems to one analyzer but more on your collection of analyzers that specialize in different kinds of problems. Psychologists imagine your having a collection of “modules” for thought that efficiently make certain comparisons, form particular classes of memories, and generate particular responses. For example, most of us understand expressions and gestures that reflect disgust, anger, fear, happiness, and ambivalence. (Buss, 2005, 2003, 1994) Many of us can also distinguish from college photographs, at better than chance levels, the individuals apt to become leaders and those apt to cheat. (Buss, 2005) Most of us are especially good at detecting cheating (Cosmides and Tooby, 1992; Ridley, 1996) and you react to social betrayal with indignation, a phenomenon that could contribute to the frequency of complaints that a parent, spouse, teacher, referee, editor, traffic cop, or judge has been “unfair.” It also probably contributes to your keeping score in relationships, to the enduring fascination that philosophers have with justice, and to a lawyer’s complaints about fairness when he has neither evidence nor law on his side.

Formal Properties of Psychological Adaptations New Yorker cartoon: A pair of cats, with drinks and snacks, sit in chairs in front of a mouse hole. “Isn’t this more fun that going out for dinner and a movie?” (Mankoff and Gopnik, 2006)

Adaptations are the means by which societies managed the ice ages and grasslands and through adaptations, a clawless, fangless, hairless mutant substituted organization for brawn. While psychological adaptations are easy to imagine, they are also hard to substantiate and, therefore, they have become a controversial aspect of evolutionary psychology. (Compare Buss, 2005, Barkow, et al, 1992 and Williams, 1966, with Buller, 2005; Gould, 2002; Gould and Eldredge, 1977; Gould and Lewontin, 1979.) According to Cosmides and Tooby (1992), psychological adaptations: - reject some information but accept, refine, amplify, and prioritize other information. For example, your eyes will, under ideal conditions, detect the energy of

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1–3 photons; you ears can react to vibrations about the same size as a hydrogen atom. - take in very specific information. Spiders have tunable lyriform organs in their legs that pick up the vibrations from a trapped fly. Frogs have neurons that respond to the color blue, others that respond best to moving small dark spots and others that respond to moving edges and sudden darkness. Blue might advertise safety, small moving spots advertise bugs, and moving shadows may warn of a bird. Similarly, vervet monkeys have one call that warns of eagles, another for snakes, and a third for leopards: each call triggers a distinct set of behaviors. A young hyperactive human male may have no interest in history or language arts but immediately notices the cat in his mother’s garden. Take that same child to Easter services and he might sleep or study specks of dust in beams of colored light but eagerly hunt and murder on his videogame just a little while later. Admonitions about good and evil may have a smaller impact in brick suburban churches that don’t have large statues and paintings of martyrs! Going down a dark hall to a series of black booths and talking in whispers through a small opening may be more terrifying than a face-to-face in your minister’s office. - combine cognitive, limbic, brain stem, autonomic, hormonal, and spinal components as well as the associated muscular, skeletal, neural, and organ specialization, parts that are often nested and work efficiently to solve at least one survival task. Your eyes have a lens that reduces blue (sharpening acuity), an iris that controls the amount of light coming in to the eye, rods (widely cross-connected, rods magnify tiny amounts of light at the cost of acuity), and cones (less interconnection, greater acuity, and sensitive to colors). - resemble antecedent forms and structures that have a similar purpose in creatures that were never your direct ancestor. Eyes, for example, emerged independently, perhaps as many as forty times. (Zimmer, 2004; Carroll, 2007) Groups of male dolphins not only save human swimmers but, like chimps, move in gangs, and kidnap females. (Conway-Morris, 2003) Ants have battle-field tactics that resemble those of humans, including throwing objects and the use of gas warfare. (Hölldobler & Wilson, 1994) - vary their similarity in ways thought to reflect degree of genetic relatedness. That is, one plan changes in its size, form, efficiency, and the number of components across generations. (Carroll, 2004; Carroll, Grenier, & Weatherbee, 2001; Kirschner & Gerhart, 1998; Raff, 1996) An infant squirrel has a leg and foot structure strongly similar to my own but he can rotate his feet more than I can; he can support his weight by hanging from one rear one foot, I cannot. - are not laid out as if by an electrical engineer. Instead, nature often redirects what is available rather than invent something new. In other cases, variation in

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a physical setting becomes an opportunity when a living creature finds a way to use it. You are not perfectly matched for your current nest because nests change in ways that you have not anticipated, despite the best efforts of your genes and cultures. You can be said to consist of gum, hairpins, and string for the glitches around you.

The Acclaimed Universality of Human Characteristics On an average basis, we are a helluvalot the same. Iranäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1972, 1989) and Paul Ekman (1971/2005, 1997, 1998) made this point when they photographed human expressions, conduct, and costumes in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Pacific islands.67 The researchers found that regardless of culture, geography, race, or language, facial and gestural expressions are similar for happiness, ambivalence, fear, and anger. In addition, they revealed commonalities of social behavior not only for emotional expressions of ambivalence, fear, anger, elation, and disgust, but also for family structure, marriage, courtship, incest taboos, sexual roles, rank, territoriality, and maintenance of group identity and property, and esthetics. Ekman added formal interviews to his comparisons of facial expressions.68 He collected information in twenty-one cultures (Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, England, Estonia, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kirghizistan, Malaysia, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States). In one study he presented photographs and the respondents picked from a list of possible emotions that matched the pictures. He also read the interviewee a story and had him select the photograph that best fit with the story. Finally, he asked them to act: “How would you look if.…?” The majority of participants in all twenty-one cultures consistently identified happiness, sadness, 67 Iranäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt hunted with a $30,000 Leica with a lens that shot at right angles to the face of the camera. Thus, he appeared to be looking away when he was taking pictures. His 1989 book, Human Ethology, spans 848 pages of examples of our global similarities. I met him in Detroit in August 2006: he still has that camera! Wilson (1998) Consilience, provides a more accessible summary for this research. 68 Ekman narrates an interesting backdrop for his studies. Margaret Mead, her former husband, Gregory Bateson (a Lamarckian and son of evolutionist, William Bateson), and Ray Birdwhistell (a student of Mead’s and inventor of kinesics) resisted notions of universality in human facial expressions. Sylvan Tomkins was one of the few, as of 1965 when Ekman began his research, who subscribed to the concept of universality. Ekman notes that these were decades when “universal” immediately translated into “racist.” Now, “innate differences” earn that label. There is today a Sylvan Tomkins Institute for the study of emotion in Philadelphia

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and disgust. Fear was identified by nineteen and anger by eighteen of the twentyone cultures. George Murdock, after his survey of the Harvard Human Relations Area Files in 1945, concluded that every culture contained: “Age grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gesture, gift giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaving, and weather control.” (Wilson, 1978, 22) Pinker (2002) lists over 400 adaptations, a list that could be longer or shorter depending on how you form any one category. Modern studies of cross-cultural uniformity include child care, mother child conflict, female recognition of infant emotionality, female recognition of infants by odor, morning sickness, attachment, mate selection, deception in mating, mate guarding, recognition of emotionality and facial expression, marital separation, kinship, monitoring geographical territories and boundaries, alliance formation and management, hierarchy management by gossip, threat, ridicule, grooming, distribution of resources, cheater detection in social exchanges, incidental memory, the ability to imagine what other people may be thinking, deception, self deception, self inflation and self depreciation, impression management, working memory, the formation of mental agendas, language, environmental and esthetic preferences, Hunting, murder, avoidance of infection and illness, facial asymmetry and sickness, skin quality and pathogens, grooming and reciprocity, avoidance of predators, insects, snakes, heights, panic, agoraphobia, disease, separation anxiety, blood, and a suspicion of strangers and transient neighborhoods.

Individual Differences: The Need for Personal Will69 Not everything goes in average ways. Cheryl was forty years old and branch manager at an investment service; Chuck, her husband, wore a uniform and delivered mail. She had a reserved park69 Taken from “Granddad and Psychological Adaptations: A Universal Human Nature?” posted on Evolutionary Psychology Forum, Behavior OnLine, 3/15/97

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ing space for her red ‘Vette, he drove a truck. She had lunch every Wednesday at Commuter Club, he packed a sandwich. On holidays and anniversaries, she bought the tools that she wanted and gave them to Chuck. She did carpentry—chair rails and two decks on their home—and enjoyed the three dimensional aspects of the chore. These were not new skills to her: when thirteen years old, Cheryl made herself stilts, skate boards and a slide. She also figured out how to mix cement, made the steps for her mother’s entrance, and pointed stone. Her father eventually locked up his tools. Cheryl climbed trees: “I once got brush burns over my whole chest and worried that my boobs would never come in.” She had no fears of spiders or snakes despite showing unusual vigilance about her food and cleanliness. At meetings at the country club, she always went to the sink and rinsed away whatever fancy sauces the chef had spooned onto the chicken. She serviced her car and her calendar at work was from Car and Driver magazine but it hung in her closet. When Cheryl told the repairmen what was wrong with the MAC machine, they were annoyed that she was right and she had similar reactions from her automobile mechanics. “They’ll get mad but I don’t care. They’ll get over it.” She lost several guys when younger because she, doing no favors, beat them bowling, playing tennis, or skating. (Chuck played basketball because he was taller and had longer arms: she couldn’t beat him!) She also refused to accept victories that were handed to her because she’s a girl. On the other hand, she liked to win but winning also involved cheating. “Gotta do it, you have to cheat in life and especially in sports.” She also had no use for whiners. “Either do something about it or move on.” Cheryl didn’t sew, rarely danced and anyone who talked about feelings annoyed her. She also didn’t gossip, nor did she worry about other people who did. She enjoyed her children but didn’t sit and cuddle them for long intervals. She also put a large Post-It on her steering wheel hub so that after work, she would remember to pick up her kids. On the other hand, she insisted on being feminine because it had useful outcomes. “… I don’t mind too much going from no makeup to makeup in thirty seconds … to conform to society’s pretty girls in pink, you have to look angelic and sexy to get what you want, right!” “Sugar” appeared in silver, just beneath the driver’s side door handle on her ‘Vette. She, when pulled over for speeding, retrieved her purse from the back ledge while she squirmed around with her knees elevated. She got no tickets. Darwin and his followers would not be troubled by Cheryl’s mosaic. After all, she did survival things such as maintaining her health and that of her family,

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attending church, protecting her assets, staying on top of her two children, and noticing show-off males and being skeptical about them. She also conformed to social demands although they annoyed her. On one hand, her employer’s expectations led to her dressing, grooming, and acting like a financial adviser. On the other, her first act as a new manager was a Machiavellian stroke: she came to work on a weekend and changed where all the forms were kept! Omigod! Her staff may have been annoyed but on Monday they adjusted quickly and asked her for directions. On Tuesday, they brought her tribal offerings … coffee and chocolate in gold foil. We, thus, are not only a helluva lot the same, we are also a helluva lot different. There are many contributions, beyond those of genetics, to such differences. There are hints that prenatal conditions—crowding, infections, alcohol abuse, maternal cortisol, the availability of omega-three fatty acids, and even whether oxytocin is given during delivery—tip the infant towards or away from hyperactivity, impulsiveness, aggression, and mistrust. These characteristics have secondary impacts on sex roles and one measured traits such as intelligence. Further, such environments may arise within mothers who carry genetic platforms for them! Harsh rearing, large families, the expendability of any one child, missing parents, and war-like indoctrination by shamans, turn a genetic propensity—perhaps mediated by one short allele or another or perhaps influenced by environment’s shifting the balance in a mother’s or father’s contributions to genomic imprinting—into a phenotypic reality for more individuals in a community. Such effects can be transmitted across generations and within specific communities as particular environments interact with the genes that respond to them. Some cultures prefer quieter children who speak early, others prefer children with cojones. The desired human nature of one tribe or region, thus, may be substantially different from that in a different one, and a predatory temperament in one of them may require several generations of prosperity before surrounding communities are safe from attack. You and I differ for nearly any trait measured and less controversially but perhaps less accurately, those differences are frequently attributed to differences in our rearing. However, groups differ for the same reasons that individuals differ: the partnerships between genes and the opportunities that exist for them. An example: Skomer voles are easily tamed, Bank voles are not but Skomers are only tame if reared by a Skomer mother. Bank voles, in contrast, are skittish critters no matter what mother they had. Is there a “universal Skomer nature”? Another example: your cells are genetic twins of each other yet your one set of genes produces different characteristics in relation to the part of your body where they

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work. Similarly, one gene can make legs, antenna, or wings depending on where it lives on a fly. (Carroll, Grenier, and Weatherbee, 2001) Are some of the structures below your navel a mirror of those above it? I suggest that the cards you have, your psychological adaptations, likely occur in most members of every culture but 1) they are not expressed with equal intensity in every individual and 2) very few individuals will have a complete deck or even an identical one to someone else. Given a large enough group, however, it is likely that at least one member will relish a particular task no matter what it is and even the most impaired will have some things they do well. Compensating deals sprout like mushrooms and the greatest handicap may be that of mismanaging alliances!70 Some of my clients are skilled tool users (even at age six years), others are not. Some of them grow plants well; others kill them equally well. Baby sitting is second nature to some; alien to others. Some are skilled readers of people’s feelings; others, not all of them males, appear to be brain damaged with respect to empathy. A few of my young patients could almost duplicate an F16 jet with Legos and make it fly; others have little skill or patience for such activity. A few of them are expert when catching a cold football on an icy field; others cannot catch anything but colds. Still others read, remember, and calculate baseball standings even though they have problems with academic math. I even know of a preadolescent male who enjoys cleaning the family toilet! I don’t believe that any of these differences result exclusively from parental lectures but from the interactions between talents and opportunities. A father may teach his son to hunt but that son also rewards or punishes his father for those lessons.71 It is as if parents sow dandelions or daisies and parental nurturing makes robust dandelions or tall daisies but will not turn one into the other.

70 Clinical research is entirely consistent with this idea: both the externalizing and internalizing disorders pivot on equity in social exchanges. “Fitness” is, after all, not always about being stronger or smarter but using your tooth, claw, and tongue to enhance similarity and influence and, thereby, manage, either by yourself or through partnerships, the nest that you make. 71 My father took me hunting only once, perhaps nudged into it by my mother, but he and my mother later agreed that I needed paper, pens, and crayons more than shivering on a cypress stump at 3 am in a Georgia swamp! On the other hand, I treasured my set of toy pistols and spent hours stalking between houses and shooting imaginary bad guys. Shooting an animal was repugnant, but plugging the kid next door, a pleasure! And I neither waited for hours for him to appear nor pretended to be cold.

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Dinichism: Women Climb (Some of Them!) “The gravest consequence of the chromosome difference between the sexes is, however, that we have to regard the two sexes as no less different genetically than two related species.… But the two sexes must always belong to the same species … because they take their chromosomes from the same pool.” Darlington, 1953, 308-309. Well … maybe not always. The small Hispanic woman climbed high on a stool, reached overhead, and unhooked the drapes and uncovered the jewelry she was supposed to sell. A very tall, very solid, very black male, a guard, told her stay off the stool, that what she did was dangerous. She was confused about his concern and he was confused that she was confused. I had my laptop and went on typing … “Regardless of the ultimate evolutionary explanations, it seems incontrovertible that males and females evolved under some similar, and some very different pressures. We should therefore expect a priori that their brain organization will be both similar in some respects, and markedly different in others. This is precisely the situation suggested by the sex difference literature.” (Cahill, 2006, 480)

Leg structure differed in A. afarensis males and females that lived between six million and two million years ago. (Coss and Moore, 1998) These differences in leg and ankle fossils line up with differences in the school yard behavior of our young sons and daughters and the answers they give to questions about escaping from big cats as they might have done in Pleistocene Africa.72 These patterns suggest “dinichism.” That is, differences in physical structures reflect separate environments for males and females. This lode has been mined by at least a dozen scholars since the mid-1980s: their systematic replication of each other’s work creates an emergent network of facts and opinions. It also hints of multiple discoveries yet to be made in regard to relic behaviors from our distant past. That is, the explorations of ancestors show up in fossilized bones and in fossilized conduct. Coss and Moore (1998; 2002) found that modern girls, between four and six years old, climb playground equipment more often than little boys and are better 72 RaffError! Bookmark not defined. (1996) suggests that DNA sequences may be intact for as long as five million years after their last expression. Can it happen for behavior? Almost certainly! The Dikika baby, for example, appears to have a mosaic of features, including shoulder blades that match those of a tree-dweller but legs and feet consistent with walking. (//www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0611/feature6/index. html) There are cultural ramifications: Ballet dancers not only get up high but give an illusion of flight when they perform en pointe or ecute grand jetes or Pas de Chats (//en.wikipedia.org/Ballet,12/15/2006)

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at it. (See also Coss and Goldthwaite, 1995.) In computer simulations, girls prefer going out further on small branches that would not support larger predators such as leopards or, for that matter, larger males. Such differences are most evident at approximately age six years. In addition, small children and adults in the United States prefer an unbrowsed Acacia Thorn Tree to the shapes of an Australian Pine, a Fever Tree [Acacia xanthophloea], or unbrowsed Acacia for the purposes of safety from lions or staying cool. (Orians and Heerwagen, 1992) How much of our modern concern for trees comes from our depending on them for shade, as clues for water, and as an escape from cats? Coss and Moore (1998, 2002) also asked sixty-seven Israeli girls and boys to view computer simulations for entering a narrow crevice, climbing a high boulder, or climbing an Acacia tree. The students were next asked to choose where to go to “feel safe from a lion.” Boys and girls both preferred to climb a tree but girls were more likely to do so (fifty-eight percent vs. thirty-six percent). The boys, on the other hand, were more likely than girls to scale a boulder. The research findings were nearly identical for American, Japanese, and Israeli children. Furthermore, females (adult or child) are more apt to be fearful of harmful beings underneath their bed whereas males expect harm to come from the side. Dinichism continues, often unassessed, ignored, or denied. There is open acceptance in American culture of “chick” and “guy” movies, men and women in Barnes and Noble stores appear to shop in different sections, and in different stores in shopping centers. While females run marathons and play tennis, they almost always do so against other females. It also appears true that males, often impulsive ones, challenge dangers and females follow along when most of the nasty aborigines are scattered or when Harleys have electric starters. Female motorcyclists, however, still have more difficulty than males when taking a riding class but their market influence should lead to not only to a different choice of colors and fewer flame-and-skull decorations but also a class of bikes that are quick and require less upper body strength. Females, more recently, outnumber males in college, in middle management, and, probably, in positions as editors. More women drive trucks than before and seven will compete this year, for the first time, in the national truckers rodeo that measures speed and accuracy in handling a big rig. There are no surprises here: men and women continue to exploit different sides of a very narrow phase transition, sometimes by talent and collaboration with other females, sometimes by waiting for males to sandpaper, paint, and varnish the splinters, and sometimes by crying “Unfair!”

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rebellion Gifted, manic Susie squirmed and waved long dark lashes up and down over huge blue eyes. She was about ten years old and chattered without punctuation marks. “My sister and I like to climb the walls.” “No! I thought that’s something only your parents did when you skipped homework!” She didn’t hesitate. “Sure! I put my back against one wall and my feet on the other side, or I can wet my hands and feet and go up, one foot and one hand on each wall. I learned about wetting my hands and feet when dad complained about dirty marks on the walls. My sister and I take turns being on top. I like to get up high above the top edge of the door and stay there for ten or fifteen minutes.” I don’t remember any little boys who did the same thing.

More than forty years ago, a second girl climbed walls when she lived in Montana with her mother, brother, and two sisters. That is, she scooched up to the hall’s ceiling and wedged herself in position for a half-hour’s private dreams. Diane, later a star gymnast in high school, wanted to be a ballet dancer but marriage, work, and a daughter put dancing on hold. She started lessons in her early thirties and graduated to pointe at thirty-six. Blisters and muscle strain tormented her body and condescension from much younger dancers tormented her mind. (Can you imagine going to dance class with a gang of eight-year-old girls?) She gained only four more inches of physical height but worlds of mental stature. Now fiftyfive years old, she still climbs emotionally as she teaches, learns new steps, and looks forward to her next performance. She can also peel a banana with her toes (I cannot but suspect that most women can—after all, they came out of the trees later then men), lead Bible fellowships, speak in tongues, and was president of a labor union! All this from a tree-loving mind. As for the men’s niche in ballet—one story is that they started as posts and platforms that put women up in the air. Few volunteer for the ballet even today when they are also allowed to leap up high. As for me, I found a niche on the ground, one suited to my sparse frame, and I learned to build sets quickly and cheaply that combined strength with lightness. Whether as psychologist or carpenter, I’m a member of a stage crew that helps women get up high.

3rd Quarter: Chosen Environments: Sync, and Disputes “The four stages of belief: 1) this is worthless nonsense; 2) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; 3) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.” J. B. S. Haldane. Journal of Genetics 58, 464 (1963) (//en.wikiquote. org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane)

Explaining or Predicting “William James’s choice of occupation is worthy of attention because … his choice was a choosing. He was the creature or victim of circumstance in none but the most superficial sense. He fed and nourished himself upon circumstance.” (Perry, 1954, 43)

Time’s window is neither clear nor even whether you look forward or back. Yesterday and tomorrow are your creations, filtered through lenses that you rarely notice, question, or remove. Your truths about yesterday change even more when you review them ten years past tomorrow, and tomorrow is less mysterious if you’ve had a career of disasters for ten years before yesterday. In spite of these distortions, you challenge the idea that “whatever will be, will be” and, whenever possible, ask shamans for a peek at tomorrow’s paper. If environment “determined” all that you are, then nature would redesign you from scratch each generation. Genes, however, remember what Mother did last week when she makes things that must manage next week. Genes, instincts, parents, personal reasoning, and human culture save time and lives when they stabilize successive generations and vary in small steps in an exploratory manner. (Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998; 2006; Raff, 1996; Brody, 1998; 1999, 2000)73 All provide tactics for you to grow, mature, reproduce, and raise half-copies of yourself. 73 Culture generally resists change: science is perhaps the exception, one that sanctions exploration and gives rules for it. Methods are saved, shamans and contents change somewhat peacefully.

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Thus, your child’s fidgets, character, aversions, and predilections will usually be a collage of what can be found in you, your mate, and your parents. Other characteristics, intelligence for example, may be an average of mom and dad and easier to predict than if it were a duplicate of either parent. The million dollars from a penny slot machine can, nonetheless, arrive with any child and parents learn they sired a genius when, like the slot machine, he announces himself to be a jackpot. (Steptoe, 1998) Rebellion, nonetheless, finds merit in Galton’s idea of a behavioral and emotional history of parents and grandparents, available to every person, one not used for making predictions but for identifying options and reinterpreting old mistakes. (Galton, 1883/1911) It also suggests that, if given your parents’s opportunities, you will replay portions of their life and that, if given your opportunities, they might have lived much of yours. As for old talents with new options? The outcomes will be explained but, thankfully, most of them never predicted nor imposed by your society rather than by your talents. The surprise? Half the time your child is apt to do what you did forty years earlier but never told him. Not understanding your differences, he will also yell, “Don’t tell me what to do!”

From Physics and Biology to Biography The first half of Rebellion described quirky environments; its second peeks at their quirky inhabitants, a few of them known, many of them anonymous, but all of them collectors and arrangers of beliefs, possessions, and territories. Chapter 7, “We’re all Twins,” details the synchrony between monozygotic twins and between members of the same family who, in particular ways, act very much as if they were also a “twin” of a sibling, a parent, or a grandparent. “We’re All Twins” also relies on biographies to reveal the sync between an individual, his family, and his chosen environments: they also feed your instinctive chip-for-gossip with easily-remembered anecdotes. Emma Darwin, for example, read biographies to her husband, Charles. Diner and barbershop gossip, bookstore and movie plots, and the evening news reflect that same fascination. If Darwin lived today, you might catch him scanning trash magazines at a check-out while Emma and the older girls collected the groceries. Second, familiarity usually helps when you need to rearrange ideas and most of Rebellion’s characters will be similar to people you know! Third, the pattern-maker that helps you to play poker will also look for patterns in the choices made by Charles Darwin, his grandfather Erasmus, William James and one of his three brothers, the writer Henry James, and scientists Mary Leakey, Richard Feynman, Loren Eiseley, and Rita Levi-Montalcini. Finally, those of you who found the first half taxing should find the second one easier going!

Chapter Seven We’re All Twins74 “… the whole business of crossing-over and recombination, superimposed upon mutation, is a means of exploiting uncertainty, for using it as the basis of deterministic biological change, of rapid and efficient adaptation of an unlimited lineage of sexually reproducing individual. But underneath this system is another. This is a system which has been evolved as a means of abolishing uncertainty in the development of the individual.” C. D. Darlington, 1953, 208. “Omigod, I’m turning into my parents,” Steven Pinker (2002) “What a wonderful thing it is that the drop of seed from which we are produced should carry in itself the impression not only of the bodily form but also of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers. Where can that drop of fluid contain that infinite number of forms? And how can they convey these resemblances with so regular and heedless a course that the son will be like his great-grandfather, the nephew like his uncle?” Quoted in Cohen, 1999, 99. Essays of Michel de Montaigne, See also: Chapter XIII. Of the Resemblance of children to their Fathers.://oregonstate. edu/instruct/phl302/texts/montaigne/montaigne-essays—3.html

Identical twins provide a mass of awkward facts for any who dispute biology’s contribution to individualism; or that Nature is carpenter, electrician, and writer but one who arranged multiple tools for you in case your circumstances change. Under stress, you are one person, you in a hammock are another person but in either situation, you tend to replay the lines and expressions, the entrances and exits, of your parents and grandparents. Even the lady who refuses to be like her abusive father uses his iron will not to be iron-willed! (And when she fails, as she frequently does, is it a failure or a victory? Or, hopefully, has she used a rigid characteristic in a constructive way?) 74 This chapter has been told in book form, and about an army of thousands, by Nancy Segal (1999) Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us about Human Behavior. NY: Dutton. 111

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You see your parents and grandparents every morning in your bathroom mirror. Your dad’s nose travels above mom’s mouth and jaw. Not only his brow but also his frowns are there. Further, you say to your spouse or child the things that your parents said, that you hated at the time, and swore never to repeat. The mixture of what you see, remember, and plan makes windows to both your probable pasts and futures. That mix also explains the majority of rebellions—they pivot on genetic differences and make so much sense to the rebellious. That mixture also suggests why you cannot, despite your best efforts, always make your partner happy. We’re all twins of our self. After four hundred sixty years, however, Montaigne’s question is unanswered! Identical twins sometimes grow up away from each other but look and act alike and do so in spite of tremendous differences in rearing environments. On the other hand, fraternal twins reared in the same prenatal and postnatal containers are no more similar than non twin siblings. (Bouchard, et al., 1990; Dunn and Plomin, 1990; Scarr, 1992; Rowe, 1994; Segal, 1999; Plomin et al, 2000) It is also true that differences in the traits of monozygotic twins are, on the average, twice that observed in dizygotic twins, which is expected because the average relatedness in monozygotic twins is twice that in dizygotic and this pattern occurs regardless of whether the twins were reared together or apart. Furthermore, children adopted when very young resemble their natural parents more than their adoptive ones. (Harris, 1998; Cohen, 1999) Implication: what science tells you about the origins of twins applies to you individually. That is, you usually display characteristics that appear in your immediate family for the last two and for the next two generations and in ways that approximate the degree of relatedness between you. Each of you is a “twin” who unfolds in a fairly specific way in a fairly wide range of settings from which you arrange your personal environment. The things that you choose multiply the expression of whatever you already carry. No two individuals, therefore, make the same environment. Furthermore, constraints exist in you that shape what you make, constraints that can be seen as opportunities or fences. (Gould, 2002) Personal will appears!

About Studies of Twins Behavior genetics is not about absolute measurements but about the changes in a measure that occur as its context changes. First, absolute measures change with the ruler that is used and, second, the equations for change are simpler than the equations for absolute quantities. The important fact is not the absolute size of an elk but whether elk become more or fewer or gets larger or smaller with each generation. Interviews, behavior observations, personality measures, classroom and work

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performance, physiological data, and sometimes computer-driven scanners compare changes in the measurable traits of identical twins (100% alike, in theory, in their DNA sequences), fraternal twins (50% alike), non twin siblings (50% alike), children with parents (50% similar), children with grandparents and half-siblings (25% similar), or children with adopted siblings or children with adoptive parents (0% similar). (Fries et al, 2000; Plomin, 1994; Bouchard et al, 1990) In nearly every case, no matter what is measured, the degree of similarity between individuals parallels the similarity they share in family relationships.

Some Fine Points for Interpreting Twins Studies Please remember. • The behavior genetics research has benefited from the great hostility that it elicits because part of the challenge for behavior geneticists has been to discover errors before a critic does. They share extraordinary caution, goals, and teamwork, frequently across Europe, the United States, and Australia and on data bases that consist of tens of thousands of individuals. As elsewhere in evolution, a good predator either kills you or makes you better! • Like astronomy, twins research involves measuring individuals as you find them rather than mixing and matching their genes and environments in a random manner. There will always be the possibility of multiple contributors making adjustments to the same set or sets of genes so that you get not an outcome but outcomes. • Similarity is common in nature, identity is almost nonexistent. Perhaps not even sequences of genes that had the same template will always be found “identical.” Along these lines, genetic contributions differ when environments switch on one DNA sequence while switching off another. When we discuss “genotype,” do we refer to a physical gene or only to the active genes? (See Haig, 1997, for more options!) The effective triggers for different sequences of development are still being identified but so far might include the events that also regulate on-going genetic activity: heat shock, toxins, viral contributions, drought, food supply, hormonal state, and even birdsong. (Plomin, 1994; Gould, 2002; Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005; Carroll 2004, 2006) As Plomin (1994) remarked, the more we learn about genes, the more we learn about how environments work. • A genetic contribution may change with the individual’s developmental age. For example, a younger child keeps sync with his environment mostly through

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his parents but he or she gets more influence when just a little older. Shared environments—parents, homes, and schools—become less influential as the child goes from the eighth birthday (heritability roughly 0.26 for some measurable traits) to the eighteenth (heritability approaches zero). Nonshared environments, those arranged by the child, become more influential. Segal (2007) cites nine independent studies that support these trends for intelligence. See also Cohen (1999) and Plomin, (1994). • OGOD, one gene, one disorder, is out of favor as an explanation for most heritable psychological traits except for some developmental disabilities. In behavioral research, “QTL” (Quantitative Trait Locus) refers to a network of interacting genes that may, because they have similar functions, be located relatively close together. The QTL is conceived as a network of many genes, each of which make a relatively small contribution to the trait (for example, personality traits such as extraversion, openness, emotionality, agreeableness, or conscientiousness). “Gene for” remains a useful concept for taproom hypotheses but its empirical referent is often a web of interacting components. (DeFries et al, 2000; Plomin et al, 2003) Further, as with other networks and most variables in the social sciences, many genes have tiny effects and a few have results that will frighten mothers. • Life has an annoying property of not working when you unhook its fasteners. And more annoying, it continues not working when you put them back together! You might say what a gene is by what it does but if you tease it apart from its neighbors, then it will no longer do what it did! Even within a cell, genes require the environment of other genes. • Except for elementary particles that no one can see, nature never makes two of anything identical. Most computations of heritability, however, assume that monozygotic twins have identical DNA sequences but a failure to observe differences, however, is no guarantee that they doesn’t exist. Furthermore, two individuals may have “identical” sequences but differences in experience switch some DNA sequences on or off. (Carroll, 2004; Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005; Carroll 2006; Freeman et al, 2006; Fraga et al, 2005) (Prediction: someone, someday, will find non-identical DNA sequences that should have been identical! And once you know where to look and how, worlds of orderly variation will be found.) • Behavior genetics computes heritability, measured by differences in the outcomes from genetic contributions, not their absolute values. As Lewontin (1985/2001) pointed out, one of Darwin’s fundamental insights was to notice

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that changes in variance were the productive thing to watch. (See also Fisher 1930/1958; Lotka 1924/1956; Provine 1971/2001) • Some traits, such as the number of your eyes, ears, or noses, depend on genes but possess very low heritability because, for all practical purposes, everyone has the same number. For heritability to be greater than zero, some of you would have to have two or three noses! Despite zero heritability, the lack of a Pax-6 transcription gene means no eyes; Pax-6 can also install a functional eye on a fly’s wing or leg, and put an insect eye on a fly but a round, brown one on a mouse. (Jacob, 1998; Carroll, 2004, 2006) And perhaps most peculiar, the fly’s Pax-6 works in a mouse and that from the mouse works in a fly! • Approximately three thousand human genes have multiple duplicates whose functions and activity are unknown. (Freeman et al, 2006) The genes that survive may be the ones that—like a secretary in a lawyer’s office—always make a copy! After all, copying is the first step in Raff ’s model! • Genetic organizations, thus, can be either fragile or sturdy depending on the kinds of challenges they meet. This more complex version of a gene sees them working in “networks of weakly interacting forces” (Lewontin, 2000; Kauffman, 1993) that, because of the durability and opportunism of networks, can make twins who are often the same but often different in unpredictable ways.

Monozygotic Twins: “Different” Environments, “Same” Outcomes The study, “Sources of human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart,” by Thomas Bouchard and his team, was announced in Science, one of the most respected and well-refereed publications in the world. (Bouchard et al, 1990) Unlike cold fusion, Bouchard’s findings were of large effect, elaborately detailed, controlled against observer bias, and soon reproduced by teams in Colorado and Virginia, Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Australia. Bouchard and his team assessed identical twins reared apart and identical twins reared together. The heritabilities for twins reared together and twins reared apart ranged between 0.90 and 1.21 for sixteen of twenty-two measures taken! And, as sync fans would predict, rearing under the same roof usually magnified, consistently if slightly, the similarities achieved by identical twins reared apart. Bouchard’s group measured height and weight, the number of finger ridges, brain alpha activity, systolic blood pressure, heart rate, and electrodermal response amplitude and its speed of habituation. They assessed information processing (reaction time, acquisition speed, and spatial processing), WAIS I.Q., special mental abilities, and personality. (Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire and

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the California Psychological Inventory) The Strong Campbell Interest Inventory, the Jackson Vocational Interest Survey, and the Jackson Vocational Interest Survey were administered. The Minnesota team compared religiosity on two measures: fourteen items that related to non religious social attitudes, and responses to a traditionalism scale. Michael Bailey (1998, 219) put it well: “… the convincing replicable demonstration that a well-measured behavioral trait has a heritability of zero would be much more interesting. Appreciable genetic variation underlying behavioral variation is the rule, not the exception.” Plomin (1994) cites reports of significant heritability for children’s perceptions of their parents, perceived closeness to siblings, choice of peers, friend and teacher attributes, perception of social support, accidents by age three years, time spent watching television, drug exposure, child rearing practices, socioeconomic status, and education, and personal crises in which the individual initiated the situation. He lists one to six references for each of these topics.75 Monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic (DZ) on the “Big Five” personality characteristics of Emotionality, Extraversion, Amiability, Conscientiousness, and Openness. (Cohen, 1999; Loehlin, 1992) Monozygotic twins make more similar errors on tests than DZ and are more likely to be accused of cheating from each other. (Segal, 1999) Monozygotic are also more similar in verbal and nonverbal items on intelligence and achievement tests. Attention Deficit, Hyperactivity Disorder has a genetic loading between 0.60-0.90 for parent ratings and 0.40-0.75 for teacher ratings (Kent, 2004) and this disorder should contribute not only impulsive behaviors but make the consequences for them more likely. (There is, therefore, a heritability for sitting in the principal’s office!) Heritability for attitudes toward traditionalism, sex, and religion are usually about 0.50 and about 0.15-0.30 for taxes, the military, and political interest. (Martin et al, 1986; Kirk, Eaves, and Martin, 1999; Eaves et al, 1999)76 In regard to psychological traits, The list grows most steadily in regard to intelligence (Plomin, 1994; DeFries et al, 2000; Plomin et al, 2003), personality and social attitudes (Eaves et al, 1999), aggression (Rowe, 1994, 2002; Wasserman 75 The Queensland Institute for Medical Research (//genepi.qimr.edu.au/) lists five hundred twenty-one papers, just from that Institute, on genetic contributions to epidemiology—whether in the realm of physiology or social behavior—starting with one paper in 1974, forty-eight in 2006, and thirty-four so far as of October 2007!) 76 A case can be made that any one of these personality factors may predict several, more specific, outcomes. For example, Rowe’s early findings on the similarity of childhood memories in identical twins reared apart may pivot on shared temperamental similarities.

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and Wachbroit, 2001; Hudziak et al, 2003; Tremblay, Hartup, and Archer (2005), Nelson 2006), depression, anxiety, and suicide (Mann, 1998; Jamison, 1999; Lesch, 2003; Baldessarini and Hennen, 2004; Meyer-Lindenberg et al., 2006; Colt, 2006) and for a growing list of topics in personality, learning disabilities, psychopharmacology, and psychopathology. (Plomin et al, 2003) Maes et al. (1998) even found that people choose mates for reasons of shared psychopathology!77

Soul Mates: The Details in Pairs of Monozygotic Twins Reared Apart “… the best guess we could make about the psychological and physical traits of another person, without interviewing him or her directly, would be based upon characteristics of the person’s MZ twin (if one could be found). Nothing we might discover about conditions of rearing, schooling, neighborhood, religion, or school yard friends would come close to the usefulness of an MZ twin in providing information about this person’s height, weight, eye color, temperament, mental illness, habits, intelligence, values, or nearly any other trait.” (Rowe, 1994, 38.)

Everyone has seen how much twins can look and act alike. Explanations, however, often include, “Of course, they grew up in the same home.” Bouchard and his team must have shouted a collective “hot damn!” when they discovered the Springer twins who were separated at approximately one month of age and reared nearly 100 miles apart in Ohio. When reunited thirty-nine years later, Jim Lewis and Jim Springer both had dark hair, stood six feet tall, and weighed 180 pounds. They were nearly identical in vocal mannerisms, walk, gestures, high blood pressure, migraines, and vasectomies! They both married first a Linda and, second, a Betty, drove Chevrolets, drank Miller Lite, smoked Salems, and vacationed on the same beach in Florida. They had almost the same heart rates, EEG patterns, and I.Q. scores. They both hated baseball and each of them diagnosed a bad wheel bearing while riding in Bouchard’s car. (Colt,1998, 40) The Springer twins were also alike in the way that they held dinner knives, bit fingernails, and lived in the only house in the block (each with a white bench surrounding a backyard tree). They had bruxism and anxious sleep patterns and enjoyed woodworking (miniature rockers or miniature picnic tables), rooting for 77 On the other hand, using a different set of measures, Trumbetta, Markowitz, and Gottesman (2006) found that heritability was least for mate choice at age 20 years, increased until age 40, but then dropped with each passing decade. And: “Contrary to expectations, husbands’s personality did not explain large portions of wives’s marital satisfaction beyond that explained by the wives’s personality” (Spotts et al., 2005) Guys! It ain’t our fault!

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stock car races, and leaving love notes around the house. (Wright L, 1997; Wright W, 1998) There are many variations on the Springers. Identical twins, Jack Yufe (reared Jewish in Trinidad and Israel) and Oskar Stohr (reared Catholic in Nazi Germany) were born in 1933, separated at about six months of age, and participated in Bouchard’s study in 1979. They first met at the airport. Both wore mustaches, shirts with epaulets and four front pockets filled with pens and pads. Oskar and Jack strung rubber bands on their wrists, read in restaurants, read magazines from back to front, dozed rapidly in front of a television, dipped buttered toast into coffee, and flushed toilets before using them. They were both irritable and could be temperamentally explosive. (Wright L, 1997; Wright W, 1998) Both of them sneezed loudly to make people laugh in tense situations. (Segal, 1999) Lykken et al (1992) found some monozygotic twins that were similar in story telling, avoiding controversial topics, giggling, not voting because of being uninformed about politics, and, in one pair, preferences for Vademecum toothpaste, Canoe fragrance, Vitalis hair conditioner, and Lucky Strike cigarettes. One pair (I believe, Yufe and Stohr), without informing each other and from separate cities, swapped identical gifts by mail.78 Two female and two male pairs had speech difficulties, four pair feared heights. Two women in one pair wet the bed until twelve years old, had difficulty with severe depression, a history of amphetamine abuse, and had recurring bad dreams of her mouth filled with doorknobs, needles, and fishhooks. Members of one pair were afraid to go into a testing chamber unless the door was wired open. One pair of women walked in ocean surf but only backwards and only up to their knees. One pair repetitively counted passing objects. These effects are rare in fraternal twins. For example, Lykken’s team found only one pair of fraternal twins who showed strong resemblances: they shared a prison record, drug abuse, and multiple tattoos!79 78 Francis Galton remarked on the close association of ideas shared by identical twins. In eleven of thirty-five pairs, he noticed the same remarks, the same song at the same moment, and one twin often began a sentence to be finished by the other. As for swapping gifts, Twin A bought a set of champagne glasses in Scotland for Twin B; B bought the same pattern for A but in England. (1883/1907/1911) Inquiry into Human Faculty. NY: Dutton, 165) 79 This research, however, has a cow lick: there appears to be no way to predict which traits will match and which will not as you move from one pair of monozygotic twins to another. Similarities nearly always exist but there’s a coin tossed for which similarities appear. There must be a student, a soulmate to Ed Wilson, who will sort through this tangle and put it in order.

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Similarities between Non Twins and Their Parents “A gentleman of considerable position was found by his wife to have the curious trick, when he lay fast asleep on his back in bed, of raising his right arm slowly in front of his face, up to his forehead, and then dropping it with a jerk, so the wrist fell heavily on the bridge of his nose … many years after his death, his son married a lady who had never heard of the family incident. She, however, observed precisely the same peculiarity in her husband … One of his children, a girl, has inherited the same trick.” Francis Galton (in Weiner, 1999, 20–21)

Biographies “Why did Darwin value biography so highly? His theories are about individuals, especially their development over the life-span. Natural selection, as Darwin fully appreciated, acts on the entire life course. Properly told, Darwinian narratives are biographies.” Sulloway, 1996, 117–118.

Scientists exchange personal stories, use them to open or close a talk, or to remember a point reached by one of their friends but keep such stories out of the imposed environment of a scientific paper. First, biographies are intended to entertain, reinforce, and establish their author’s viewpoint, reputation, and wealth. Second, the story takes on a life of its own when it adjusts to please a cash register. Third, publishers try to print only what they can sell and biographies command more of the market than science books do. Finally, biographies share words generously but neglect scientific methods, systematic graphs and tables of data, and technical language. Nonetheless, biographies and clinical anecdotes suggest that a bridge exists between the experiences of identical twins those of singletons. Stories about singletons establish their identity, likeability, secrets, loves, and flaws; the twins studies suggest that inheritance contributes strongly to all of those things. Many us, as Darwin probably did, sometimes find biographies to be contexts for discovery. Thus, information wakens my pattern-maker that, in turn, ignores my internal editor, and tries to rearrange a bit of the chaos about whom you and I might be.

William James (1842–1910) and Henry James (1843–1916) William (Will) and Henry (Harry) James were the eldest of five children, born between 1842–1848 to Henry James, Sr., and Mary Walsh James. Will, Harry, Wilkie, Bob, and Alice were checkerboards of their parent’s religious interests, sociability, writing ability, emotional stability, anxiety, hypochondria, and financial acumen. Again, there was similarity and variation between these characters. Will explored being an artist, biologist, physician, neurologist, psychologist, and phi-

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losopher. While he searched with uninterrupted money and self-involvement, his zeal took its turns with physical weakness, extreme self-doubt, and depression. Harry, a year younger than Will, was a literary critic, novelist, and playwright but more reserved, careful, and detailed in his approach to relationships and writing. He was more stable in his career choices, had a smaller, although carefully chosen, circle of friends, and achieved fame decades before his older brother. How different from Will? Not necessarily! Rebecca West remarked that William gave us studies in philosophy as though they were fiction while Harry wrote fiction as if studies in philosophy. (Richardson, 2006) Will and Harry believed what no physiologist believes today, that human eyes, ears, and fingertips give a trustworthy look through nature’s window. Thus, Harry is said to have revised American literary realism, Will did the same for American psychology, creating one both individual and developmental and very distinct from the compulsive measurements of group averages undertaken by Wilhelm Wundt in Germany and that led to formal experimental psychology. James traveled often and read widely in philosophy, science, and psychology and wrote his admiration for and objections to whatever he read. His bibliography is nearly fifty pages long and includes essays about individualism, psychology, religion, psychic phenomena, and life after death! (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_ James. 11/05/2007) Harry wrote twenty-two novels, one hundred twelve stories and short novels, seven books of literary criticism, three autobiographies, and three plays. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_James. 11/05/2007) Their father, Henry James, Sr., wrote about great truths but had to find his own. He also pursued relationships with prominent, serious writers, theologians, philosophers, and novelists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Thackeray, and Thomas Carlyle. Harry settled in London, achieved prominence from the character of his writing, and was sought by the literati rather than courting them. Will’s allies, also serious writers, many of them recruited at Harvard, included Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sanders Peirce, George Santayana, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, James Frazer, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, and Carl Jung. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_James_Sr. 11/05/2007) Perry (1954, 33–34) found Will and Henry James, Sr., to be from one mold: “Their similarity of temperament predisposed father and son to the same style of utterance. William was also a talking writer, with a genius for picturesque epithets, and a tendency to vivid coloring and extreme freedom of manner. William, too, was one who wrote primarily to express convictions,

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giving the result a peculiar quality of sincerity. Like his father he presented philosophy in the form of literature, and invited the attention of lovers of literature, who thereupon found themselves unequal to the philosophy. Hence W. D. Howells, accustomed to literature rather than to philosophy, found that William’s Pragmatism was brilliant but not clear, ‘like his father, who wrote the Secret of Swedenborg and kept it.’”80, 81 Will and his father were teachers, explorers, and tireless philosophical deviants, both of them self-involved, emotionally labile, and looking for one or another grand explanation for physical and psychological events. My impression is that Will was most creative when challenging another thinker and he may have read so widely and intently in order to arrange his own ideas by discovering points of disagreement! Further, as is true for many lively males, however far Will and his father orbited and however much they blustered, they inevitably circled around quiet Mary Walsh James.

Getting to Know Mary Walsh James “It is, of course, a grief to me, in writing this book, that circumstances make it impossible to estimate the influence of the individual peculiarities of the mother—for good or bad—upon her offspring. They appear to me, for the reasons stated, to be important elements in the inquiry as those of the father, and yet I am obligated to completely ignore them in the vast majority of instances, on account of the lack of reliable information.” (Galton, 1892, 104)

Mary’s family supplied not only the first house for the James gang but also, until she died, the psychological posts and beams that sheltered all of them. For example, Henry’s children sometimes had difficulty explaining what their father did for 80 Henry senior’s genes found environments. According to Wikipedia, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) declared himself a prophet, directed by Jesus to interpret the Bible and predict the Second Coming. Twenty years of Swedenborg’s contributions to science and engineering were displaced by his religious theories, themselves inspired by fasting and sleep deprivation, about how the soul connected to the body as well as by his interests in angels and demons. Swedenborg’s ideas attracted not only William Blake and Carl Jung but also Johnny Appleseed! (en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Swedenborg, 6/29/2007) Henry Sr. (1811–1882) and Swedenborg would probably have thought about similar things even if they were born in the reverse order! William’s own spiritual interests included looking for evidence of life after death, an interest consistent with his father’s passions. (Blum, 2006) 81 Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, also discovered Mark Twain, the prototypical rebel and opportunist, and introduced him to the rest of America! (Powers, 2005)

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a living and Mary made up their cover stories. Further, like many mothers, she was appreciated most by her family after she died. Nonetheless, she might still be found in some of the contrasts between her children, the conflicts within each of them, and their dissimilarities from their father. According to Perry: “The father was fundamentally robust, the son (William) relatively frail, with long periods of bodily disability and neurasthenia. There was more of sheer aboriginal force in the father, while the son depended more on the temper and edge of his instruments. The other difference is no less unmistakable, but more difficult to describe. The father was, as we have seen, an eccentric … William James was more mundane, more highly socialized, and had more of what men call ‘taste.’ He had queer ideas, but he was not queer. With all his philosophical detachment he knew instinctively how to meet the world on its own terms, how to make himself understood, and how to be free and spirited without transgressing the accepted norms of convention or polite intercourse. While the father had his moments of spiritual inebriety, the son was more securely restrained.” Dunn and Plomin (1990) argue that differences in siblings reflect differences in genes: If so, then the contrasts between Henry James, Sr., and those between his children might be a window through which we glimpse aspects of Mary Walsh James, their mother. Both Perry (1954) and Richardson (2006), however, give limited attention to her in nearly 500 pages of history and anecdotes about Will, his father, and his paternal grandfather. If you could look in Will’s and Harry’s mirrors and subtract their father, how much of their mother, Mary Walsh James, would you meet? We are also comparatively ignorant about Susannah Wedgwood (Charles’s mother) or about Mary Howard (Erasmus Darwin’s first wife and Charles Darwin’s grandmother) or about Elizabeth Pole (Erasmus Darwin’s third wife and Francis Galton’s grandmother). Even Mary Leakey gives few details about her mother! We know these women dimly through the contrasts in their children and grandchildren. On the other hand, given that assortative mating for psychopathology means that people with similar quirks find each other, we may see mothers reflected in the records of fathers. Thomas Henry Huxley—an exception—acknowledged his mother in his brief autobiography:

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“My mother was a slender brunette, of an emotional and energetic temperament, and possessed of the most piercing black eyes I have ever saw in a woman’s head. With no more education than other women of the middle classes in her day, she had an excellent mental capacity. Her most distinguishing characteristic, however, was her extreme rapidity of thought. If one ventured to suggest that she had not taken much time to arrive at any conclusion, she would say, ‘I cannot help it, things flash across me.’ That peculiarity has been passed on to me in full strength; it has often stood me in good stead; it has sometimes played me sad tricks; and it has always been a danger. But after all, if my time were to come over again, there is nothing I would less willingly part with than my inheritance of mother wit.” (de Beer, 1983, 101)

Grandparents “My handwriting same as grandfather” (Darwin, 1838, cited in Weiner, 1999, 3) “Another fact in heredity may also be illustrated by the islands and islets; namely, that the child often resembles an ancestor in some feature or character that neither of his parents personally possessed.” Galton (1889/1997, 11) “Will you laugh … like your mother … sigh like your old man, Will some things skip a generation like I’ve heard they often can …” Marc Cohn, “The Things We’ve Handed Down.” from The Rainy Season, Atlantic, 1993.

Some family traits resemble a holiday fireworks display, a series of bursts rather than a steady light. Other traits arrive and depart in a gradual fashion as in the case of social prominence that can increase, peak, and ebb in a matter of three generations. (Galton, 1892/1972) In regard to prominent judges, twenty-six percent had a prominent father, seven and one-half percent had a prominent grandfather and fewer than one in a thousand had a prominent great grandparent. Approximately the same figures held whether prominence was tracked forward or backward in time. Galton found a similar pattern also for statesmen, military commanders, writers, scientists, musicians, painters, and theologians. Other characteristics appear to jump ahead in the genetic line, perhaps by the same devices that Mendel found in peas.

Mary Leakey (1913–1996) Mary Nicol Leakey shared her spirited temperament and her love for drawing and painting with her father, Erskine Nicol. He also had strong interests in Egyptology

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and traveled often and for long intervals. Erskin liked to observe archeological excavations and was a good friend to his daughter; thus, he took Mary to Upper Paleolithic sites in France and she enjoyed them immensely. Mary further shared a love for archeology with her mother’s father, John Frere, a love that seems to have skipped expression in her mother, Cecelia Frere Nicol, who, very unlike Mary, held to traditional standards for femininity and kindness. Mary was about thirteen years old when Erskine died and Cecelia enrolled her in a convent: “Good Catholic children go to good Catholic convents for their good Catholic education.” (Leakey, 1989, 31) The Convent of the Assumption in Kensington accepted Mary but Mary—already fluent in French but not in a Parisian dialect—argued with her French teacher. Mary also hid in the boiler room to avoid reading poetry in front of her class and refused her punishment, that of reading in front of the entire school. She was expelled and enrolled in a second convent, run by Ursuline nuns, after she and her mother moved to Wimbleton. The Ursulines expelled Mary because she “had not merely simulated a fit in the classroom, using soap to produce the symptom of frothing at the mouth, but that she had further deliberately caused an explosion in the chemistry lesson … the only real surprise is that I had paid enough attention in earlier chemistry classes to achieve what I did.” Some of this rule-breaking later served her well when she drew forth and responded to Louis Leakey’s amorous attentions. A classic plot in both soaps and evolutionary research—she was twenty-years-old, tall, slender, and female, an artist, and interested in paleontology; he was married, ten years older, and already famous although not wealthy. Louis dropped his wife, Frida, and took his assistant, Mary, to Lake Victoria in East Africa. They faced years of financial problems, long hot days, and tribal wars in surrounding territories. Nonetheless, in 1947–1948 Mary found thirty bone fragments that she assembled into the skull for Proconsul africanus, perhaps ancestor to the chimpanzee line, and estimated to have lived between twenty-seven and seventeen million years ago. (//en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Proconsul_%28genus%29. 09/16/2007) The Leakeys were the first to hunt for fossils and tools in the Olduvai Gorge where the exposed rock layers are more than two million years old. In 1959, she and her team found the skull that Louis named Zinjanthropus bosei (an Australopithecine approximately 1.75 million years old and later renamed Paranthorpus bosei. (Wood, 1992) In 1978, she participated in the discovery of a set of hominid footprints at Laetoli, Tanzania, that were roughly 3.6 million years old. A bipedal, heel-to-toe gait was evident as was the absence of a large separation between the first and second toes.

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Mary was a not only her father but also her maternal grandfather. That is, her mother’s father, John Frere, famous in England in the 1790s, found stone tools that predated the use of metals. His discoveries were published in 1800 but considered almost heresy for another sixty years. “John Frere is generally credited as being the first to suggest a very ancient date for Acheulean hand-axes. In 1797 he sent two examples to the Royal Academy in London from Hoxne in Suffolk. He had found them in prehistoric lake deposits along with the bones of extinct animals and concluded that they were made by people ‘who had not the use of metals’ and that they belonged to a ‘very ancient period indeed, even beyond the present world’. His ideas were ignored by his contemporaries however, who subscribed to a pre-Darwinism view of Human evolution (More at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheulean, 6/6/07;// home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~sfreer/jfrere.html)

As was done by her father and grandfather, Mary Leakey helped to rewrite our understanding of human history. She also received several honorary doctorates, including those from Yale and Oxford, and an award from the Royal Swedish Physiographic Society—the Linnaeus Medal, biology’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize. Leakey comments in her autobiography: “It would be tempting to stretch my faith in genetic inheritance to the point of claiming that my own interest in archaeology came naturally to me on the Frere side. I’m not prepared to do that though it is interesting that my cousin Sheppard Frere is also an archeologist, and retires this year from a chair at Oxford with a long and distinguished record of fieldwork and publication. I also approve thoroughly of the Frere tradition of being willing to put forward new and unwelcome views.” (Leakey, 1989, 14–15) Between pages 192–193 in her autobiography, there is a color photograph of Mary sitting on a stone ledge. She wears a white cotton hat, baggy blue slacks, a light colored shirt, socks but not shoes, and her glasses partially down her nose. She sits in the African sun, holds her chin in her left hand and, still defiant, holds the remnants of a cigar in her right while she possibly has thoughts—about the cigar and about human nature—similar to those of her father and grandfather.

Charles Darwin and Grandfather Erasmus Darwin “Belief in evolution, passed on to his son Robert and reincarnated in his grandson Charles, can be seen as the finest of Erasmus’s legacies. ‘Reincarnated’ may seem too strong a word, but I use it because I see such similarity of mind between Charles and his grandfather.” (King-Hele, 1999, 363)

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Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a prominent physician, poet, inventor, and a naturalist, argued for evolutionary processes in the formation of species and in ways that sometimes annoyed the clerics of his time. (King-Hele, 1999) Dr. Darwin stuttered and had marked social anxiety but managed professional and personal friendships with great skill; he was a very successful physician and businessman, entering into commercial projects with the pottery magnate, Josiah Wedgwood. Doctor Darwin was also famous for his dinner table: he was a very round gentleman and he ate in a semicircular hole, cut in the table so that he could reach everything he wanted! Charles, despite his own social anxiety, also had extensive networks of professional colleagues by correspondence. Both he and Erasmus enjoyed rational argument mixed with grand speculations about plant and animal emotions and about evolution. Erasmus, writing by hand, published one million words in eleven volumes; Charles, two million in twenty-three. (Erasmus had twelve legitimate and two illegitimate children; Charles, ten but all of them legitimate; Erasmus had a full-time medical practice, Charles was comfortably well-off because of inheritance and because of Emma Wedgwood’s £25,000 dowry.) Charles in eight years wrote four volumes on barnacles, Erasmus in eight years translated four volumes on Linneaus’s plant classifications. Both were fascinated by plant fertilization (Erasmus, one volume; Charles, three), plant movement and sensory abilities (Erasmus, one volume; Charles, three), geology (coral reefs, both men), and animal expression of emotions. (even by worms) Erasmus published Zoonomia in two volumes after hiding it for twenty-four years, Charles delayed his publication of On the Origin of Species for twenty. And, as might be expected, he had recurring bouts of depression, social withdrawal, digestive problems, and anxiety. (Quammen, 2006)

Fragments across Generations Jonathan Weiner tells about genetic similarities that crossed several generations in one family: “A computer operator from the south of France goes back to his ancestral village in Ethiopia. His family left Africa years before he was born. But when he meets his grandfather, who is the chief of the village of Shembe, three hundred miles from Addis Ababa, he sees that they not only look alike, they look at the world alike and move through the world alike.” (Weiner, 1999, 236) According to Weiner, the old man was so impressed that he made his grandson the next village chief. There are many such to be found. David Cohen (1999) tells of “Linda” who was separated early from her biological father and reared by her mother and stepfather who, though both were kind, shared few traits with Linda. She, when forty years old, found her natural father.

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They were both landscape painters (he used oils, she used watercolors). They were both perfectionists in projects and their arrangements of books and artifacts. They both named their pet “Winston.” Neither she nor her father liked peanuts or chocolate but they both loved Snickers bars. They were political conservatives but religious liberals, sports enthusiasts who would jump up and yell even when watching a football game on television, and enjoyed trails, museums, and ruins. The repetition of self across generations does not surprise anyone whose life span laps into at least one generation back and one forward. The patterns seen in the Darwins, Jameses, or Leakeys can be seen in all of us. There is, however, another aspect to preservation of self when genes create environments and pass them forward in time. Elizabeth, an alert owl, peered at me over her rimless lenses. (I still see those blue eyes!) She tried to kill herself but one of her grandchildren tattled and Elizabeth was then watched pretty closely. The Irish, however, can be as stubborn about dying as they are about living! She therefore labeled each of her possessions with the name of its intended receiver. Elizabeth’s possessions will scatter like her genes but not in a random way: she targeted objects to receivers. Could it be that a Waterford goblet will find a “gene for Waterford crystal”? Similarly I expect a dying individual to favor the child who most resembles him or her, who may but not necessarily, be the oldest. In a subtle, indirect fashion, we find that one more time, genes find, make, and defend environments. They also pass them on to likeminded thinkers in the next generation as sync slides past a grave.

We’re All Twins: The Nature of Nurture “We seem to inherit bit by bit, this element from one progenitor, that from another …” Galton (1889/1997, 7) While four-year-old Arlene snuggled to one shoulder, mom talked quietly but then barked, “No!” and pulled Arlene’s hand away from where it formed tiny curls of Mom’s hair. “I can’t stand when she does that. I’m sure she’s doing it just to annoy me.” Arlene went back to sleep; mom continued her narrative. A few minutes later, Arlene moaned, “No!” and pushed mom’s hand from where it had rolled little coils in Arlene’s hair.

Bouchard and his peers collected data, defended it from very determined critics (e. g., Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, 1984; Lewontin, 1985, 1991), and against the

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possibility of their own errors. In so doing, they found a view of our nature that leads not to clones but to individuals. The first gift is that of seeing biology’s contribution differently than before. Genes, for example, contribute to nearly any measurement taken of environments: the nature of the rater contributes to the ratings that are obtained. (Plomin, 1994) Further, natures vary in infinite ways, including the extent to which they partner with environments. Scientists learn about some of them when they test genes in different environments and discover the bifurcations and gradations that are possible in development. They also learn that different environments emerge when different natures occupy them. Thus, in Robert Plomin’s words, behavior genetics does not separate nature from nurture but reveals, instead, the nature of nurture. (Plomin, 1994) One of Galton’s phrases also comes to mind: “Nurture acts before birth, during every stage of embryonic and pre-embryonic existence, causing the potential faculties at the time of birth to be in some degree the effect of nurture.” (Galton, 1883/1907/1911, 131) Second, every teenager is a mosaic that swore between its twelfth and eighteenth year to be different from his or her parents but, when thirty-five, finds in the mirror a checkerboard of mom, dad, mom-mom, pop-pop, or even an uncle or aunt. Further, your psychological Legos are shared with the same characters who gave you a knobby nose. When pressed to explain your looks and conduct, however, you often blame your parents’s genes for the nose but their lectures for what you think, unaware of genetic contributions—sometimes from the same genes—to both! Third, because of the repetition of parental characteristics, although arranged in novel combinations, parents are usually beacons for their children. Any conclusion that children could be randomly reassigned to different parents is wrong. And, perhaps for reasons of common sense, no one has done such a thing! Kuramoto applies again: similarity and influence produce synchrony whether in a physic lab or in Levittown. And family histories are incomplete unless they include the successes and gaffs of parents, grandparents, and an erratic uncle or aunt. George Colt’s essay in Life Magazine again comes to mind: “When I look at myself, it seems there’s less of me than there once was. At a recent party, schmoozing with one last guest on my way out the door, I suddenly thought, I’m acting exactly like my father! Having spent my youth fighting to forge my own identity, I find, increasingly, that I resemble the very parent against whom I worked so hard to rebel: his social ease, his sense of humor, and, now that I am in my forties, his thinning hair and slight pot-

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belly. Indeed, as I get older, I feel that instead of adding layers, I am shedding skins. In becoming more like my parents, I am becoming more myself. I am surprised but delighted that it all feels so comfortable, not an imprisoning but a coming Home.” (George Howe Colt, 1998, 50) Knock on any door, go through the foyer, and sit on the couch inside, the one that fits best the people who live on it. Drink their coffee and eat their cake, talk about the weather and then their family stories. Study the similarities in their body shapes, twitches and fidgets, how they work or play, collect or scatter relatives, and save or waste money. As you leave, thank them for their cake and tea but mostly for their stories. In your forties, you remember your aged parents as they were at forty. You have one vision of how you were for the last twenty years and an overlapping one of how you might be for the next twenty: you pause before your mirror on a fall morning and juxtapose what you remember against what you expected and look for what is to come. Further, the birth of your child renews pieces of an older life: grandparents not only move into the future but also see fragments of how they were sixty years earlier. If you watch carefully, you might notice that one of your children gets to rear bits of you and your parents. When you feed your child or grandchild, you will see and hear parts of yourself as you were in infancy. Visit one of your aging parents and you will meet parts of yourself as you might become. Give your opportunities to your parents and it is likely that they would have built your world; give their opportunities to you and you might build theirs. Aside from accidents and disease and the wonderful experiments completed through genetic variation, we ALL came from a used brickyard.

Chapter Eight Conceived to Rebel There are two environments to consider here: the more familiar started when you slid out of mom into delivery and it continued in your crib, nursery, and school. There was later the baked red clay of a south Georgia playground and the school cafeteria table where you first sipped the cream from the top of a carton of milk before running your straw to the cold layer on the bottom. Frank Sulloway’s book, Born to Rebel, focused on Darwinian competitions between children in such environments. That is, first arrivals dominate second arrivals; second arrivals must look outside the family for opportunities. There is an earlier environment, one that gives a different explanation for Sulloway’s findings: the effects of prenatal events environments last beyond birth and are persuasive enough to account for what Sulloway attributed to postnatal environments. That is, prenatal gifts to firstborns favor one kind developmental course, one that is often less impulsive or rebellious. Laterborns get a different path because they came through a used womb: any Darwinian contests are prenatal and in seriatum. A bias towards conservatism or experimentation is consistent with Raff ’s model for sequences of genes. First, duplicate whatever succeeded, and then vary the next unit to be assembled, one that is not only in the game but might change how it is played. Sulloway’s findings may well emerge from the differences in the players that existed before they were born!

Differences in Family Environments: Born to Rebel? “The problem with complex interaction effects is that they tend not to be replicable.” (Rowe, 1997, 366)

David Rowe spoke from his experiences in behavior genetics when he reviewed Sulloway’s provocative book on how birth order and family dynamics change adult personalities. According to Sulloway, your turn to arrive in a family, your place in the restaurant line, affects what you get from your parents and that affects what you become in regard to traditionalism or openness to new ideas. This con130

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cept should trouble no one but Sulloway’s had trouble getting people to believe him! You don’t have to search far to find kvetching about his handling of the data, publishing without peer review, and collecting a half-million dollar advance from his publisher (e. g., Ruse, 1997). Birth order effects occur in nonhuman species. The offspring of birds, fish, mammals, and some plants show birth order effects in regard to viability, size, and dominance and, in some species, offspring have adaptations that help them to kill their younger siblings. Parents will also choose the healthier offspring and cast off the unhealthy ones. (Sulloway, 1996, 2001) For example, female finches, in mite-infested conditions, lay eggs for females first and for males later, exposing the mite-sensitive males for a shorter time. (Badyaev et al,2006) In regard to humans, over two thousand studies, completed since the 1920s, exist on the effects of birth order! (Sulloway, 2001) For example, Majumder (1990) found complex birth order effects on childhood survival in Bangladesh. Pebley, Hermalin, and Knodel (1991) found birth order effects on infant mortality and birth spacing in a historical survey of eighteenth and nineteenth century German villages, and Vlajinac (2006) found that birth order predicted diabetes in a group of 320,000 children and adolescents. And most recently, Penn and Smith (2007) analyzed birth records in the Utah Population Database and found that having more children was associated with reduced parental survival but especially for mothers, and both a large family size and maternal death were more detrimental to laterborns. The rest of story, however, is less clear but more entertaining. According to Sulloway’s critics: 1) he may or may not describe something real, 2) he may or may not describe something that is substantial, 3) he may or may not have cooked the data, and 4) if the effects are real, they might be predicted by and accounted for by other explanations! Ernst and Angst (1983), in their review of one thousand studies, concluded that birth order effects were an artifact of bad research design. Sulloway reanalyzed those studies and found one hundred ninety-six that controlled for the effects of social status and the number of siblings. He found that seventy-two of those studies showed clear birth order effects, fourteen did not, and one hundred ten were indeterminate: “Studies generally show that firstborns are more conscientious than laterborns, a difference that is exemplified by their being more responsible, ambitious, organized, and academically successful. Laterborns emerge as being more agreeable than firstborns, in the sense of being more tender-minded, accommodating, and altruistic. Differences by birth order are more limited and mixed for the

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three remaining dimensions of the Five Factor Model. Laterborns appear to be more open to experience, as expressed by their being more nonconforming and unconventional; by contrast, firstborns appear to be more open to experience in ways that reflect intellectuality. Compared with laterborns, firstborns also appear to be more neurotic in the sense of being temperamental and anxious about their status. Lastly, firstborns are more extraverted than laterborns, in the sense of being assertive and dominant; whereas laterborns are more extraverted in the sense of being fun-loving and sociable.” (Sulloway, 2001, 46) Sulloway also identified twenty-eight scientific revolutions (ideological, technical, controversial, or conservative) and then scored 3890 scientists as supporters or opponents of each one. The five conservative movements were all led by firstborns. All the rest, except for mesmerism, were supported by laterborns with an odds ratio of 2:1, an outcome that should occur, by chance, only one time in a billion! The concept of evolution, for example, was supported for one hundred twenty-five years before DarwinError! Bookmark not defined. by forty percent of laterborns, zero percent of firstborns! Sulloway’s position is that birth order does not affect personality directly but “birth order is a proxy for disparities in age, physical size, and status, all of which contribute to personality. In addition, birth order is related to the roles and niches available to offspring within the family system. (Sulloway, 2001, 39) Sulloway’s description of birth order effects also lines up with theory from A-L Barabási (2002) for an emergent network: first arrivals help to define environments and select second arrivals. In Sulloway’s argument, parents arrived first in the family and, therefore, define opportunities and limits for children. Older siblings, likewise, define the environments for younger ones. First arrivals should have a greater adherence to parental rules, whether expressed in social conservatism or in conscientiousness. Later arrivals, because the senior niche is filled, use sociability, extraversion, and openness in order to hook up outside the family. This sequence also lines up with Raff ’s exploratory model: duplicate, compartmentalize, and vary but it disagrees with behavior genetic descriptions of family environments: there is strong influence of such environments for the first eight years of a child’s life but, thereafter, he defines his own environment and every child in a family comes to have a different one. In other words, the longer a child lives, the more resilient he is to imposed environments, perhaps even those that come with an older sibling. The debate over birth order, one that existed before Born to Rebel, continues and can be predictable, strange, or funny. Judith Harris (1995, 1998, 2000), who defends her own theory of personality development, claims that birth order effects

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disappear when a child or adolescent moves into a peer group. She, therefore, rejects Sulloway’s data and explanations. (She also puts more credence in shared environment for adolescents than research might support!) Frederic Townsend (2000)—also skeptical of Sulloway’s interpretations—analyzed the Ernst and Angst material and concluded that Sulloway exaggerated what could be found. According to Townsend, forty-nine studies (not seventy-two) confirmed a birth order effect, one hundred twenty-two found none, seventeen found an opposite effect, and sixteen were ambiguous. (Townsend, 2000, 147–152)82 Sulloway responded to his critics in a chapter, “Birth order, competition, and human behavior,” published in 2001, and in several Internet postings of 1) his analysis of the biographies of political activists (//www.sulloway.org/politics.html) and 2) his meta-analysis of the birth order literature from 1940-1999. (//www. sulloway.org/metaanalysis.html, 7/4/2007) My pattern-maker, nonetheless, remains suspicious not of what Sulloway described but how he explains it. I am inclined to believe that birth order counts for something, perhaps a lot of somethings, but through the contests of genomic imprinting and the possibility of systematic changes in their results as mothers and fathers get older. Further, because of prenatal rather than postnatal influences—themselves a product of the fit between a fetus and its container—the factors that influence growth in the womb will continue to have meaningful, measurable results outside of it. (Burt and Trivers, 2005) Older sons, if they move into conservative roles, may do so because their mother prevailed over the developmental imperatives of their father and produced a more thoughtful, more cooperative, less impulsive son. It is also true that not all laterborns start revolutions, that a vigorous contest weeds out the smart and rebellious from the merely hostile and schizoid! For example, both genomics and Sulloway might predict prisons to shelter more laterborns but genomics might predict a higher proportion of those laterborns to be of higher birth weight and to have problems being still, learning the parts of speech, and keeping stable social ties. Thus, I look to Bob Trivers and David Haig for hints, explanations, and directions on what to measure. (Haig, 1993, 2003; Burt and Trivers, 2005) The rebellion that was born probably began with conception. 82 The Townsend study is dated 2000 but publication of his analysis as well as comments from Harris and others was delayed for four years because of legal actions initiated by Sulloway who found Townsent’s remarks defamatory! (en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Birth_order, 7/1/2007) See also Harris’s material and download the September, 2000, issue of Politics and Life Sciences, 157–179, at://xchar.home.att.net/tna/birthorder/index.htm#4essays)

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Prenatal Differences in Mother Love Four-year-old Annie, as was her habit, rolled out her bottom lip and kicked her mother in the shin but, this time, during our therapy session and in front of her father who had never before seen his sweet little girl do such a thing. I asked him to sit her on my little oak stool for three minutes of time out. (Mother already defended herself with this procedure at home. Dad saw no need for it.) He stood his two hundred forty pounds upright, bent over Annie from the rear, and reached downward. She looked over her shoulder and up at him through her blond curls, dropped one tear out of one big blue eye and stood very still while that tear made its path down one pink cheek. Dad froze except to whisper, “I can’t …” Annie captures findings from the relatively new study of “genomic imprinting,” that is, mothers defend themselves against the demands of their children and fathers defend the child against the limitations of the mother. Both the demands and the countermeasures from either side start at conception and generally effect mothers more than fathers: fathers, on average, make less investment in children whether that investment is measured by the tiny size of their gametes, minor physical costs to fathers during the child’s gestation, or, later, who stays home with the kids, takes them to doctors or soccer practice, or meets with teachers. First, the effect of a gene, one that is imprinted, can depend on whether it was carried by an egg or a sperm. Most of the eighty known imprinted genes come from females and are thought to protect her against the demands made by the imprinted genes from males, especially when those males—as is true for humans—can mate with several different females. In these conditions, some of the genes in sperm—repeating tactics that you met in Tit-for-Tat—treat the invaded female as a campground, one to be used and left rather than protected. A tug of war emerges. The mother’s genes benefit if she shares them in offspring from more than one male. Each male, of course, wants her to invest in his offspring all that she has. The point of these contests is to scatter parental genes—female genes are thought to do better if paired with genes from a series of different males and male genes better if paired with a series of different females. Each male, however, seeks to get the most that he can from any one female and each of those females defends herself from him. These contests also make savers and arrangers from females and spenders and explorers from males! These habits can persist for lifetimes: males are sometimes generally content with a nickel in their pocket but females are often

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depressed and looking for a new partner if he takes a demotion or a layoff, spends too much time on disability, or sits around during his job’s slow season. Second, genetic similarity between companions usually leads to cooperation but differences lead to disputes. Because family members are only partially identical to each other, the bonds between them are inherently ambivalent. Each member of a family will try to pull its children into sync through reminders, pushes, pulls, nudges, beatings, threat, pleas, or tears, or to speed up, slow down, spend less or more, and to take turns changing the cat litter. The target complies only sometimes and to a limited extent. The target, of course, is only halfway your ally. Thus, from your parents’s moans when you were conceived to your last croak, you manage, and are managed by, resonance and conflict between you and whomever vibrates within and around you. Just as identity is rare in nature, so are even matches. Imprinted genes very likely give early small advantages to one parents’s genes, advantages that support the posts and pillars of a fragmented mind and tip it towards exploration or caution.

A Gene from Dad Differs from that Same Gene from Mom According to Austin Burt and Robert Trivers, imprinted genes may have a say in the development of your right and left cortex. (Burt and Trivers, 2005) Goldberg’s model for the two halves of your cerebral cortex comes to mind with respect to the trade-offs between egg and sperm: some parts of you manage routines, other parts look for messy projects to arrange. That is, if paternal imprinted genes favor resource acquisition, they might act in your right cortex in ways consistent with Goldberg’s thoughts: your right performs calculus, geometry, and music as pattern-maker: it turns novelty in numbers, spatial arrangements, and sounds into numeric, visual, and auditory rhythms. And if maternal imprinted genes favor resource conservation, then infants should be born—as in fact, they are—with a larger left cortex that will develop earlier and manage familiarity, familiarity that links the infant with what already exists. (Goldberg, 2001) Genomic imprinting becomes not merely another “war between the sexes” as Hunter (2007) speculated, but, consistent with the ideas of Raff, Gerhart, and Kirschner, the sculptor that encourages your becoming a rebel or a follower. (Raff, 1996; Kirschner and Gerhart, 1998, 2005; Gerhart and Kirschner, 1997) There are details in this plot, revealed mostly by mice but perhaps still relevant because mice and humans have such similar DNA. Women abort to save themselves, men complain when they do. In a similar but less extreme manner, mothers resist fetal demands on their blood sugar and blood pressure and limit placental growth. At the same time, her genes possibly encourage her offspring’s ability to find and maintain social connections when she contributes to its left forebrain and striatum,

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retina, nose, and parts of its vomeronasal organ. (Burt and Trivers, 2005; Keverne, 2001; Goos and Silverman, 2001; Keverne, Fundele, and Nevison, 1996) Males, often mice and sometimes men, with serial mating relationships tend to treat a female partner as if she were part of a temporary, r selected environment: “use her up and move to another one.” He obtains not only a more competitive offspring but also takes maternal resources away from the offspring that other males might harvest. He must move strategically, using only a few seconds and a few genes in one sperm, in order to inspire and defend his offspring for the rest of its life. The male’s imprinted genes, when unopposed by those of the mother, show up most in his offspring’s muscle, cartilage, skeleton, dental enamel, and (in some studies) quickly-metabolized brown fat. (Burt and Trivers, 2005) They also show up in the hypothalamus—a small mass that sits just above the roof of the mouth, next to and slightly above the pituitary gland. The hypothalamus includes the medial forebrain tracts that conduct the business of eating, drinking, fighting, and mating. Furthermore, areas of the hypothalamus regulate oxytocin and vasopressin, somatotrophin, thyroid-stimulating hormone, ACTH, follicle-stimulating hormone, and luteinizing hormone. His imprinted genes tend to make larger offspring but ones with lower brain weights at birth because their cerebral cortex is smaller. (Goos and Silverman, 2001; Keverne et al, 1996; Li et al, 1999) Debates between imprinted genes extend into postnatal behavior and cross several generations. That is, mothers nest, nurse, and carry roaming offspring back home but do so, often, with no help from the male. Her willingness is apparently a function of male-imprinted genes that she carries from her own conception. Fathers, in serial relationships rather than in completely monogamous ones, press for sons with larger size, strength, and self-interested initiative and very likely, for daughters willing to nest, nurse, and fetch the kids back home and to advertise these assets accordingly. Mothers try to make a little cooperator out of the savage that dad wants. It could be that her scrimping on assets tends to make later children, sons or daughters, on average, a little more rebellious and a little more homely. Her surrender to dad suggests not only larger, stronger sons but also daughters that are more attentive to their own children and, very possibly, more physically attractive.83

83 Stray thoughts: dental enamel is associated with male-imprinted genes (Burt and Trivers, 2006). Do a women’s white teeth reflect her willingness to conceive and nurture children? Is her interest in brighter teeth motivated not only by competition for males but also for status in the eyes of other women? Also, do ads for expensive cars feature beautiful women who carry male imprints that favor having children?

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Kanazawa 2005, 2006, found that antisocial males have more sons as do larger, taller parents. The studies are anchored in the Trivers-Willard hypothesis but also line up with genomic imprinting. Could it be that strained maternal assets, even those less extreme than those associated with poison, radiation, heat, and drought, increase the rate of genetic variation and do first in males? (See also Earl and Deem, 2004, in regard to evolvability speeding up in rapidly changing environments.) David Haig, accused by some of his friends of thinking too much, extended his early analyses of conflicts about blood sugar and placental size (Haig and Moore, 1991; Haig, 1993) to the internal squabbles of an adult. (Haig, 2003) That is, imprinted genes from most fathers should favor acquisitiveness and impulsiveness. Imprinted genes from the average mother should encourage their offspring to waste less and save for tomorrow. Again, there should be only rare instances of complete victory or dead ties and partial dominance is to be expected to exist and to change in response to contexts. Eventually, impulse and forethought come into sync, as if those characteristics were two players forced into a Tit-for-Tat relationship because they share their container. These hypothetical partnerships ought to shift men and women closer to neutral: middle-aged guys may smile at mothers with little children and start to worry about morality; middle-aged women may decide to run a corporation. Haig startled me during a talk in Manhattan. His complexion turned from ruddy-Scot to bright pink while he narrated—to an audience of about a hundred people, most of them female students—one of his conflicts in college: Haig longed for a female sexual partner but once had a girl, uninvited, come to his room during a party, undress herself, and sit on his bed. Haig immediately heard lectures from his mother about “filthy men” and failed to touch the girl. (Haig, 1999. See also Haig, 2000, 2003) As for my being startled, I have had, and still have, a similar awareness of sharply conflicting parental commands, conversations my parents often had with each other but never with me directly. Many of my clients report similar experiences and are usually relieved when I suggest that everyone carries them. Thus, according to Burt and Trivers, genomic imprinting may have a legacy beyond gestation and can be “… expected to act early in development, on starkly different degrees of relatedness, and to have profound ramifying consequences for juvenile growth and survival. By contrast, later kinship interactions may select for effects that have little to do with size but a lot to do with behavior, brain physiology, interactions with others, and internal psychological conflict.” (Burt and Trivers, 2006, 124) Your prenatal struggles may grow from disputes about blood sugar to complex, conscious, sometimes bitter debates when you consider the purchase of a new

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car. Thus, you steer between taking and giving, using and saving, or rewarding or punishing, as if caught, like Hamlet, in a boundary between chaos and order! “To be or not to be” echoes sometimes as “To do or not to do” until you die. You become something of a shuttlecock. In Haig’s words: “Introspection suggests that I often attempt to modify my own behavior by an internally voiced mixture of exhortation, bribes, and threats.… I know what I know, and I know what I want. So, why do I need to persuade myself of anything?” (Haig, 2003, 418)

What Some Eggs Cost: Taking Maternal Investment from Prenatal to Postnatal “Where the male invests parental care, female choice … should also involve, perhaps primarily involve, questions of the male’s willingness and ability to be a good parent. Will he invest in the offspring? If willing, does he have the ability to contribute much?” (Trivers, 1972/2002, 96) “… to an extraordinary degree, the predilections of the investing sex— females—potentially determine the direction in which the species will evolve. For it is the female who is the ultimate arbiter of when she mates and how often and with whom.” Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, 1981, cited in Buss, 2004, 104. “Jim, I checked with all my girl friends before I decided to go out with you …” A whisper on my pillow from a passing nag.

David Cohen’s Stranger in the Nest, gives great attention to the influence of prenatal events on the child’s postnatal development including finger prints, aggression, mental illness, tomboy behavior, minor physical anomalies, and mirror image differences between identical twins. Cohen’s insights about prenatal variables fit with those of Haig, Burt, Trivers, Keverne, and the army that follows them. Haig, Keverne, Burt, and Trivers may have, without intending to, accounted for birth order effects—if any such exist! For example, birth weight often increases with birth order, the later the baby in the series, the more it is likely to weigh, even through the tenth child! (Juntunen, Laara, and Kauppila, 1997; Cardwell, Carson, and Patterson, 2005; Miller, 1994) This sounds like a healthy trend since low birth weight predicts later physical and emotional difficulties. On the other hand, if birth weight reflects maternal and paternal contests, a larger baby could hint that the mother wears down with each child and increases her odds for having more impulsive children. (Along with these trends, imprinted genetic effects might predict that earlier birth order will be associated with caution and earlier verbal expression, later birth order with innovation. (Kristensen and Bjerkedal, 2007; Goldberg, 2001) Given that genes often amplify environments, could it be

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that prenatal maternal investment in the fetal cerebral tissue also favors a socially more responsive child? Essential maternal assessments begin with conception and battle with the fetus over blood and sugar supply and the size of the placenta, the length of pregnancy, nursing, and the delay before she conceives again. They also show up in a mother’s willingness to make a nest, keep her offspring in it, and nurse, warm, clean, and protect them. Genomic imprinting, by resisting fetal demands, may change its postnatal characteristics, feminizing it while making it less selfish. The first assessment occurs in human mothers before and during pregnancy, in her gossip with family and friends, in what she picks from magazines and Internet sites, in her dreams, and during OB-GYN evaluations. The second appraisal occurs through kindergarten teachers and then through school evaluations for disruptive behavior and learning disabilities. The third evaluation can occur on the playground or athletic field or in her decision not to leave Harry “because of the kids,” and the fourth in juvenile courts or before committees that award battlefield commissions, plaques for community service, or prizes in the arts and sciences: all of them stages whereon males parade in front of females, one of whom may wager an egg. There are hints of what may yet be found in regard to birth order and prenatal crises but these studies could be no more than hints: - More human males are conceived (1.6-1.2/1) than delivered (1.05/1) sometimes due to allergic reactions toward the son. (Spreen, Risser and Edgell, 1995; Spreen et al, 1995; Blanchard, 2001) Sons that pass maternal physiological standards are carried to full term and have fewer developmental impairments, less impulsive behavior, and higher intelligence. (Spreen et al, 1995) - Human mothers abort children or put them up for adoption in relation to paternal fitness and economic conditions (Hrdy, 1999) but they abort sons more than daughters in drought, famine, or when losses occur in maternal social dominance. (Kruuk et al, 1999) - In one pre-industrial society, having a daughter lengthens the mother’s life by an average of twenty-three weeks, a son shortens it by an average of thirty-four. (Helle, Lummaa, and Jokela, 2002) In other studies, sons have more problems at delivery apart from their larger size (Lieberman et al, 1997), often require longer gestation (Divon et al, 2003), and have higher rates of infant mortality. (Spreen et al, 1995) - More sons are born in the spring (Cagnacci et al, 2003) and often to younger mothers. (Trivers and Willard, 1973) A series of brothers often predicts that the youngest will have greater fluctuating asymmetry (Lalumière, Harris, and Rice, 1999), a greater risk for being homosexual (Blanchard, 2001; Cohen, 1999; Bogaert,

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2006; Blanchard and Lippa, 2007; Bogaert, 2007), and some greater risk for psychopathology. (Herrell et al, 1999; Fergusson, Horwood, and Beautrais, 1999) Thirty percent of teen suicides are homosexual, usually male, effeminate, and often abusive of alcohol or drugs. (Cohen, 1994) Small males at birth are less likely to marry. (Phillips et al, 2001) Further, children with physical defects are more likely targets for institutionalization and abandonment or parental abuse and infanticide. (Buss, 1999) Males show not only genius but flaws and for either one, do so at rates greater than seen in females. And whether genius or fool, criminal or moralist, males, if too different from average, whether genius or fool, reproduce less. For males, surviving gestation simply leads to being measured again but in a more critical way. Men who fail these later tests are not aborted but remain childless. Rhesus and chimpanzee mothers and their female relatives also screen out infant males who are impulsive and aggressive. (Suomi, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2006) A very few of the rejects might become explorers (Wilson, 2007) but most of them become ant and beetle food on the jungle floor. The rating scales that teachers and pediatricians use for measuring disruptive behavior reflect the mating preferences of females and continue standards that were first applied in utero—what is his “fit” with whatever and whomever surrounds him?. Mothers examine their sons for kindness, cooperation, cleverness, and strength—reasonable predictors for that son’s later paterntal investments. A female separates the trainable males from the impossible, the gifted from the bizarre, the dependable from the psychopathic, and the adventuresome and strong from the wife-beaters, philanderers, spendthrifts, thrill-seekers, writers, and television addicts. (A few of us, however, are genuinely charming …) In the extended wombs of daycare, classrooms, Sunday schools, football, and proms, a male’s problems with planning, clumsiness, and impulse control warn female eyes that he needs more work. Women, as if judging Olympic skaters, also signal each other where a male rates in regard to health, social prowess, and probable future earnings: all of which contribute to his willingness to invest in children and his ability to do so. (Buss, 1998; 2003) Her motives may, however, be mixed and, so far, she hides them and her strategies from science. She may save her resources for her next child, but, given the greater variation seen in males than in females, she may also spend herself to sandpaper irregularities handed from the son’s father! And one consequence from the father’s imprinted contributions might be to make his offspring more competitive despite the handicaps that he gave them. After all, even mutations have an interest in reaching the next generation!84 84 Females have two X-chromosomes. If disruptive behavior has some foundation in different alleles that are X-linked, sons may express propensities that their mother’s

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Rebellion “from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud” 85 Individual characteristics that emerge early and from within, rather than being imposed later and from the outside, are usually more persistent and, as is true for psychological disorders, may have stronger contributions from heritability. (Mash and Barkley, 1996; Barkley, 1990) And in many people, especially the memorable ones, there is a multiplier for invention, for acquisition, and dominance; in others, the many who back up the grandstanders, there is a lens that notices what is worth saving and leads the onlooker’s commitment to do so. Richard Wright, under conditions of extreme poverty and parental desertion, sneaked books past his puritanical grandmother. He became a prominent author, noted for his protests about racial unfairness. Actress Mae West had a violent temper like her father (sometimes a featherweight boxer and gambler with underworld ties and sometimes a cop and detective) but, starting in her first three years of life, enjoyed going to stage shows with her mother, performed vamp songs when four years old, and appeared on stage at age five. (Watts, 2001) She also, like her father, annoyed police officers but, in her case, less for her violence but more for her sexual remarks. Ambitious Cora Millay tried to be a writer and competed in the same contests as her daughter, Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Vincent” published in a notable children’s magazine at age thirteen years and by eighteen had won every prize that it offered. She, like her usually absent father, was also irresponsible, undependable, and drawn to substance abuse. (Milford, 2001) Susan Sarandon was (and is) a social activist who used to rotate the dresses on her dolls so that each was treated fairly. She, the oldest of nine, often felt like an outcast (home movies of family events show her in the corner, staring) and remained a loner through her acting career. (Shapiro, 2001) The photographer, Man Ray, sneaked paint and paper past his disapproving parents and later moved himself to an artist colony in New Jersey. Young “Ritty” Feynman, on his way to a Nobel Prize in physics, scoured Far Rockaway for math books and broken radios to fix. He shocked his sister for his audiences instead of using a lab rat and, when carry. Should mothers occupy cells along with their sons? Given relativism in the legal judgments made of males, they are compared to other males, should females be compared to other females so that females occupy as many prison cells as males? 85 “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” (Willie Stark, All the King’s MenError! Bookmark not defined.) This marvelous insight appears to be about morality; because immorality is often about nonconformity, Stark’s comment is also about rebellion.

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they were both much older, learned Chinese in order to annoy her one more time. (Gleick, 1992) Stan Kaplan opened a profitable lending library for his friends at age eight years and taught some of them to read, paying his students an exorbitant ten depression-era cents to attend his classes. Kaplan eventually became a respected educator. (Kaplan, 2001) And, of course, young Mozart’s affinity for music came from inside as did Gauss’s sense for mathematics or Bose’s for physics. (Steptoe, 1998) The persistence revealed by Wright, Ray, Feynman, and Kaplan, and Mozart, Gauss, and Bose, thrives in your neighborhood. Tall, freckled, skinny Pete, about fourteen-years-old, threatened his mother almost every day and his imposing father once a week. His parents considered residential placement, foster care, and calling the cops. Yet, Pete was polite and cooperative with strangers and with his teachers unless one of them struck him as being unfair. Pete’s paternal uncle, however, was obnoxious and rude to his own mother. (Pete, oddly, never defied the same female, his granny: “She would kick my butt!” Granny was in her mid 70s, short, and getting shorter.)86 Neither Pete nor his uncle slept unless they locked their bedroom window, even on the hottest nights: “Bundy will come in and kill us.” Pete’s mother tapped her lower knee when her legs were crossed; so did her brother, so did her father. All of them had difficulty with distraction by the coughs, finger taps, hums, and whistles from other family members. Furthermore, none of them noticed, understood, nor particularly cared about the impacts of their own fidgeting, scratching, humming, or foot-tapping. Pete thoroughly angered his mom by carrying the family phone, room to room, talking to his friends while he did schoolwork or chores. I inquired why either of them needed it. Mom “had to talk to someone” while she cleaned the house! Pete’s conduct was no longer a matter of his “choosing” freely to irritate her but was simply being her and, given the contributions from heritability to mate choice (Maes et al, 1998), Pete was also being his dad. Such patterns in children’s behavior and emotions sometimes puzzle, discourage, and frighten parents who want their offspring’s personality to be free of their own chips and dents. Telling such parents, “Your child may act like half of you” elicits, “Stop that from happening!” They are even less happy when told that heritability for some personality characteristics increases for a lifetime. Such parents might have chosen a mate for the purpose of counteracting one of their own 86 Some of this material was adapted from Healing the Moral Animal, the workbook for a course of the same name at the 1999 Cape Cod Institute, Orleans, Massachusetts. As for Pete, I wonder if his fear of granny was imprinted? Did she scare hell out of him before he could walk or even before he was born?

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faults: “He will act like you instead of like me.” Unfortunately, mosaic outcomes probably occur at least as often as blended ones and the child might get the worst of both! Parents also can be upset, suspicious and spiteful after a divorce but relieved that bad influences left with their ex’s belongings. Indeed, their main goal for counseling can be to help their child unlearn all the bad features of the former partner. Behavior, however, emerges when genes find opportunities and some behaviors, as much as half of them, will resemble those of the partner who left. And the child may act more like the opposite parent just after a weekend visit or when the child wants to retaliate for a missed television program. Such has become common knowledge: I sipped iced tea in my favorite diner, and stared ahead at too-familiar spots and stains on the wall next to the coffee urn while I eavesdropped. An older waitress told a younger one: “Even if you never see the bum again, you’re still gonna’ deal with him in your kid!

Chapter Nine Your Divided Self Arthur Wigan concluded that every one of us has a “dual brain” but did so after witnessing a lot of dissections: two nearly matched halves in a skull implied two nearly matched brains as seemed to be true for arms and legs. (Wigan, 1844, Harrington, 1989) And more important to Wigan, the owner of one skull seemed normal although an infection required three ounces loss of tissue at each cleaning but “yet the man preserved his intellect entire until the moment of his death.” (Wigan, 1844, 36) Not only do you have a dual brain but you can also get along nicely with only one of them! Each half, however, appears to have followed a slightly different evolutionary path and accomplishes a different set of objectives than imagined in the late 1970s. That is, if Elkhonon Goldberg’s ideas are correct, your dual brain functions as one exploratory system that puts novelty and familiarity into different compartments, makes routines from surprises, and takes on the roles of captain, navigator, and quartermaster for your adventures. On the other hand, neither of the relatively modern editions of the dual brain story—your left does words and arithmetic, your right does math and geometry—nor Goldberg’s view—your right is the crisis manager and your left is chiefin-charge of familiarity—accounts for the multiple personalities that thrive inside of your head. We need a set of concepts that account for your being a Ulysses who strives, seeks, finds, and never yields, and for your quieter intervals as a consolidator, conservator, and story teller. These contrasts should also align with the phylogeny and ontogeny of your right and left cortex and with the similar plots and scripts that you share with your parents and children. Nonetheless, more than a century of scientific and popular beliefs still speak with conviction: you not only have dual brains but also dual minds. No one has yet explained how the former makes possible the latter.

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Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde87 “With every day and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew nearer to that truth … that man is not truly one but truly two. I say two because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point … I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.” Henry Jekyll (Stevenson, 1886, 62) “My own conscious and seemingly indivisible self was turning out far from what I had imagined.… I was an ambassador ordered abroad by some fragile coalition, a bearer of conflicting orders from the uneasy masters of a divided empire.… As I write these words, even so as to be able to write them, I am pretending to a unity that, deep inside myself, I now know does not exist.” (Hamilton, 1996, 134–135)

I was frightened of what my colleagues might say if I mentioned my disbelief in personal unity, the little person inside of me, and that it had a soul defined by God. More annoying to my liberal colleagues, I didn’t particularly believe the things taught in public school: that is, I am an agnostic who sees great value in deism and finds that the religious can do without Darwin better than evolutionists can do without religion. Stevenson merely put in ink what his readers already believed about divided minds, expressed the idea better than Hamilton, and beat him by more than a hundred years! Hamilton may have referred to psychic conflicts for restraint and impulse, for taking chances to get resources or to hoard what you already have. Stevenson captured those same biases but with more words and actions.

Double Dealers in Literature “The main character … does not know whether or not his left hand shot his best friend’s wife dead. He had undergone an operation known as callosotomy, where surgeons sever the bundle of white fibres that join the two cerebral hemispheres.” Della Sala, 2005, in reference to “Bizarre Situations,” a story by William Boyd (1982) in On the Yankee Station.

Stevenson captured the sense of two stubborn, contrary agents for chaos and kindness, made to share one skin, and fight for control. Dr. Henry Jekyll speaks for all of us: “Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more my self when I laid aside restraint 87 Expanded from an essay posted 4/9/07,//www.behavior.net/bolforums.

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and plunged in shame, than when I labored, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.” (Stevenson, 1886, 61–62) The “literature of the double” included “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” (Burns, 1799); Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg, 1824); “William Wilson” (Poe, 1839), “The Double” (Dostoyefsky, 1846) and Crime and Punishment (Dostoyefsky, 1866), “Jekyll and Hyde” (Stevenson, 1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde, 1890), “The Secret Sharer” (Conrad, 1910), and “The Jolly Corner” (Henry James, 1909). (Davidson, 2003) Duality in Victorian popular literature may have been popular with Victorian gossips in tap rooms and hospital staff cafeterias. (Similarity and influence?) Arthur Wigan was an obscure physician when he asserted in 1844 that two conscious individuals lived in every skull and, in instances of fatigue, injury, or disease, coordination failed between them. Wigan, working pretty much on his own and remaining obscure even to this day, assembled the most extensive collection of clinical material from his era. (Corballis, 1993; Harrington, 1989) Thirty years later, the neurologist, John Hughlings Jackson, reached the same conclusions as Wigan (Harrington, 1989) and reinforced popular beliefs and popular literature in time for Stevenson’s popular story of Jekyll and Hyde. More than a century after Jackson, pioneers still explore the split brain and some of their leaders, Joseph Bogen, Peter Vogel, Roger Sperry, and Michael Gazzaniga, get most of the press and tend to agree with Wigan! Others, such as Elkhonon Goldberg, find novelty managed on your right and routines on your left. The research, however, seemed better able to account for Jekyll and Hyde before Sperry, Gazzaniga, Vogel, and Bogen got into it. That is, modern research deals with bits that are similar in different individuals and leaves their integrated product to clinicians and other storytellers. And none of the scientists account for what Colt and I observe or for what Vonnegut imagined to exist inside of Herb Foster. As for Boyd’s story: it fails on a technicality. At one point the hero is seen working with one eye covered but half of each eye goes to a different side of the brain. He would need to have covered half of each eye in order to achieve the plot’s intent.

Herbert Foster The late Kurt Vonnegut told about an investment fund manager and his unlikely client, one Herbert Foster. (Vonnegut, 1951/2000, 59–74) The fund manager is successful, charming, and nameless, a psychopath, a modern Pechorin, a hero of our time, who weighed a wallet by the beauty of its carrier’s wife as well as his manners, automobile, clothing, and home. By these measures, Herbert Foster deserved to be poor.

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“My client … hadn’t had a new suit in three years; he never owned more than one pair of shoes at a time. He worried about payments on his secondhand car, and ate tuna and cheese instead of meat because meat was too expensive … television was something they had to go two doors down the street to watch …” Foster earned about $6000 per year, his wife stayed home, and their two-yearold son played only classical music on the Foster’s old piano. Foster, however, secretly handed the manager an envelope that contained $800,000 in securities and another $50,000 in cash—assets to remain hidden from Mrs. Foster. The salesman whispered, “May I call you Herbert, sir?” There were pictures on the Foster’s mantle: one of Herbert’s mother—a twin of Mrs. Foster—and one of a saintly fellow, Mrs. Foster’s father. There was no picture of Herbert’s father on the mantle and the old man was never to be mentioned because he “… preferred playing jazz piano in dives and breathing smoke and drinking gin, to his wife and child and home and job. Herbert’s mother finally said he had to choose between one life or the other.” The curious manager found where Foster said that he was employed as the bookkeeper, a crowded bar where Foster happened to be completely unknown: “Then Herbert Foster, looking drab and hunted picked his way through the crowd … There was no question that being in the place was absolute, humiliating hell for him … but a light flashed at the far end of the aisle the crowd made for him and a tiny white piano sparkled there like jewelry. The bartender set a drink on the piano … Herbert … took a cigarette from his breast pocket and lighted it … Herbert Foster disappeared. In his place sat an excited stranger, his hands poised like claws. Suddenly he struck, and a spasm of dirty, low-down, gorgeous jazz shook the air, a hot changing wraith of the twenties … Firehouse Harris, his father’s son, three nights out of seven.”(73–74) The challenge is whether to accept Foster as an outcome of ordinary social learning or to give biology a role in his bifurcation. Of course, biologists might predict that Firehouse Harris and a puritanical wife might be expected to produce a two-year-old that played only classical music! I am relieved that Stevenson, George Howe Colt, and Vonnegut described such things. Vonnegut especially was genius enough to turn a story loose and let it live rather than dry it out, pin it down, and mount it in a flybox as I have done here.

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Genomics for Saving or Spending 1) If maternal imprinted genes not only conserve her resources but make enduring contributions that bias her offspring to do likewise, and 2) paternal imprinted genes make enduring contributions that bias his offspring—male or female—to acquire resources and put them to immediate use, then 3) an alignment could be made between her contributions and the routine-managing left cortex and his contributions and the novelty-addicted right side. There are implications. 1) Females and infants or either sex exhibit less Yakovlevian torque than is common in adolescent and adult males. (Goldberg, 2001) The contributions from maternal-imprints to cerebral cortex, as measured in chimeric mice at birth, do not reflect neural differences that will appear in adolescents and adults. Chimeric mice, however, die too young to permit comparisons between newborns, adolescents, and adults. 2) The self-centered nature of Firehouse Harris or of Edward Hyde could be a matter of right-side cerebral dominance; that of altruists Herb Foster or of Doctor Henry Jekyll depends on the politically-correct rules from their maternal left. Exploration, after all, marches behind selfishness’s flag.88 3) The devil (sic) however, is still in the details! The similarities shared by 1) reared-apart monozygotic twins, 2) singletons and their natural parents— even in the absence of direct instruction—and 3) the mosaics that exist in your mind and mine … all are facts without identified causes. For example, if 88 There is also a match between Goldberg (2001) and Archibald MacLeish’s representations of God and Satan in his play JB: God is a boring rule-maker and Satan a passionate, indignant instigator who exclaims, “These eyes see!” (MacLeish, 1958) Satan is by far the more interesting: he surely knows that he will eventually lose whatever contests he enters but, God, for his own credibility, swears not to help JB. After all, we teach our children not to pull wings from flies and should expect the same of our creator. Satan, of course, would rather win one that God intended for him to lose. Do the congregations for establishment gods wear the costumes and rituals formed in a superorganism’s left cortex and those of fundamentalists, the Dionysians, emerges in turbulence from its right? Surprise: if your left cortex’s prattles do not line up with changed conditions, does “swearing by the god, Apollo” mean that you swear by a liar?

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you inherit a “nose for Budweiser,” you are more apt to like the stuff when you trip over it. Imprinting, in the sense of the relationship between Lorenz and his geese, could also account for some of the outcomes. Schaal, Marlier, and Soussignan, 2000, for example demonstrated that a human fetus can learn odors from its mother’s diet. Implication: your father smelled of Budweiser, therefore, you will smell of Budweiser! (Lamarckian outcome without asking a gene?) In any event, whether by early experience or by genetics, you inherit a propensity to learn some behaviors but not others. There remain, however, the troublesome details of Jack Yufe, Oskar Stohr, two guys who grew up worlds apart but wore the same kind of shirts!

Left to Right and Back Again Sync and Conflict between Your Left and Right “… if unequal in power and slightly different in function, the ideas of one brain may be weighed against the ideas of the other … the human being can set one brain to regard the other, can think of his own thoughts, can weigh in each brain reciprocally the testimony and reasonings, and thus, as the common adage runs, ‘two heads are better than one’—‘two brains are better than one.’’’ (Wigan, 1844, 257–258) “… it is our own interpretation … that the minor hemisphere is indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and that both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.” Sperry, 1974, quoted in Bogen 1977.

Gazzaniga (1998) described your left cortex as an “interpreter,” Gazzaniga (1998) and Pinker (2002) also called it a “spin doctor” that lines up what happens now with what happened before. Your left may also be seen not as a liar or a self-deceiver but as a mere babbler, telling stories when it has no current data from your right. Your right side is probably no more innocent. Will it find patterns where none exist and will other people call you paranoid? Will it extend small patterns further than can be replicated? And will the right side anger, become rigid, and escalate its claims when contradicted? Has your right contributed to the dozen or more mass delusions that Mackay recorded in 1841? Does it contribute to our modern ones that we find in the news or discussed on Art Bell’s programs after midnight? Sperry gave us examples of what the right seems to do better than the left: reading faces, fitting designs into larger matrices, judging whole circle size from a small

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arc, discrimination and recall of nondescript shapes, making mental spatial transformations, discriminating musical chords, sorting block sizes and shapes into categories, perceiving wholes from a collection of parts, and the intuitive perception and apprehension of geometrical principles.” (Sperry, 1981) It is also likely that Sperry and his colleagues used relatively novel material for their research whereas verbal tasks most likely would also be familiar ones and, therefore, processed on your left. Access to a CNS scanner and testing American subjects as they learned Czech might have changed the course of Sperry’s and Gazzaniga’s interpretations! While linguistic skills solidified on your left, your right refined its abilities for recognizing visual and numeric patterns and for creating them when they did not already exist. Thus, the left and right cortex do similar but slightly different things in regard to patterns: your left side replays known words, symbols, auditory, and visual elements. The right side is a recreator, architect, author, and sculptor that pulls Legos into predictable sequences and arranges behaviors to manage them. Richard Feynman’s dad understood these things by instinct when he challenged Ritty to find patterns in sequences of colored tiles. Feynman spent his life finding patterns in combinations for safes, bongo rhythms, and nuclear interactions. Many of us have a similar experience but with less exalted material. An artist often does not reason about his composition until after he finishes it. When doing sculpture, I assemble, disassemble, reassemble, and pivot the work until it tells me that it is done, no matter how long it needs me. When writing, I often waken at three in the morning and find that my problem from the day before appears to have solved itself by changing not its content but the relationships between paragraphs and chapters. I grab a pad and pen, make some notes, go back to sleep, and, in the morning, put my silent partner’s advice to work.

The Reason for Two Halves: Oscillators Make Stability from Discord “Like all of us, (William) James had many sides.… He was always teetering on the brink of collapse but had been able—so far—to catch himself and fall backward to safety at the last moment. The different parts of his personality never quite became different personalities; the parts held together in a kind of confederacy.” (Richardson, 2006, 474) “Is it all extraordinary then that the two brains should be unequally exhausted by the joint exercise of their common powers? and that, as each is proved to be a perfect instrument of thought, and of all other mental operations, they

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should sometimes give discrepant results, similar to the state of the whole brain from excessive mental exertion. (Wigan, 1844, 117)89

First, the bits that you collected at conception form partnerships and schisms: you sometimes manage opposed directives from your mother, father, and sometimes grandparents. Second, you not only hear your parents’s debates and throw their slogans about but become a mediator or Dutch uncle. You do these things despite your swearing when younger that you would never say what they said or do what they did! You also find yourself restraining similarities that your mother and father shared and passed to you in a double dose. Moodiness in both parents might sometimes lead to bipolar disorder in children. And where parents were different, you also look for, refine, or contrive situations that turn those battling characters into good friends and, if not good friends, then dependable advisors because they disagree in such predictable ways. Your problem is a fairly common one for living organizations. Straight lines are imagined far more often than found. And organisms sometimes match the variation in their local environments by using oscillators instead of rulers. Oscillators set a range of variation, a ceiling and a floor for temperature, blood sugar, or for the number of rabbits in a grove as the oscillator turns and heads again to its opposite extreme. You can expect, therefore, not static organizations but ones with a floor and a ceiling, a window through which a continuous range of information guides the controls for muscles, glands and minds. If oscillations are more dependable than a steady state, then they should appear in the relationships between your left and right cortex. That is, either side should do some things better and some things worse when in contact with its partner. Arthur Wigan speculated about such things, modern research finds them. “… that activity in the corpus callosum can fluctuate, that it is only rarely complete, that it can include inhibitory components, and that for a majority of fibers, there is a sizeable conduction delay. (Ringo et al, 1994) One immediate corollary of complementary hemispheric specialization is that callosal traffic is asymmetric, right-to-left information being partially but importantly different from left-to-right.” (Bogen, 2000, 345)

89 Wigans book so impressed Joseph Bogen, M.D., of Cal Tech that he arranged for a reprinting of two hundred forty hard-bound copies. He also numbered and autographed each of them and my regard for Bogen and for Wigan is such that I keep copy forty-two on a special shelf.

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These findings should surprise no one. As Bogen remarked elsewhere, the corpus callosum has 200 million fibers that cross the midline and usually target inhibitory cells in the other side. That is, one side often works by releasing the brakes for specific targets in the other. Many conversations between left and right also appear to be continuous; others may be more sporadic. It also appears to be true that some tasks are performed better without comments from the opposite side and some are performed worse: “… there is now evidence that the capacity of one hemisphere to perform a particular task may deteriorate following commissurotomy. For example, Gazzaniga has described a patient who could perform a tactile task (discrimination of the detailed shapes of wire figures) with either hand before split brain surgery. After the surgery the subject could not perform the task with either hand, suggesting that interaction between the hemispheres is needed …” (Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessell, 1991) Still, no explanations for Herb and Firehouse, Henry and Ed.

Sexual Selection: Your Right and Left Pick-Up Different Chicks Raff ’s model applies to any emergent organization and, as if a fractal that repeats itself at all sizes, to any piece of an emergent organization. At all scales, “duplicate, compartmentalize, and vary” explores between what might be and what already is. Divided at its phylogenetic birth, each half of your brain took a somewhat distinct evolutionary path through millennia and now does better the things that it once did a little differently. Your right frontal area is larger than its partner but the opposite relationship occurs in the back where your left is larger than the matching area on your right. (Bruner, 2003; Goldberg, 2001; LeMay, 1976) This lack of symmetry may reflect different selective pressures on your right and left cortex: that is, novelty and familiarity are another example, like sex, of dinichism—novelty requires one kind of neural organizations and familiarity another. Your two halves each experience a slightly different set of selective pressures and should achieve different outcomes. (Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005; Carroll, 2005, 2006) Further, the left and right cerebral cortex not only duplicated itself but, in theory, each half also created its own mating displays! Not only should your right and left attract partners but each of them may attract a different set of them! Does the right half of a woman’s mind find sync with the right half of a particular man? And if so, what are the choices for her left side? And how are those matches measured and signaled?

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If sexual selection contributes to the swelling on your right frontal and left occipital cortex, then both their thickness and their abilities should vary more in males than females (True! Goldberg, 2001), become more noticeable with the onset of puberty, and reach their maximum potential during times that children must be reared. These exaggerations should be relatively expensive to produce, maintain, and defend and their abilities should exceed the ordinary demands of survival. Such was Miller’s argument that human verbal, musical, and artistic ability are products of sexual selection. (Miller, 1999, 2000)90 Is there a mating reason behind the truism that if you are to make it in science, you will do it by the time you are thirty? Finally, did similarity and influence, multiplied by narcissism, lead scientists to notice most whatever appeared unique to humans and, therefore, to write one hundred years of scientific myopia, when all of us erroneously focused on language-non language as the most interesting—indeed, the most important—difference between left brain and right and between man and animal? And how will an army of rationalists take their demotion from navigator to keeper-of-the-log? Will they still look in the mirror when they hug themselves?

Imperfect, Complex Unions Epigraphs Redux: “We find that, under natural physiological limitations, an optimal decision-making system can involve “selfish” agents that are in conflict with one another, even though the system is designed for a single purpose.” Livnat and Pippenger, 2006. “Organisms are extremely internally heterogeneous. Their states and motions are consequences of many intersecting causal pathways, and it is unusual that normal variation in any one of these pathways has a strong effect on the outcome. To be ill is precisely to be dominated by a single causal chain. To be obsessed by an idée fixe which motivates all one’s actions, or to be convinced that all behavior on the part of others, without distinction, is hostile, is a form of mental illness … Indeed, we may define ‘normality’ as the condition in which no single pathway controls the organism.” Lewontin, 2000, 93–94. 90 Charles Murray (2003) documented the impressive scientific, literary, and artistic achievements of males in comparison with females for the last 1100 years and concludes that Christianity allowed the “genes for” the Sistine ceiling to be expressed— individualism and the acts that attract women also draw you to God. Small wonder the conflict exists between chasing skirts and chasing an afterlife!

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It can no longer be assumed that the guns are holstered, the knives sheathed, and all struggles end when two gametes join their containers but mix their blocks instead of blending them. Mergers are modular, conflict and rebellion thrive, and endless textures exist. Loren Eiseley was one of them.

Loren Eiseley: Naturalist, Anthropologist, Writer “In that house there was no peace, yet we loved each other fiercely.” Eiseley (1975, 27)

Loren Eiseley was born in 1907 in Nebraska, son to an unstable, gifted mother and to a father who was equally gifted and, like mother, usually absent but for a different set of reasons. Eiseley’s descriptions of his childhood reflect how he carried on his inside the characters he faced on his outside. His mother, Daisy: “The woman, who in all my remembered life was neurotic, if not psychotic, whose blasted sense of beauty had been expended upon the saloon art of prairie towns, was dead. Her whole paranoid existence from the time of my childhood had been spent in the deliberate distortion and exploitation of the world about her … Because of her, in ways impossible to retrace, I would die childless.” Eiseley (1975, 229) His father, Clyde Eiseley, a depression-era, traveling salesman, was often gone because of his job and perhaps to escape from his wife. “At home, he spoke rhetorically long, rolling Elizabethan passages that made shivers run up his son’s spine. When Clyde Eiseley died, he left a soiled edition of Shakespeare, worn by frequent handling, a copy his son possessed all his life.” (Heuer, 1987, 15) That copy of Shakespeare represents Clyde’s biological legacy and proof that he remembered his son, Loren. For example, Kenneth Heuer, an editor and one of Eiseley’s friends, once saw that “… before his audience’s eyes, the quiet professor transformed himself into an eloquent actor, whose rhetorical delivery of ‘The Illusion of Two Cultures’ conjured up his father’s ghost.” (Heuer, 1987, 164) The theme of abandonment, of looking at other people as if he were an intruder, appears all through Eiseley’s autobiography and in many collections of his essays. For example, Clyde, dying in a coma, heard the voice of a son from his first marriage, woke up, and spoke. Loren remembered sitting with Clyde far longer but eliciting no response. Eiseley often refers to animals and people that he met and questions if they remember him—even to the time that he, on top of a passing boxcar, and a girl waiting in a red sportscar, waved to each other at a rail crossing.

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Another example: Eiseley adopted a stray dog but had to leave it behind. Eiseley always remembered that dog running alongside the moving train and dropping back only when exhausted and remarked several times later that man, after taming the dog, deserted him. Eiseley’s aunt burned some letters and Loren remembered one smoldering note from Clyde: “The boy is a genius but moody.” The copy of Shakespeare and that bit of recognition from the fire were vital to Loren—after all, Clyde married the first edition of that moodiness when he chose Daisy. Did Clyde respond to his son as he once responded to his bride? Did some of Clyde’s gifts move into sync with Daisy’s ambition and artistic abilities and give all of us a genius, entirely skeptical about civilized man but at one with our ancestral nature. Within Loren, Clyde’s and Daisy’s features wove together in such a way that neither one could escape the other. Loren shared Daisy’s powerful emotional storms and her personal sensitivity: he probably saw himself as he saw her and as his father might have seen her. He also might have framed and labeled her as she might have framed and labeled herself if she were outside looking inward. The uneasy partnership between his parental assets gained Loren an appetite for, and the talents to satisfy, a following of magazine editors, nature lovers, and large popular audience. This achievement was not easy: there were instances when Eiseley, overcome by social anxiety, inspired his audiences but might not have remembered what he wanted to say, said, or even how he got down from the speaker’s platform! According to Heuer, Eiseley chose nature writing as his lifetime career by eighth grade, influenced not only by his teachers but also by a third person, his maternal grandmother, Malvinia McKee Corey. “Among the treasures I found in that closet off Loren’s old study were the hundreds of letters to and from scientists, educators, government officials, authors, editors, and critics—many of them famous. The recent photographs of him were present too, but there was something else unexpected: packets of photographs of Loren and his friends taken at all stages of his life and, in a cardboard receptacle marked ‘Family Box,’ numerous pictures of his ancestors. This same box held stories written by Malvina McKee Corey, his maternal grandmother, who in her eighties, passed the time by recalling memories of her childhood (emph added, JB). In more ways than one, this nineteenth century chronicler of pioneer days in the wilds of Oregon was Loren’s psychological or near twin.” (Heuer, 1987, 7–8) Heuer refers to Corey’s “second sight,” one shared perhaps by Loren who could jump back ten thousand or ten million years between a period and the next capital letter.

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These leaps appeared whether Loren hiked through a canyon of rock or one of cement and tar. “My mind is stuffed with stray teeth, mammoth bones, and the lost trails of Indians and pioneers … I write because all these things haunt me and because, in that sense, I am the voice of things other than myself.” (Heuer, 1987, 79–80) Eiseley was most alone, like many of us, in his own eyes. From the time he was six-years-old and until he completed his Ph. D. at the University of Pennsylvania, Loren Eiseley was escorted by a chosen environment of real and imagined wild creatures and by his teachers, again, some real and some imaginary, who praised him and encouraged his doing more of what he already did well. I doubt that he learned much of anything in a formal classroom. Rather the classroom was a place to be while he developed. Later on, hoboes in frozen boxcars, animals that adopted him as their equal, fragments of teeth and bones, and shamans that he both met and imagined—they all taught and kept him company. He, of course, married a former teacher and librarian, Mabel Langdon, who, according to Heuer, arranged Eiseley’s life so that he could flourish. Eiseley struggled with deafness and fear of insanity all of his life and he refused to have children because he refused to risk passing his mother’s insanity to his children. Loren nearly died of tuberculosis in his teens and had recurrent ear infections—thus, his episodes of hearing problems that fed into his paranoia. He also rode freights with thousands of unemployed men and had a dozen near-deaths not only from hunger, cold, and exhaustion but also from railroad cops. At one point, he, traveling across Nebraska during a Great Plains winter, hung through the night on a boxcar’s outside ladder. When older and stronger, Eiseley explored digs and caves across the central United States and bones and conversations with the ghosts of Indians. He conversed with demons and with wild creatures, including the stray dogs and cats on Philadelphia’s Market Street. Frank Speck, Anthropology Chairman at Penn, took on Eiseley as a graduate student. It was important for Eiseley’s development that Speck was another shaman. The two men worked as equals and Eiseley took responsibility for the Department after Speck. The two men were in sync. Eiseley eventually wrote Darwin’s Century (a prize-winning, commissioned history of Victorian scientific thought), four books of poetry, and nine collections of essays about man’s place in nature. He became chief academic officer at the University of Pennsylvania from 1959–1961. Penn’s library was in terrible condition at that time: dusty classics lay on the floor while roaches ate their bindings and glue. Eiseley adopted the lost books just as he had adopted lost dogs and cats and the library became a shelter for the books and a dig for Eiseley. No matter where he traveled, Eiseley tracked his

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own multiple natures, combining the mother he wanted to forget with the father he thought he lost and finding ways to be remembered by all of us.91 92 91 Eiseley died on July 9, 1977. He is buried just outside of Philadelphia next to his wife, Mabel Langdon Eiseley, in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala-Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. His five thousand books and two thousand reprints are in a permanent collection in his former office, the Loren Eiseley Seminar and Library, at the University of Pennsylvania (Heuer, 1987). 92 I chose a fall Saturday and I rode Intruder to the end of forty-five years. The last mile on Belmont Avenue ended at black gates and the large dark door of a well-kept funeral home. “Eiseley is one of our most popular graves, please have a seat.” The receptionist handed me a map with a path on it marked in yellow. There were lots of graves on the west side of “West Lawn” but not Eiseley’s. Back to receptionist, a new one. I gave her the name, she typed, checked her computer screen, and announced, “He’s not in here.” “He certainly IS here.” “We have a Mabel Eiseley.” “That’s his wife, they share a plot.” “Oh. His name must be spelled wrong.” Eiseley’s autobiography has several references to “Will he remember me?” He asks this in regard to a passing dog or cat with whom he once shared a conversation or, in his days as a hobo, a fire and a bit of meat. He once commented, “Time. Either you ride away inexorably on its back, or, if you stop, it goes by you with someone else waving farewell whom you will never meet.” Correcting the cemetery’s spelling became of overwhelming importance. The revised map led me very near to where I had parked the first time. The tombstone appeared suddenly and just as suddenly, the last 40 years compressed into an instant: The gray apparition seemed to announce, “He is already gone” and to demand, “What kept you?” I had no answer. I had been only thirty miles away from him since 1973, some four years before he died. I was thirty years too late to offer him anything more than an erratum in a graveyard’s data base. Eiseley was right, either you ride Time or it goes by you. I, too, became anxious to press on. There is relief in flying, in the rush to the wind and in swoops to the right or left or in using Intruder’s brakes to dive. We rode the Interstate part way back to my home. My right wrist rolled forward, her engine spoke up and rushed us ahead, her mirrors quickly made ordinary things very small, and seventy miles per hour left even grief behind. A kid, however, nearly killed me when I slowed on a country road in front of my house. I glanced in a mirror as he and his tuner car came up fast on my rear fender, I laughed at him and gave Intruder an extra burp of gas just before we swerved from asphalt to gravel and escaped. I will leave when I’m ready.

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My Own Used Bricks I am a mosaic rather than a blend of my father’s and my mother’s physical traits. I have his forehead and his nose; her mouth, chin, and long neck. Even in my 60s I have his height and muscle definition but on my mother’s small frame. I also act and react like him or her but no one in between. Neither my father nor my mother ever abandoned a principle and, therefore, I have two bricks for stubbornness. My father, however, was respected by everyone, quiet about his convictions, a soldier, who, like many soldiers, disliked fights. He often worked late and often several grades above his Army rank, and usually earned perfect ratings on his efficiency reports, sometimes from men who had gone to college and drank too much. Even out of uniform, he dressed modestly, avoided show-offs, and hated drawing attention to himself. I have her restless, distractible nature and her hunger to be noticed and her anger when ridiculed. In middle school in south Georgia, I couldn’t restrain my opinions in order to avoid a fight but, instead, had many, flinched often, and lost both blood and the fights, that is, all but one. Irony: while her anxiety and small size guaranteed my physical defeats, her pride prevented my backing down. Even though bloodied, there was honor in staying to bleed some more and I, thereby, kept the respect of my classmates in that swamp-town school. Pop found his career in the Adjutant General (the Army’s equivalent to human resources), I was a psychologist for a state government. He sometimes wrote and edited the post’s Daily Bulletin, I often write short essays. Although only a year old when orphaned and his later becoming a graduate in 3 am escapes through kitchen windows and hopping the nearest freight—he did for the Army what I do now with a Ph.D. and a key from Phi Beta Kappa. My education gave me a different set of tools for the uneasy alliance from my parents. In my mid-thirties, I accepted their mosaic and planned ways to use her assets to balance his flaws and vice versa. I seek audiences but over-prepare for them and often pack a two-hour offering into a twenty-minute bag. I use his knack with a camera when I make slides for a presentation. Those pictures also protect me, because, like her, I often forget my next remarks until the next image is on the screen. I still sniffle like him and am distracted by it like her. “Jimmy, blow your nose!” echoes still and I might suppress my sniffle, or sometimes laugh and, like him, take an extra large snort! Neither parent approves of the other, gives in to the other, but—although both are dead, segments of both still live. Finally, my father once shared his wish to ride a motorcycle across the country and take pictures. Neither my mother nor the Army allowed such behavior and Pop never again made that comment. Although I was about nine years old at the time, I still hear him but I’ve also remained one who flinches and freezes when

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facing a punch. I first got on a cycle at age sixty-two, earned a perfect score on the written test for a motorcycle license but perhaps set a record for failure on the riding test. I found Intruder later that same afternoon, bought the glittered black and chrome bitch, and passed the riding test several months later. I still make her go but my fears of her disappeared. I had no choice but to buy a sportsbike, one that can break eighty-five in second but also has four higher gears if I should need them. At age sixty-five and evermore like my father, I do better if I am a little terrified on a regular basis.

4th Quarter: Old Dogs, Suicide, and Free Won’t Old Dogs, Young Tricks Guys in my generation are sometimes viewed as childish and accused by gossips of “not acting our age.” There may be truth in these accusations. That is, adolescent surges of hormones ratchet up muscles, vocal advertisements, and the bluffs and contests of young males; young females grow plump above and below their navel, separate a bit from their gang of female marauders, and put on a harness held by a young male. An implicit deal underlies “I will love you always”: “I will devote my protection, money, and influence only to you” and, in return, she rolls her shoulders forward, slumps, looks upward into his eyes, and promises all of her eggs. This nonsense lasts fifteen years. Males and females then return to whatever it was they did before their fourteen birthday. Men and women often get shorter, egg shaped, and weaker. Men, like little boys, worry more about fairness when they try to control women and young males and women—like their ancestral grandmothers—work in committees, run a business, and hang out with their friends. Two sexes move into sync, produce children, and return to their original natures.

Suicide and Apoptosis: “Mother Said ‘No.’” Six contributions make one platform for suicide. 1) C. D. Darlington concluded that evolution turns random events into near-certainty. 2) Stuart Kauffman reached the same point some forty years later in regard to changes from chaos to order. 3) Rita Levi-Montalcini observed death in masses of neurons in developing chicks that failed to find targets: “The impression was that of a battlefield covered with corpses.” (Levi-Montalcini, 1988, 141) 4) Elkhonon Goldberg found that the right half of your cerebral cortex engages uncertainty, makes it routine, and, conceivably, finds a connection between itself and what your left side does. (Goldberg, 2001) 5) Jacob Bronowski’s “sense of the future” gives a framework for defining human executive functions as tools that manage tomorrow before you have to take it on. (Bronowski, 1977; Barkley, 1997) 6) Viktor Frankl concluded that suicide in Auschwitz was associated with a lack of connection to the future: for example, coupons given for extra labor could be swapped for cigarettes or food. Choosing cigarettes predicted choosing suicide. (Frankl, 2006)

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It is possible to view the determination to live as a mother’s legacy, one conveyed by her smiles, whispers, and lectures when those mutterings are consistent with the legacy that she provided during gestation. That legacy, conveyed prenatally, consists of attributes for making social ties. Without those ties, individuals imitate neurons and self destruct when they connect with nothing. All of these things reflect a deep principle: the beacon for living is in evolving better ways to make a living, not merely doing something different in order to stay where you are. Such pulls natural selection along and hints that, at some levels, apoptosis is merely the obverse of selection’s coin. Given that heritability exerts more influence as you age, it can be said that your future pulls you more than your past pushes you. What you have been is less informative than what you are to be. You explore, as if a fish swimming into the current, feeding on demands for your particular set of abilities. Neural cells in chick embryos must do a job if they are to live, Dalmatians on fire trucks are more interested in tomorrow’s fire than last week’s, and determined minds thrive or die not for what they have been but for what they are to become.

Free Won’t “… Organisms do not find already existent ecological niches to which they adapt, but are in the constant process of defining and remaking their environments. At every moment natural selection is operating to change the genetic composition of populations in response to the momentary environment, but as that composition changes it forces a concomitant change in the environment itself. Thus organism and environment are both causes and effects in a coevolutionary process.” (Lewontin, 2000, 125–126) Lewontin is neither alone nor the first. Determination, defiance, and affirmation started when a bacterium swam upstream. One billion, five hundred million years and a sneeze later, Aristotle (384–322 BC), Aquinas (1225–1274), Spinoza (1632–1677), and Leibnitz (1646–1716) proclaimed the human mind to be a seeker and arranger. Darlington (1953, 303) also elaborated these themes, and after him, Bouchard, Plomin, Scarr, Rowe, and a host of contemporary behavior geneticists. “All this choice of environment has arisen as men, by creating environments, have advanced from the old stone age. With each one of us the choice grows with our own understanding and sophistication. Take us back either to early infancy or to the old stone age, and the choice of environment is quenched.… Every step in civilization is a step in exposing and exploiting

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the genetic diversity of men and their genetic gradation between what in poetic terms are called the creature of circumstance and the man of destiny.” (Darlington, 1953, 303) E. O. Wilson (1975) referred to abilities to change environments as “the ultimate adaptation.” That is, creatures that adjust their worlds should do better than creatures that merely adjust to them. Such is the core of our being as reflected in our conduct and in the thoughts of any writer who is not depressed! Put you or me in an environment that is too tough or too easy, to which we are too poorly-or too well-matched, and we move on, whether by foot, boat, bus, truck, or freight train. From instant to instant, life is on the make, finding, in Stuart Kauffman’s words, new opportunities to make a living. Every Dennis-the-Menace is unique and, driven by his nature to escape his mother’s rules, tries to rearrange her. He first says “please,” then whines, sneaks, acts first and asks later, or threatens to run away and kill himself if he can’t get what he wants. It is a wonderful thing that a spider does likewise.

Chapter Ten Old Dogs, Young Tricks “Well, my poet days are over and I’m back to being me.… it’s faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, and more money.” (Tom T. Hall, “Faster Horses,” The Ultimate Collection, Hip-O Records, 2001; www.cowboylyrics. com/lyrics/hall-tom-t/faster-horses-the-cowboy-and-the-poet-12417.html)

Copyright conventions prevent my sharing more of Hall’s lyric. Definitely, look it up on the Internet! Even the full version captures only half the story because it doesn’t mention what the “poet” did before maturity led to his search for kindness, dependability, and intelligence. For skeptical females with eggs to market, poets can sometimes offer better deals than cowboys. The song also refers to the cowboy as for an “old philosopher” because that’s what the younger one, at that moment, wanted but the philosopher was devoted more to having fun than talking about it. Many of us in old age return to the pursuits of adolescence but not to just anyone’s adolescence.93 That is, you were one twin of yourself until your fifteenth birthday, a different twin possessed you for twenty years, and you began your twelve steps to recovery at thirty-five. Every man and woman eventually rediscovers his or her equivalents to “faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, and more money.” The old guys who now buy fastback Mustangs probably also bought them forty years ago.

93 “Old Dogs” is mostly about males. First, I am one and, second, we vary far more than the females. Females do remarkable things but males do more of them—good or bad—and get the ink. If you want to find extremes, you might have an easier time looking at males! Nonetheless, the evidence for this segment is less substantial than usual. Did I notice the one topic in human nature that Frank Galton never discussed? Or did my right cortex overheat and burn a valve when arranging this? Hell, I dunno … 165

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Metamorphosis? “To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia.” (H. L. Mencken, 1949/1952, 57)

You rehearsed hunting in teams and hierarchies on the school yard until a tickle near your groin pulled your hand to your pocket. A smooth complexion, freckled nose, bare legs, and fine ankles—even from across the room—pushed your hand even further away from your cap pistol, stamp collection, bicycle, bat, and glove. When those perfect thighs eventually grow cellulite, will familiar hormones take you back to your stamps, bike, and baseball? Will a ball and glove be found again after spouse, offspring, and taxes no longer keep you from the important things that you first did? Further, will you reach up on that shelf and take down your stuff because you changed from within or because the environment no longer tells you what to do? There is no answer to this choice: nature and nurture are inextricable. You chose your ball and glove at one stage, soft skin and warm breath at another, and later returned to where you started. In a subtle way, Darlington’s observation that evolution turns chance into certainty applies to your personal development. That is, before puberty the stuff you did was somewhat more varied than the stuff that you did after your sweat got smelly and women became more important than tuner cars and racing bikes. I also hope that you happily, easily, and without thinking too much, revert after age thirty-five back to the tuner cars and motorcycles. You will have plenty of company. Nick Sanders leads tourists—most of them Brits—on motorcycles from Portugal to Timbuktu and back again in northwest Africa: He remarked: “Trips like this have to do with getting to a certain age. I’m not immune to that—I’m 50 next year and you realise that your life is finite and you’ve maybe got 15 years of useful life left. Once you realise that, everything pales into insignificance—how much money you make, what relationship you’re in, what your kids are doing at university. It’s nothing compared with how you feel about yourself. And that’s why I take people on trips like this. It can make them feel so much better about the rest of their life.” (Westlake, 2007, 96) Saunders also charges £3000! Sanders explained further about his tour: “… the objective was to get to the hotel. In that respect it was the same as any motorcycle tour anywhere in the world, but in Africa you don’t know how it’s going to work.… Never mind getting to the hotel on time, you don’t know there’ll be a road there.” One of his customers remarked: “You have to have the right mentality for this sort of trip … A lot of people … needed plans with intermediate goals and the

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like. You don’t get that with Nick. His style suits Africa—plans don’t really work there.” (Westlake, 2007, 99) Plans don’t work in Africa because Africa itself is immature, a sprawling child without a parent. She has roads that vanish into sand dunes, hostile frontiers, and checkpoints where bribes may not work. Sanders takes his tour through villages where robed, dignified black people stare at whites who ride motorcycles and wear helmets, goggles, boots, and jackets in the desert heat. The scene could be one in Mad Max! Most days end at hotels where six-and eight-legged pets and their offspring, perhaps donated by the last guest, share your bed. Old dogs live again the stuff of their playgrounds. I want to go …

Genes That Switch On or Off “… The proper description of any given person is not a single characterization, nor even a set of characterizations, but a set of characterizations in a particular temporal order, a developmental history. There is no characteristic of any human being that is not in a continuous state of developmental transformation throughout life.” (Lewontin, 1982, 16)

If-then developmental sequences may construct sharply different outcomes from one set of genes in different contexts. (Wilson 2006) The lac operon phenomenon, demonstrated by Monod and Jacob, showed that a gene switches “on” when lactose is available and “off ” when it is not. (Gazzaniga, 1992; Jacob 1998) This simple model might account for an extraordinary range of findings in which one set of genes achieves two or more, very different, outcomes. - Well-fed infant male dung beetles grow horns when adult and defend tunnels they dug through poop, tunnels wherein where more dung beetles are created. A starved male grows no horns and evades the super-sized guard by making his own tunnel and sometimes impregnating the female. (Wilson, 2007) (Undersized chimps and male orangs, know as “sneaky fuckers,” use similar reproductive strategies. So do frat guys and GD Independents!) - A ‘gator or turtle egg that incubates in warm sand becomes a male; in cool sand, a female. - In rats, a brief exposure to testosterone, just after birth, produces male patterns of hormone release and mounting females; without that exposure, hormonal release is cyclic and the would-have-been males lower their stomachs but raise their tails when mating. They also make nests and retrieve pups. (Levine, 1966) - Approximately one infant rhesus male in ten is unusually impulsive, misjudges distances when he leaps between high branches, and bloodies his fur and breaks

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his bones in fights with larger, older rhesus. Infant rhesus that grow up with their peers in a lab setting, without maternal attention, tend to be more impulse-driven and, in Suomi’s words, drink alcohol as if they were sponges. (Suomi, 2000) (He later remarked informally that supplementing the diet with omega-3 fatty acids attenuated many of his experimental effects.) (Suomi, 2006) - One set of bony rudiments can make a human’s arm, cat’s forepaw, whale’s flipper, or bat’s wing. (Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005) - Pax-6, a transcription gene, can make an insect eye not only in the usual places for an eye but also on a leg or wing and the same gene can work in a fly or a mouse. (Jacob, 1998; Carroll, 2006) - According to Raff (1996), earlier genetic sequences can remain intact and available for duty some five to eight million years after they were suppressed by the new ones. There should be no trick for those sequences switching back on after a mere thirty years! Of course, in regard to old laws, I believe Dr. Raff more than I believe Moses! - After sudden impact from heat, infection, oxygen starvation, cold, poisons, or radiation, heat-shock proteins (Hsps) first try to repair the damaged DNA sequences but, if unsuccessful, later stabilize them in their earlier form that is passed to the next generation. More primitive arrangements, more probable than newer ones, resume their old functions and, thereby, testify to the impact of a gamma ray and make it heritable! (Queitsch, Sangster, and Lindquist, 2002; Rutherford and Lindquist, 1998; Lindquist and Craig, 1988)94 - There are eight transcription genes (Hox) that occur in a fixed order but sometimes in multiple copies. Labial, proboscipedia, Deformed, Sex combs reduced, Antennapedia, Ultrabithorax, Abdominal A, Abdominal B occur in all metazoa, whether insect, fish, bird, or mammal. This sequence emerged perhaps a little more than five hundred million years ago and has made between three and thirty million living species, including seven hundred, fifty thousand insect, four thousand mammalian, fifty thousand kinds of weevil (Raff, 1996) and very likely, the ninety-plus percent of all species that ever lived but are now extinct. (Carroll, 2004, 2006; Carroll, Grenier, and Weatherbee, 2001; Kirschner and Gerhart, 2005) Shifts in operating status are to be expected. That is, genes work as switches and in wide networks, a responsive web of yes/no modules, and a cluster of five or more similar modules can lead to the appearance of a continuously varying 94 Curious about your ancestors? Crank up the heat or the ultraviolet, make some droughts, or scatter gamma rays. The hair that springs from an old man’s ears will appear on his children’s backs and their newly thickened legs and arms. And you might save a lot of grant money that once went to bone hunters.

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trait. (Plomin et al, 2003) The advantage is that individuals change for particular environments, even without putting on motorcycle jackets and helmets, and some commitments are not made forever but can be temporary, guarded, or retracted entirely. A woman who is pregnant differs from that same woman who is not pregnant. Once she delivers her child, she may lose weight, exercise more, and again drink margaritas and smoke on the back deck with her friends. Prozac changes the salesman into a shopkeeper on the Jersey shore. Promote a manager to vice-president and he may take on a mistress but one who leaves him when he is demoted. And of course, a lobster that wins one fight becomes more likely to win a series of them and winning elections depends on convincing pollsters that the opposition cannot win. Actual majorities then stay home on election day. Bottom lines: adults find and construct niches that match their quirks and their quirks have substantial heritability. If so, then the enduring niches that the adult makes must overlap those that he made when a child. Wordsworth’s remark, “… the child is father of the man …” has evo-devo meanings although decorated: you again see the child when the man is no longer a father! Further, the bizarre shifts that go with courtship can be seen as a spell of madness, eventually cured by time. Old dogs again play in school yards, doing things that were easy to learn and practiced at recess, not in the classroom. Given the smaller importance of social obligations—your children are launched—you start to match your nature as it was.

Love Is a Passing Fever “Either the season of spring … or some incidental heat of passion has brought a relapse … in those periods of life with which much heat and blood are associated, persons are most given to mania, namely those about puberty, young men, and such as possess energy and vigor …” Aretaeus, 100 A.D., quoted in Akiskal, 1995,754). From a fifty-year-old male: “I feel as if I should be looking at women and pursuing some of them but I’m not. I don’t feel alone. Instead, I feel so free …” I told him to enjoy it. I’ve had a sports bike, also known as a “crotch rocket” for several weeks. A college-aged friend looked at the bike and remarked at length how much it would attract women. My own thoughts were that I liked the sense of flying and that I had to buy it now because I might be unable to ride it next year when I turn sixty-six. I really am a kid again and no yucky girl is getting on my bike!

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Love is a mix of alcohol and cocaine. Shakespeare, Ovid, and sections of the Bible … all of them express love as so intense, delicious, and miserable that you not only fall in love but also with the idea of being in love. Love can be your most intense addiction, the sweetest of pains, the sharpest of stimulants. It is also the most lethal because it can kill you quickly or slowly, by means of too much fun or too much pain but it always kills you. Even religions capitulate to love, adopt it, and change it for their own purposes: the consuming, hot fire that is selfish and leads to fights and stolen women is supposed to give way to serving God, orphaned children, and old widows. Because of love, males fight with humor, brawn, deception, threats, and money; swapping freedom for approval from someone who incessantly chews gum, shops, talks about feelings, and nags them—whether lover, sons, or “just friends”—to be at least a little better than he was yesterday or the lover, sons, and “just friends” of other women. Males not only vie for attention but also return it when they size up a female’s kindness, intelligence, health, probable fecundity, and maternal aptitude. That is, will she do things his way? Is she durable? Will she have babies and will she care for them? Do the brightness of her teeth signal her maternal inclinations more reliably than her spoken promises? Almost certainly! And a billion dollar dental industry helps women and their daughters lie to men! Did her parents pay for dental work that helps her to lie? Again, almost certainly! Will she welcome only you into her belly, will the visits be worth their price, how soon will her welcome vanish, and how long before she bores hell out of you? On her behalf, does a guy have the strength, cleverness, and political skills needed to bring home meat, win fights, and discourage thieves and rapists? And does the woman have the assets to draw him home, paycheck in his pocket or a fresh kill on his shoulder? And does his beating her mean that he loves her? Does he care enough to be jealous? (Buss, 2000) Bottom line: love for either a man or woman means they “abandon all others,” including their own self when he or she gives up yesterday’s important things. Impulsiveness can be a developmental marker for the course of your life, one that starts at birth, discovers persistence in matters of the gonads, and decades later, lives again for today. When a child, you act as if an r selected creature: your high levels of activity consume whatever your parents give you and you will push them for more than they have. As you age, you also find limits in your possibilities. Compound interest replaces immediate gratification and you plan for the future. Your dopamine and with it, your initiative and forsight, leaves you, on an average of seven percent every decade. (Volkow, et al, 2000) The fidget in your right foot is a metronome that slows as you age while your mind does likewise. You

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eventually cheat your retirement fund for some new toys. You talk about cooperation but for selfish reasons: some activities “just seem natural” and, when younger, you do them immediately, enjoy them, and, when questioned, taxed, or arrested, defend your doing so. Irony: when the faces and fannies of your children become angular instead of round, and hairy instead of smooth, you return to your first passions and start to grow your own baby fat. You no longer care quite so much when skin finds wrinkles, backs compress, voices rasp, eyes film over on top and grow bags underneath, and, for Darwinian reasons, “Wow!” morphs into “Gross!” and protects young girls from old men.

“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME …”95 Swept Away In Testosterone “We find that our working stock of ideas is narrowly limited and that the mind continually recurs to the same instruments in conducting its operations, therefore its tracks necessarily become more defined and its flexibility diminished as age advances.” Francis Galton (1883/1907/1911, 146) Sean and his dad each had a truck with a decrepit body but modified under the hood and in its cockpit as if a NASCAR entrant. “I don’t understand why my father has to act like he’s a kid again.” “You will someday …”

Puberty is when sons and daughters do extreme things. Young males are particularly noticeable and turn confusion into resources and resources into confusion, court death in order to escape it, and share their bloodiest trophies with mothers, sisters, wives, and the girls at the taproom. Testosterone is praised and blamed for these things. (No one complains about estrogen the cooperator but, then, little sister always got away with everything!) According to Wikipedia: Testosterone “… is the principal male sex hormone and an anabolic steroid. In both males and females, it plays key roles in health and well-being. Examples include enhanced libido, energy, immune function, and protection against osteoporosis. On average, the adult male body pro95 Eliot left out the apostrophe! It annoys hell out of me to do the same! This line, taken from The Wasteland, is from a pub scene in which drunken womenError! Bookmark not defined. gossip about abortion and sexError! Bookmark not defined., instead of loveError! Bookmark not defined., while the barman nudges them to get out for closing the pub as well as an era.

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duces about twenty to thirty times the amount of testosterone that an adult female’s body does.” (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone. 11/05/2007) Testosterone is less appreciated in settled times when estrogenized minds think of it as if it were a villain. People in stable environments want fewer children, efficient management of resources, and good relationships with their neighbors. In such conditions, older males and females write rules and impose time-outs on snappy dressers and noise makers of either sex. Young females, however, still want obnoxious males and older females, encountering such a male, remember their younger days but can’t say why. Testosterone often becomes the saving player during environmental and social crises and saves the people who most criticize it. “Do or die” may be encouraged in professional sports but it is plentiful and for duty and honor, not money, in military service. The 9/11 Twin Towers collapse gave many heroes a stage, so many that a Manhattan feminist proclaimed her newfound appreciation for what testosterone can do. In utero and immediately after birth, exposure to testosterone masculinizes hypothalamic functions in rat brains and behavior that otherwise would have been feminine: castrated male rats support a working ovary and are more apt to assume female mating positions, build nests, and retrieve pups. (Levine, 1966)96 During a male’s puberty, a girl’s smile, a whiff of her perfume, or a glance at a magazine cover … any of them instantly produces erections. (They also make it impossible for males to stand up in English and go to Math without substantial embarrassment!) Facial, chest, and pubic hair grow long and dark, the face becomes leaner, the voice deepens; the jaw, brows, chin, nose, shoulders, and chest take on adult dimensions. Muscles get larger and stronger, the Adam’s apple becomes prominent, testes manufacture sperm, and the young male finally wins a fight with his father. Advancing age and decreased levels of testosterone are correlated with smaller muscles, loss of bone density and strength, fewer erections, and less energy. Separation anxiety and fear of dying become more evident, anxious active children who became manic in their teens or adulthood become anxious and active. Some old dogs fret about the future of their nation, and bounce grandchildren on their knees. Others of us do less of these things. Of course, the grandchild is not only genetically similar but also developmentally similar to the knee’s owner. The old dog thinks “I used to do the same thing” and enjoys doing it again: one bouncing kid brings joy to two minds. The kid who once yelled that his sister, mother, or teacher was “unfair” writes about moral 96 Levine acknowledged the pioneering work of Carroll Pfeiffer in the mind 1930s.

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dilemmas. Older scientists regularly become philosophers, sometimes good ones, but I’m not sure how many old philosophers become scientists of any merit whatsoever … the testosterone just ain’t there and probably never was.

Dr. Galton, Tell Me About the Breasts … “Will you still need me, will you still feed me …” When I’m Sixty-Four. Lennon/McCartney, 1967 Darwin enjoyed biographies, the sound of Emma’s voice, and thinking about evolution while she read to him. (Sulloway, 1996) Darwin, an anxious fellow, was onto a good thing: I know an English woman whose vocal qualities have the effect of a benzodiazepine.

I am troubled that I, a longtime, keen judge of a woman’s face, hips, stomach, and legs, now first look at her breasts. I first noticed this phenomenon when I visited a dentist several years ago. She was about thirty-five years old, slender, freckled, and her blue eyes were capped by black, glossy bangs. I needed a filling. She skipped the Novocaine, cupped my face to one of her breasts, and I relaxed while the drill whined. This change in me was significant—I hated dentists and feared the sound of a drill and the odor of burning bone, especially my own burning bone! The change was also annoying and developmentally inappropriate at an age when I should be smiling at women who need a grandfather for their small children. (I have since met a fellow who changed to a “tits-guy” after he started taking a neuroleptic: I understand those drugs change levels of prolactin (Pappagallo and Silva, 2004; Markianos, Hatzimanolis, and Lykouras, 2001) Is there a connection?) Further, I always found a well-designed bra to be more interesting than what it carried. And getting one off was sometimes more of a puzzle than what to do later—as Skinner noticed, getting the grain of corn is more important than having it. I fear the future: I may reach at my last breath, hypnotized by the face and tits of my nurse or, worse, by a stuffed dummy with only those features and nothing more! As of now, I expect to miss the fun I had as a face-leg-ass guy but I might, instead, forget my earlier fascinations or wonder why I had them. Francis (Frank) Galton may have experienced something similar. Galton, like hyperactive boys and men and many young rhesus monkeys, was probably more socially stable when anchored to a female. His sister, Adele, was thirteen years older and Frank, when eight years old, appointed her to be his executrix because she had worked so hard on him. Louisa became Galton’s wife, took over from Adele, and kept track of Frank for forty-three years. Roughly two years after Louisa’s death, Galton’s great niece, Lucy Evelyne (Eva) Biggs, moved

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in as his companion. (Gillham, 2001) She was in her early thirties, Galton in his eighties. So far, nothing peculiar for an affluent gentleman. The oddity was Kantsaywhere, a novel that Galton intended as a popularized description for a eugenic society, one whose most valued females were “thoroughly mammalian.” Galton’s publisher, however, rejected the manuscript! Galton died a month later, in December 1910. The man who gave us nature and nurture, twins studies, biometrics, composite photography, fingerprinting, meteorology, and positive eugenics, also wrote an unpublishable book … one that usually would have become a postmortem tribute. Galton, before dying, told one of his nieces that he wanted the manuscript “smothered or superceded.” Instead, she burned most of it, especially the love scenes, but the sections on eugenics eventually passed to Galton’s student and collaborator, Karl Pearson. (en.wikipedia.org/Francis_Galton. 11/05/2007) Unfortunately, she may have burned the wrong sections: the surviving material is as boring as Skinner’s Walden II! The niece explained in her note of March 27, 1911: “When I began the work of execution, my heart misgave me so much that I thought I would begin by merely “Bowdlerizing” it, and then see. So I destroyed all the story, all poor Miss Augusta, the Nonnyson anecdotes, and in fact everything not to the point but there were a good many pages that I felt myself incapable of judging. So I am returning the mutilated copy, hoping (if you and Eva* could agree on the point) that Professor Karl Pearson might see it. Unfortunately Eva is not well enough just now to be consulted, so we must wait. Mutilated as it is, poor “Kantsaywhere” can never be published, and it is as safe from that as if it were destroyed altogether, but I think what remains might interest Prof. Pearson, and possibly, though I doubt it, be useful. Besides if something survived, I should not feel quite so much like a murderess …” (www.galton.org, Life of Francis Galton by Karl Pearson Vol 3a, p. 413: image 0470) Like so many of us guys, Galton appears to have been wiped, washed, and dressed by a female relative at both ends of his life! Did Charles Darwin experience a similar reversal while listening to his wife’s reading? There are modern examples. It’s 2 am and I’m awake, listening to a trucker show on my radio. A driver who trains a twenty-four-year old intern calls the host for advice in a small world

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where he ignores 100,000 eavesdroppers. (Yes, truckers have “interns”! Groan.) The intern happens to be a female, he happens to be almost seventy, in love with her, and certain that she’s in love with him. He explains that she sometimes appears in only her undergarments. Further, his equipment works “if carefully managed,” and he doesn’t want children. (I want to sleep but human nature keeps me listening.) The audience of truckers, men and women, in twangs and drawls from Seattle to Austin to Savannah, reacts as strongly as they did to the prospect of Mexicans’s piloting the big rigs up I35 and across Oklahoma to Kansas City. And the callers, mostly female truckers, ask who takes advantage of whom in this relationship between the intern and an old man? I drift off, wondering if the driver has a lesson for me: the smell of a woman elicits two sets of drives that alternate in three stages—protection, lust, and protection. How much of an old dog’s search is for an anchor and mother-protector rather than a mate? Does Duck want to get laid or to be hugged? Does he, like many of us, tip a waitress more if she calls him “Hon’”? While I expect heartbreak for Duck, I also feel envy that he sometimes has an undressed girl in the bunk behind his head.

Going Backwards from Sixty-Four to Zero “One eternally keeps an appointment with one’s self, but I was much too young to know.” Eiseley (1975, 174) “This same box held stories written by Malvina McKee Corey, his maternal grandmother, who in her eighties, passed the time by recalling memories of her childhood.” (Heuer, 1987, 7–8)

In our forties and fifties, some of the ties to our anchors disconnect: our children leave home and, as Gulliver would do if all the Lilliputians suddenly went away to college, we regain freedom and can repeat the pranks of our teens. Here are some examples but renamed and put into new times and places: Mabel had polio in her teens but Herb courted her while he chattered incessantly and pushed her wheelchair from place to place. They became a pair of happy manics in sync. She regained her ability to walk, they married, had children, and collected lots of memories before paralysis caught her again at age sixty. Herb, still chattering, pushed her wheelchair. Julie, seventy years old, knit, sewed, and colored as she did as a child, all pleasures she put away so long as she was married, worked in a factory, and raised children. (So many women I know enjoy sitting and coloring!) Her husband is gone,

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her children are in their forties, and she is free to have some fun. She chooses to do what she did sixty years ago and with the quiet dignity that she had when only seven years old. I am one more bee in this swarm. Once a second grader, one who feared his own eventual death but also one who water-colored in his great aunt and uncle’s backyard, I now use words instead of paints to establish themes, sweeps, and washes quickly but ruin them with endlessly reworked, irrelevant details. My younger writing flowed when it could jump topics between sentences. And once more the tenth grader and college student, my essays connect the gaps between quotes by famous people who better said what I want to say. High school in northern Italy: I listened to the AM radio late at night and searched for distant stations. I was usually in my room, completing schoolwork and a correspondence course in commercial art. I also spent many evening in the Army’s photo lab. I paid two dollars each evening to become a slave, one that talked, coaxed, and connived with big Beseler enlargers and print dryers. I obsessed for hours with filters, exposure times, and all the paper I could use in order to rescue images that I should have trashed. (Man Ray got his best images because of what he did to his negatives. I sometimes (often!) underexposed a shot but saved it by abusing the enlarger. That is, a five-minute exposure on the enlarger, focused on a paper intended for contact prints, could produce the most gentle, detailed black and white images from a negative that was hopelessly pale.) As for daytime, Bobbi Sue’s light brown curls and North Carolina drawl, her head tilted down and to one side, her huge eyes looking upward into mine, even her asking about math homework or the yearbook, took up most of the space in my head. I used to blame my childhood isolation on my fearful mother, who kept me at home, and on the Army’s moving us every couple of years. Although I’ve lived in the same town of three thousand people since the early ’70s, even my friends tease me about my having no friends.97 I ride a motorcycle that its maker named Intruder but I noticed the suitability of the bike’s name after I fell in love and bought her. I think sometimes about Bobbi Sue, not as she probably is but as she was, and more often now than at any time between ages eighteen and fifty-five. From ages sixteen to twenty-five, I wanted a female partner like a hungry kid pressing his 97 I once explained to a veterinarian the striking similarities between my cat and my motorcycle, similarities that suggest a convergent evolution, the result of similar functions leading to similar structures. Her comment? “You really need to get out more …”

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nose against the window of a donut shop but a kid who didn’t want the leftover donut. I now look for a female partner, pass twenty possibilities every week in the mall and bookstores but, as in high school, each woman has at least one intolerable fault that I can discover in a few seconds. This is a substantial contrast with my hyperactive middle years, filled with an old Porsche, political intrigue, parties, and babes who frosted their hair and glossed their lips, knew when to use their salad or dinner fork, and insisted that brandy alexanders come before snuggling. Between age thirty and forty-five, women brought themselves to my door with plans to get up late and a bottle under their arm; at sixty-four, there are no calls or knocks and I don’t bother to stock the fridge. As if I deliver newspapers once more, women talk to me the longest and with the greatest sincerity when they pay me. How odd. How familiar. There is more. In eighth grade, I raced my bicycle when I delivered one hundred thirty newspapers morning and evening. Then as now, I delayed writing receipts and collecting money. It was boring and embarrassing and some customers even stopped me, “Hey, don’t I owe you some money?!” I still put off forever billing individuals or insurance companies and take on customers if we find each other interesting. I still see and hear Max, a German shepherd, who ran alongside me every morning and afternoon when I delivered newspapers. He barked and leaped in sync with my every other pedal stroke. I regularly took a rolled up newspaper, swatted him across his forehead on my back swing and then whipped that paper around to my left, throwing it slap flat against the face of a cement step. Max always stopped when I stopped my bicycle. He licked my hands and face, I scratched his throat and ears, and we guys then went opposite directions for home. Nearly fifty years later, I ride Intruder almost every day in a curved loop of about the same length of time, at about the same time of day, but without throwing newspapers or scratching a dog’s ears. I go much faster and further now and but still enjoy the currents in my face. Max has probably been dead almost fifty years but I expect to see him again. I again listen to AM radio late at night, carry a camera and talk in pictures, and scatter freshly printed photos to dry on any flat surface as my father did when I was ten years old and we lived in Japan. As if in high school again, I pursue recognition rather than money, collect odd thoughts and rearrange them, correct things that don’t need correction, and speak again through pictures. Counting backwards, if I am at sixty-five as I was at thirteen, then motorcycles and strokes aside, I will die at seventy-eight like my father.

Chapter Eleven Suicide and Apoptosis: Mother Said “No.”98 “Darwin’s theory of evolution is a theory of descent with modification. It does not yet explain the genesis of forms, but the trimmings of the forms, once they are generated.” Stuart Kauffman (2000, 17) So does apoptosis. “Apoptosis is a process of suicide by a cell in a multicellular organism. It is one of the main types of programmed cell death (PCD) and involves an orchestrated series of biochemical events leading to a characteristic cell morphology and death. The apoptotic process is executed in such a way as to safely dispose of cellular debris. In contrast to necrosis, which is a form of traumatic cell death that results from acute cellular injury, apoptosis is carried out in an orderly process that generally confers advantages during an organism’s life cycle.” (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis. 9/4/2007)

Chapter 11. Suicide and Apoptosis explores suicide as an orderly, usually non impulsive choice that comes from within rather than as a reaction to something outside. It is described here as one outcome from a failure in connectivity with the future such as that seen by Levi-Montalcini in her microscope slides of developing cell clusters in chick embryos or that described by Durkheim, Frankl, Primo Levi, or Camus. Suicide is also another example of how human lives repeat strategies that nature uses elsewhere: the self-transcendence that Fromm admired in Beyond the Chains of Illusion, the attachment to future purpose found essential by Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, are not unique to humans. Suicide follows when living materials assemble without a purpose. It is neither painless nor mad and compensates not only for deficits but also for excesses. Life copies Goldilocks as it must and anchors to “just right”! Apoptosis, by a different light, is another expression of natural selection: erase those experiments that that fail to connect with mates and resources, and, in the case of humans, the future! 98 This chapter developed from Brody JF “Suicide ‘Mother, May I?’” a poster presentation (one thirty-two pages long!) at the biannual meeting of the International Society on Human Ethology, Detroit, Mich, July 31–Aug 4, 2006. 178

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There is a second useful metaphor, borrowed from statistical physics, that of emergent networks. (Kauffman, 2000; Lewontin, 2000) Suicide grows from a web of interconnected weak influences, some of them more important than others and sometimes urged on by minor cheerleaders or held back by worries about the children or mother’s disapproval. Scholars may, or may not, agree on which factors—for example, self mutilation—must play on suicide’s team or, like depression, play on several different ones. (Durkheim, 1897; deCatanzaro, 1981; Jamison, 1999; Colt 2006) As is true for other emergent systems, the network that seeks your death competes with your other obsessions to live. Dying finds allies and works to defeat its competitors. Self-destruction, thus, finds “yes” many times and from multiple advisors but it also suppresses “no” at the same time. You can expect an arms race between a client’s plans to live and their plans to die, and between what a therapist does and what the client does next. Networks, however, vary. Once you recognize contributions from depression, isolation, loss of friends, influence, and money, aging, humiliation, or being cheated, trapped, or the target of gossip and suspicion, or simply being different, you will find that your favorite explanation for suicide-in-general accounts for very few suicides-in-particular. Thus, suicide will devil clinicians because it is rarely predictable but always explainable! Mistakes are easy, so is blame for making them. No surprise, spin doctors and pattern-makers will find suicide to be a sin, cowardice, or betrayal, or a courageous act, an obligation to God, and a fundamental human right. There might also be conditions in which suicide becomes a public duty, a gift to relatives, a rebellion, or a retroactive abortion.

Failure to Find Sync Life grows from sync and sync grows from similarities and influence. Suicide becomes more likely when similarity and influence lead to death and simplification rather than to partnerships and involvement. This notion lines up with that of “fitness,” as conceived by Darwinians who measure the length of a life or count the numbers of offspring that live to a reproductive age. Suicide and apoptosis possibly had the same phylogenetic seed and replay scripts written in physics. Barabási and his group measure also measure fitness but by the number of connections that a node has and by the rate, the “fitness connectivity product,” at which that node finds new connections, and—by implication—moves into sync with them. Lack of sync should go with lack of connectivity and, whether by Darwin’s concepts or Barabási’s, a shorter, lonelier life.

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Second, suicide and murder are opposites. Murder more closely resembles necrosis—cell death by infection or trauma in the company of pain, fever, and inflammation. By one means or another, both necrosis and murder get lots of attention! Suicide is often orderly, individual, and private; necrosis and murder are usually hot, bloody, sloppy, and resisted by the victim. Third, suicide may also be a player in regression-to-the-mean. That is, suicide erases not only liabilities from the family ledger but also excesses for beauty, wealth, intelligence, or talent. Either too little of many things, or too much of anything, means that you either create your own audience of your near-twins or fall out-of-step with living when your friends, parents, and clerics shun you. Fourth, multiple contributions from within you make a single network that arranges its environments and reacts disproportionately to events that would be trivial to an outsider. The abilities that let you create a private nest will also help you discover reasons to kill yourself. Such might involve a business failure, the giggle from a young girl, the death of a rock star, or the evil eye from a shaman. As for the suicides of popular individuals, popularity itself is not an imposed environment but a self-assembled one that picks from whatever is available. Misery or joy can be found in church or a Barnes and Noble store. Once you accept the idea of “superorganisms,” (WilsonError! Bookmark not defined., 1975, 2000; Wilson and Hölldobler, 2005; Wilson 2007), you may look for parallel events in organizations of different size and complexity, whether their bricks are surrounded by a skin or by a cell membrane. Neurons can be seen as a mass of self-organized, and therefore, emergent, particles that have hubs and perhaps hundreds of thousands of nodes. Expect also for there to be Darwinian contests between competing networks and expressions of sync (sometimes confused with inclusive fitness) between similar ones. Finally, superorganisms—including the fans of musicians, preachers, and satanists—also allow the inclusion of clustered self-destruction as suicides as deaths from a loss of connectivity. You are more likely to kill yourself if your leader, messiah, or hero dies and, if your friends are really close, they will often expect you to die with them and help you to do it!

Which Way the Gun Points “‘Wheresoever you finde many and severe Lawes against an offence,’ observed Donne in Biathanatos, ‘it is not safe from thence to conclude an extraeme enormity or hainousnesse in the fault, but a propensnesse of that people, at that time, to that fault.’” Biathanatos, (1647/1982) lines 2770–2773, also cited on p. 169 of Colt (1991).

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John Donne (1572–1631), an adventurer, poet, scholar, theologian, and no stranger to sin or to suicide, recognized the Crucifixion as a suicide and argued that not all suicides are sins. Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire found suicide to be a reasonable act. So did David Hume and Arthur Schopenhauer. So do Jack Kevorkian and Thomas Szasz. So does the average Dutchman. And so do many thinkers with great intelligence and lots of education and living in areas of high population density.

Suicide Compared with Murder “‘All the students come in at some point and talk about suicide,’ a high school social worker says. ‘I can’t put them all in the hospital.’” Colt, 2006, 313.

People who seem to be “mad” are often doing adaptive things but in the wrong contexts. Calling them mad, however, obscures their motives, logic, and goals. Suicide appears to satisfy Miller’s concept of an adaptation: easy to learn, fun to do, efficient, persistent despite instruction against it, within the skill of every normal human, and found in every culture. Such are presumed to have survival benefits and genetic foundations although you might expand your ideas about the meaning of “fun to do”! Although suicide can occur in the context of depression or psychosis, so can every other human adaptation. David Buss argued, and I think successfully, that murder is a psychological adaptation that, like abortion, benefits one set of genes at cost to another set. It also has particular scripts and settings for perpetrators and targets. It is culturally universal and acquired without formal education. Furthermore, murderError! Bookmark not defined. can be a private drama or a public one, a script played by a man and woman or gangs of men in competitions for territory and wealth. There are even indications that, at least for one of its participants, murder can be a lot of fun! (Buss, 2005. See also Wrangham and Peterson, 1996; Ghiglieri 1999.) If murderError! Bookmark not defined. is an adaptation, so might be suicide: found in every normal human, easily learned, often a pleasure, and, oddly, with survival value. If suicide is an adaptation, it should be present in every normal human and expressed with no formal instruction. While suicide completions number roughly ten per hundred thousand, there are many more attempts than completions, and nearly everyone thinks of it. There are similarities between murder and suicide. They both tend to be spring-summer events that decrease in winter when crimes against property go up. (Falk, 1952) Other commonalities include being young and male and having difficulties in finding and keeping property and partners.

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More importantly, there are differences: 1. Suicide is half again more frequent than murderError! Bookmark not defined. (Colt, 2006) 2. Suicide risk actually increases during hospitalization and the weeks just afterwards! 3. Suicide goes down in war, up in recessions. Murder has the opposite pattern. 4. Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, and Orientals are, respectively, more likely to commit homicide but Whites, Orientals, Hispanics, and Blacks are, respectively, more likely to commit suicide. Although suicide rates have increased in recent decades for young black males, black adults and especially old black females almost never kill themselves. Old white males, alcoholic and living alone, are the most frequent suicides.99 5. Lower intelligence and impulsiveness are associated both with lower socioeconomic status, criminality, and imprisonment (Rowe, 1994) but higher I.Q. with suicide. (Voracek, 2004) This pattern implies that murder may be impulsive and likewise for suicidal gestures but suicide completions show planning and persistence. Murder frequencies should decrease in the countries and segments of society where I.Q. is higher. 6. Finally, impulsive individuals will be also inclined to display other instinctive behaviors with little forethought, such as extreme mate-guarding, murder, rape, robbery, assault, property destruction, or revenge, and suicide but only in reaction to immediate context and more often as a gesture.

Apoptosis, Not Necrosis “… to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away …” Primo Levi, 1958, 88; also known as the Matthew Effect, Matthew 25:29.

The “Matthew Effect” appeared in earlier discussion of Bose-Einstein models in economies and social relationships. It also applies here, no surprise, to apoptosis and suicide. Necrosis occurs to individual cells or groups of them after an infection 99 “The problem with alcohol is you can’t write; the problem with nicotine is, you can’t write without it.” Peter Hamill, quoted by Jerry Nachtman, WABC radio, 11/18/2003. Alcohol opens migratory doors and small amounts of stimulants help you solve puzzles. Hamill’s remark reflects variations in connectivity! It also brings to mind some of Kauffman’s descriptions of chaos and order.

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or injury. The sequence for necrosis is neither stereotypic, self-initiated by the target, nor time-limited. It may be slow or fast; inflammation is often prominent and sometimes accompanied by fever. Infections spread to unrelated cells, apoptosis to functionally related ones. Apoptosis is initiated by protein synthesis within the target cell and is specific to one cell in a group or to a group of cells that perform one function. The process is orderly, rapid, and often occurs in early development. The cell shrinks, becomes denser, and fragments before its parts are removed or recycled. (Lockshin and Zakeri, 2001)100 By means of apoptosis, webs are trimmed from between your toes and fingers, neurons disappear if they do not establish connections with a target, and unreinforced sounds disappear from the developing infant’s language.101 Levi-Montalicini observed programmed cell death in 1947: “At the cervical level, I was witness to the disappearance of the membrane marking the boundaries of the nucleus, the retraction of the nerve fiber, and a decrease in the volume of the cell bodies. In immediately successive stages, the same cells acquired an appearance know, in histological terminology as ‘picnotic,’ or indicating the establishment of a process of irreversible degeneration. The impression was that of a battlefield covered with corpses.” (LeviMontalcini, 1988, 140–141) And she found it on the same slide where she also found, at lower, less mature levels of the developing spine, massive cell invasion: “My attention was drawn to the spinal cord which revealed … a spectacle not unlike that of the maneuvers of large armies on a battle field. Thousands of cells in the thoracic segment, and a smaller number in the sacral one, were 100 Apoptosis was reborn in the 1970s (like our interests in behavior genetics and splitbrain phenomena!), simmered for two decades, and exploded in the 1990s when a cell’s dying was no longer seen as an incidental to their living: death became “an interesting and biological event … as much a part of cell biology as mitosis, extension of an axon, the enzymatic sequence of glycolysis, or secretion.” Lockshin and Zakeri (2001, 545) 101 I learned to value apoptosis when preparing the index for Rebels. That is, one option when Word makes an index is for you to instruct it to list all instances of a term. The next step is to go through the list and delete entries because of their context and redundancy. I think Levi-Montalcini would appreciate the similarity of purpose and outcome. She might also endorse the idea that the legal profession needs Departments of Apoptosis.

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proceeding in long columns from the ventro-lateral to the dorso-medial sectors of the spinal cord. The migration began on the fourth day of incubation and ended on the sixth, when the cells reached their destination at the sides of the central canal.” Montalcini captured evolution in one slide: duplicate, vary, and select! Apoptosis is fundamental to cellular disassembly and used in many contexts: so is suicideError! Bookmark not defined.. Apoptosis is consistent with Durkheim’s intuitions about suicide when he distinguished egoism, altruism, and anomie as its frequent motives. (Durkheim, 1897/1997; Colt, 2006) Durkheim might also have agreed that many aspects of suicide are associated with problems in connectivity. There are many indications that disconnection is a factor in the deaths of sophomores, old guys, and prisoners. As Bloom (2000) noted, it is a plausible metaphor for observations of orphaned children by Spitz, maternally-deprived monkeys by Harlow, learned helplessness by Seligman, and socially-rejected baboons described by Sapolsky. There is also a tendency for some hospitalized patients through sarcasm, anger, and silence to drive away attentive staff. Other patients, in contrast, are more open to social contacts and draw to them both employees and family members. Similar patterns of reaching out and survival or of isolation and death also occurred in prisoners in concentration camps. (Levi, 1958/1993, 1986; Frankl, 1959/2006) Apoptosis is fundamental to disassembly and occurs in many developmental contexts. 1. Apoptosis has been attached to Hamilton’s notions of inclusive fitness, necrosis has not. That is, apoptosis starts with changes in an individual cell and can be triggered by infection. It possibly preempts contagious viral invasions of similar cells. (Vaux and Strasser, 1996) In other contexts, it prevents the accumulation of cells that require nourishment and cleansing but serve no purpose. Fungi and scavengers do useful things. So does apoptosis. 2. In necrosis, inflammations, pain, and fevers are common and draw attention, apoptosis does without them. Similarly, murderError! Bookmark not defined. is less frequent than suicide but gets more attention in the news and in histories whereas suicide is often private and attracts limited public interest. 3. DeCatanzaro (1981) surveyed suicide in relationship to inclusive fitness and to reproductive failure. Not one of the many studies that he cites is inconsistent with an apoptosis model and many appear to support it strongly, from Durkheim’s notions about suicide and connectivity failures to the positive

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associations found between higher intelligence and higher rates of suicide. While it is possible to see inclusive fitness as a contributor to cellular apoptosis, it is also possible to explore apoptosis and connectivity failures without invoking kinship benefits. Choron’s analysis of suicide is also consistent with an apoptotic model and so is Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus. (Choron, 1972; Camus, 1955) 4. In German concentration camps, suicide rates were comparatively low for both Jews and non-Jews who found ways to market themselves, whether to the guards or to other prisoners. Such advertised their usefulness—perhaps by tidiness, energy level, and even posture. Overwhelming numbers of new prisoners, exhausted and disconnected from family, possessions, privacy, cleanliness, food, and water perhaps advertised their helplessness and disappeared within ten days of arrival (Levi, 1987; 1958) and often within two hours. (Frankl, 2006) Suicide, however, became more frequent among survivor prisoners after they were released. In a similar manner, after the Russians moved into Germany at the close of WW II, perhaps a hundred thousand German officers committed suicide for reasons of guilt, fear, and, ironically, because they, just as was true for their former prisoners, no longer had a purpose. 5. Suicide levels are highest among the retired, unemployed, poor, divorced, childless, city-dwellers and people who live alone. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Epidemiology_and-methodology-of-suicide. 11/05/2007) 6. Suicide rates usually go down in wars, up in economic depressions. (Colt, 2006; Jamison 1999) 7. First-generation immigrants have suicide rates that match their homelands but eventually move toward those of their host country. (Colt, 2006) Connectivity may be a player here. International suicide rates vary from zero to forty per one hundred thousand. For example, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus had the highest rates in 2005. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide#Epidemiology) In general, east Asia, China, Australia, Russia, and Europe have the highest rates, the United States, India, Spain, Italy, and central Asian have intermediate rates, and South America and Mexico the lowest. (There were no data for most of Africa, Greenland, and parts of South America.) Regions with higher rates have higher population densities, transitory social relationships, weaker religious traditions, and, sometimes, poor economies. 8. Apoptosis is consistent with the association between occupation and suicide: dentists lead, at five times the national average, followed by physicians and nurses. Mathematicians, scientists, artists, social workers are next. Psychiatry

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is possibly the most suicidal speciality … eight of Freud’s closest disciples committed suicide. Rates are also high for females in traditional male roles such as chemists, physicians, or soldiers. (Colt, 2006) 9. Women—the “connected half ” of our species—talk about suicide, men do it. That is, men commit suicide more than four times as often as women although women make gestures about three times as often as men. The difference between male and female suicides increases in adolescence and young adulthood: for ages fifteen–nineteen, five times as many males as females commit suicide; between the ages of twenty–twenty-four, seven times as many males as females commit suicide. 10. Suicide in childhood and adolescence appears congruent with programmed cell death: there is not only growth but also pruning. Before puberty, most children assess, sometimes with micrometers, where they fit in. Some little males become bullies, many become targets. Some little girls collect lots of friends, other little girls hang desperately to only one of them and have panic attacks or even drop school if that best friend is stolen by another girl. During puberty, reproductive ads are difficult to fake and include changes in muscularity, fat deposits, body hair, vocal quality, and the preoccupations that go along with acquiring friends, territory, and exclusive partners. If murder springs from territorial, dominance, and mating contests between males, then loss of influence, friends, and prospective mates lead to departures from the school yard or mall. A feminine giggle aimed at either a male or a female can trigger a chorus of similar giggles from onlookers and become as lethal as a bullet for mating or for social inclusion. 11. It is fairly easy to view social isolation, in college and in the natures of people, including their higher intelligence, who go to college, as consistent with apoptosis. Almost 1100 suicides are projected to occur on college campuses in 2007; eighteen–twenty-four-year-olds think about suicide more often than any other age group; eleven percent of students seriously consider attempting suicide; one in twelve U.S. college students has made a suicide plan. Further, the suicide rate for fifteen–twenty-four-year-olds increased by over two hundred percent in the last fifty years. (www.usna.edu/MDC/Clinical/suicide/ genderfacts.htm; Cohen, 1994; Jamison, 1999; Colt, 2006) 12. Suicide, despite the peaks that occur in adolescence, is most frequent in the deaths of white men, over seventy-years-old, living alone, and poisoning themselves with alcohol—Hamill’s remark about nicotine and alcohol finds relevance here.

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13. Suicide was particularly high in jails (Hayes, 1983) but, as of 2002, decreased from 189/100,000 to 47/100,000. According to the Department of Justice, these rates are now below those of death from natural causes (Department of Justice, 2005)102 14. A series of prior suicidal attempts may be the most reliable predictor of a completion and there is a tendency for one individual to keep reusing the same method. As with apoptosis, there is an order in suicide. 15. Suicide occurs more in some families than in others. That is, of twenty-six suicides in one hundred years for Old Order Amish, four families had seventy-three percent of them. (Colt, 2006) Families with the most depression, however, did not have the most suicides. If one member of a pair of Identical twins commits suicide, the remaining twin is at a risk thirteen times greater than that seen in fraternal twins. Natural parents of adoptees who completed a suicide also tend to commit suicide. 16. Suicidal individuals report a sense of peace once they make a decision to die. (Colt, 2006) Frankl (2006) noticed that Auschwitz prisoners had a choice of exchanging labor coupons for cigarettes or for extra food. The suicides chose cigarettes as if no longer concerned about tomorrow. If suicide is apoptotic, then it arises from disconnection that leads to decisions made within the suicidal. After all, no influence, no similarity, no sync in a synchronous universe and the stuff of your being is scattered for recycling. Mating failure, financial loss, or the end of a great obsession … all may contribute to suicide. So might being the richest guy in town, the most innovative composer, or the strongest weight lifter. (See Jamison, 1993, in regard to sex and death in creative individuals.) And because suicide grows from apoptosis, then establish102 According to Hayes (1983): “The victim is most likely to be a 22-year-old, white, single male. He would have been arrested for public intoxication, the only offense leading to his arrest, and would presumably be under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs upon incarceration. Further, the victim would not have had a significant history of prior arrests. He would have been taken to an urban county jail and immediately placed in isolation for his own protection and/or surveillance. However, less than three hours after incarceration, he would be dead. He would have hanged himself with material from his bed (such as a sheet or pillowcase). The incident would have taken place on a Saturday night in September, between the hours of midnight and 1:00 a.m. Jail staff would have found the victim, they say, within 15 minutes of the suicide. Later, jail records would indicate that the victim did not have a history of mental illness or previous suicide attempts.”

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ing connectivity must be explicit if you are to change suicidal intentions; you can expect the task to be all consuming as you search for connections to the future that fit an individual who has given up on finding his own.

Disconnecting for the Good of All The Crucifixion was a suicide-by-cop. Believers accepted it as an act of inclusive fitness, skeptics might suspect a grab for legacy and an unending link to the future.

Inclusive fitness has been offered as a reason for swarming (Hamilton, 1963; Frank, 1998) and for suicide (deCatanzaro, 1981): you do things that benefit your relatives even at cost to yourself. In the first case, inclusive fitness leads to heaps and piles of the same creature, in the second, it accounts for the dying isolate who breaks off from the rest of the herd. (Could suicide be a variation of infection-control, that a sense of “not fitting” mimics serious illness and leads to separation and, therefore, prevention of contagion?) “Suicide bombers” in the Middle East (Thompson, 2006), Kamikaze pilots (Colt, 2005), rebellious Hungarian youth, and Americans charging up either Mt. Surabachi or the cliffs at Normandy (Bloom, 2000) did suicidal things to benefit not only kin but also the next fellow. I suspect, however, that “homicide” applies better than “suicide” to some of these examples, that few soldiers charging up Normandy’s cliffs into German bullets did so in order to kill themselves. It may be that “homicide bomber” is a less misleading term, and there may be inclusive fitness benefits for the killer’s relatives in the case of murder and to those of the target in the case of suicide. DeCatanzaro (1984, 1995) used inclusive fitness to account for suicidal thoughts as reported by the general public, university students, homosexuals, elderly people, and residents of a mental hospital and of a corrections facility. “Across all samples, the strongest correlate of suicidal ideation was burdensomeness to family and for males, lack of success in heterosexual activity.” (Buss, 2004, 99) These are the two basic ideas that deCatanzaro pursued in 1981 in Suicide and Self-Damaging Behavior: A Sociobiological Perspective and again in 1995. (deCatanzaro, 1995) There is independent support for two concepts—burdensomeness to family and low reproductive potential—as factors in suicidality. Brown, Dahlen, Mills, Rick, and Biblarz (1999) surveyed one hundred seventy-five American university students. Those who rated themselves as unattractive to the opposite sex and dependent on kin reported more suicidal thoughts, depression, and hopelessness.

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Joiner et al (2002) analyzed suicide notes for content that reflected not only burdensomeness but also hopelessness and emotional pain. Only burdensomeness emerged as a relevant factor and positively correlated with the number of completers and the lethality of their method. There are indications that something more may occur. That is, higher intelligence holds hands with higher rates of suicide, a fact that appears to be counterintuitive to the idea of intelligence as a fitness-enhancer and a maker of social ties. Martin Voracek (2004) found positive relationships in eighty-five countries between suicide rates and intelligence. That is, higher average national intelligence is found with higher rates of suicide and independently of social class. Higher intelligence may also be a contribution for the one in ten college students who considers suicide. It is possible that someone who is too smart may be out of sync with his peers, and, like a misfit neuron, more likely to “dumb down” or disappear! Data from all of these studies are consistent with inclusive fitness explanations and notions of limited reproductive prospects could be part of them. As deCatanzaro (1981) pointed out, low reproductive potential means that a suicide will makes a relatively small impact on the gene pool and that “a gene for” suicide will not be eliminated. It may be useful to join the idea of limited reproductive potential with that of burdensomeness: this pairing fits well with the concept of apoptosis and with observations by Beck and his colleagues about hopelessness (Beck, Resnik, and Lettierri, 1986), and by Frankl during his years in concentration camps: that is, life—in cells and in individuals—depends on having ongoing usefulness and feedback that relates not to past but to future purpose. The concept of apoptosis, thus, puts several motives into one container and makes sense of a recurrent human puzzle, suicide, including the relationship sometimes found between it and I. Q. and suicidality. Apoptosis also allows study of human self-removal as an elaboration of basic events found in populations of cells. On the other hand, self mutilation, irritability, and hyperactivity correlate with confinement, isolation, changed habitats, and reproductive failures in species from bacteria through primates and and handicapped individuals (deCatanzaro, 1981; Bloom, 2000; Suomi, 2000) and may exist for non suicidal reasons. Cutters do not necessarily want to die. It may also be that death is a risk but is not one regularly sought by bikers, automobile drivers, alcohol abusers, and devotees of extreme sports. The participants court death, much like a bull fighter, BASE jumper, racer, or, for that matter, the writers, musicians, or painters who are also thrill-seekers. Great risks

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sometimes lead to great admiration. Lose an audience, lose a life!103 Lose a life to keep an audience. Would Christ have understood?

Depression, the Hand-Holder Depression is often seen as a contributor to, if not a primary cause for, suicide. (Mann, 1998; Baldessarini and Hennen, 2004; Colt, 2006; Jamison, 1999) There are at least six limits, however, on the relationship between depression and suicide. 1. The surest predictor of suicide is not depression but a history of prior attempts. 2. Individuals can be severely depressed and confused but not suicidal. Suicide is a particular concern in people who are agitated, disoriented, and anxious in ways suggestive of schizophrenia and such individuals may be desperate about their condition, but hopeless and scared rather than depressed. Some of the new-generation antipsychotic medications and a pack of cigarettes may be more helpful than an antidepressant. 3. Individuals kill themselves but evidence of mental instability and depression may not have been evident before death and had to be discovered during a psychological inquest. 4. Depression can be associated with loss of appetite, sleep disturbance, and restlessness or with just the opposite—weight and appetite gains, sleepiness, and inertia. Psychological autopsies, therefore, have twice the chance for retrospective discoveries of “depression.” 5. Antidepressants presumably work through increasing the availability of the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine but there is no clear relationship between these neurotransmitters and suicide. Indeed, the first generation of antidepressants, imipramine and its relatives, were themselves lethal and a popular way to commit suicide!

103 Suicide should fall into emergent network theory. Removal of a noncompetitive node (most nodes in biological systems have 1–3 links) should increase the average fitness of the neighborhood but I’m not sure this possibility has occurred to Barabási’s team. Death, whether by murder or suicide, limits variation, simplifies networks, and increases resources that might be picked up by survivors. It may be that if genes did not exist for inclusive fitness, physics would have to invent them.

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6. Apathy can result from a prior decision to die and be mistaken for depression. That is, hopelessness, self-isolation from relatives and friends, skipping work, not eating, and ignoring medical illness merely escort the dying whose behavior is in sync with their unvoiced decisions. It is by no means unusual for suicidal thoughts to flicker in the minds of people who are no longer considered depressed.

Serotonin and Oxytocin Brody (1970) found that white rats responded to very low intensities of electric shock, mild concentrations of quinine in their water, and more to flashing lights and loud noises. (None of these interventions affected the behavior of controls!) The treated rats not only ran faster to escape nearly undetectable shocks but also sat on a small wooden perch to avoid touching an electrified floor that was of no consequence to controls. The stimulus intensities—whether shock, taste, sound, or lights—appeared to be undetectable to untreated rats and, in the case of shock and the quinine-laced water, to Brody, himself. Brody suggested, because of serotonin’s possible roles in sleep, that a bias exists in reactivity to internal vs. external stimuli. Other investigators used “neuroticism” in their studies of human behavior and the possible roles for serotonin. It could be that insufficient access to serotonin triggers stronger reactions to survivalrelevant contexts. If sync is about similarity and influence, the neurochemistry to follow in regard to suicide is that about enduring connectivity and suicide’s script may reveal oxytocin in their background. Oxytocin not only controls milk availability and uterine contractions in females, it is also a player in male and female orgasms. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Oxytocin, 8/5/2007) Oxytocin can be said to encourage monogamous behavior in some species (Young, Lim, Gingrich, & Insel, 2001; Lim et al, 2004; Lim, Bielsky, and Young; 2005) and lessens social anxiety, increases trust, and lowers suspicion in humans (Kosfeld et al, 2005 and could mediate prosocial behavior. (Kosfeld et al, 2005) Oxytocin may well get you to love anyone with whom you have had intercourse three times! Waldherr and Neumann (2007) found that sexual activity and mating with a receptive female reduced the level of anxiety and increased risk-taking behavior in male rats for several hours. These changes were correlated with oxytocin release in the hypothalamus. Oxytocin research has even penetrated the dry Economist in an essay entitled “I get a kick out of you.” (February, 2004,//www.oxytocin.org/oxytoc/love-science.html) Oxytocin is available in nasal sprays even though evidence is weak that oxytocin in your nose will, in fact, penetrate your brain. Oxytocin and its near-twin, vasopressin, have strong effects on connectivity and on stress reactions, they might be assessed not only

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in regard to “resistance” and “rebellion” but also for preventing “death” by selfremoval. Will research with oxytocin find it to be more important to social connectivity than serotonin that often leads to a “don’t care” attitude?

Retroactive Abortions: “Mother said, ‘No.’” Again, a thought from Bob Trivers: “Where the male invests parental care, female choice … should also involve, perhaps primarily involve, questions of the male’s willingness and ability to be a good parent. Will he invest in the offspring? If willing, does he have the ability to contribute much?” (Trivers, 1972/2002,) Males, however, make the same assessments of females whose sexual attractivenss may be, at least in part, due to in utero genomic victories by her father’s genes. I eavesdropped on a circle of eight girls at the mall, each of them about fifteen years old. A group of three faced a group of five. They caught my attention when one under a mane of glossy black hair, arched her back and commented, “I didn’t want you to come sneaking up behind me when I wasn’t expecting it.” (I had to listen at this point and recorded the scene on a paper napkin!) Two of them were interested in the same fellow and swapped him back and forth three times in fifteen minutes even though they had never before met. They compared information about his interests and the lies that he told. One offered, “You care about him more than I do, so you take him.” (A guy would never consider this tactic!) The response was equally clever: “I’ll take him back but I’m going to drop him real soon because I can’t believe what he tells me.” Deal closed.

Genomic imprinting might well shadow the girls’s conversation. That is, the determination to live can be a mother’s creation, one that starts with her decisions to defend herself or to invest in her child during pregnancy and to continue later with smiles, whispers, cheers, and sneers.104 The higher rates of suicide in Asians, Amerinds (of Asian ancestry), and North and central Europeans may occur not in random members of those populations but in those who do not make social ties in cultures that pivot on mutual obligations and benefits. The absence of connectivity, or its loss due to accident or disease, leads to thoughts of death. According to deCatanzaro (1981) such was 104 A mother who defends herself during gestation may well make a more thoughtful child that is concerned about its place in a social matrix. On the other hand, a mother who was less skilled in her self-defense could make more impulsive, more physically attractive daughters, attractive because their appearance advertises their willingness to care for children.

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noticed by Durkheim and elaborated later by modern scholars. Connectivity and apoptosis also resonate strongly with a lack of “meaning” for social decay and suicide as described by writers such as Jacques Choron or Viktor Frankl. In contrast, black females, until recently, had more children, had sturdier, more impulsive children—especially sons—and continue to have almost nonexistent rates of suicide. Adolescent black males recently have increased rates of suicide that might be related to their becoming smarter, discovering cultural disarray, and finding a discrepancy between what they are capable of doing and what they are likely to do. It might also be that black females, in matrilineal organizations, sort through the males and eject the sons and lovers who are social liabilities to the streets where jail, murder, and suicide become more likely. As for genomic imprinting, the father’s genes favor a larger son, a more impulsive, stronger one with greater energy reserves and, in some research, stronger dental enamel. The mother possibly makes substantial contributions to the fetal left cortex and to a routine-compliant, other-directed child: her legacy consists of assets that make social ties. (The right side develops postpartum and, for most of us, acquires novel information and puts it into patterns. See Goldberg, 2001.) Without those connections, individuals, usually males, imitate neurons and self destruct when they accomplish nothing in social endeavors: like a developing neuron, they need signals from target sites if they are to continue living. A relationship may exist between early resource availability, maternal stress, and later cortical maturation, impulse control, irritability, and destructive behavior. Even normal mothers when hungry, thirsty, stressed, or abandoned may abort children, usually sons first. Mothers with severe mental illness—particularly bipolar disorder, major depression, and schizophrenia—are more likely to have pregnancy, birth, and neonatal complications including placental abnormality, bleeding, and fetal distress. Maternal schizophrenia can be associated with low birth weight and cardiac abnormalities. (Jablensky et al, 2005) and some researchers suggest that obstetric complications do not amplify trends that existed before delivery. O’Keane and Scott (2005), for example, speculate that mood disorders originate in fetal exposure to stress hormones in the mother’s bloodstream. It is not a large step to include genomic conflicts in our thinking about survival contests between fathers and mothers and between either parent and their child. We might also be less surprised that females would experience depression and thoughts of suicide when exposed—possibly in early adolescence and pregnancy—to hormonal conditions that existed during their gestations. As for males, their suicides, committed in their sixties and seventies, may have started at the moment of their conception!

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Given the possible, if yet speculative, tie between maternal investment in utero and cortical development, one might expect higher suicide rates to keep company with higher intelligence. Thus, impulsive people make more attempts, nonimpulsive people make more completions. Along these lines, Jacobson and Bygdeman (1998) found that 242 adults who committed suicide by violent means from 1978 to 1995, and who were born in one of seven hospitals in Stockholm during 1945–80, had a higher incidence of multiple birth trauma, an effect that occurred for both women and men. The risk of suicide dropped and was equal for both sexes if the mothers were given opiates during delivery. Jacobson and Bygdeman suggested that minimizing discomfort to the infant during birth may have reduced the risk of committing suicide by violent means as an adult. (This conclusion, however, is controversial. See also Jacobson et al, 1987; Neugebauer and Reuss, 1998) Prenatal and perinatal challenges occur all through life, including during mating and even in old age when physical helplessness, hopelessness, and fears of loneliness return. Like their rhesus sisters, human females evaluate both sons and lovers for health, social prowess, and the abilities to acquire resources and to share them. (Trivers, 1972; Hrdy, 1999) And the impulsive and aggressive sons born to rhesus or to human mothers achieve similar outcomes. In either species, the guys who pass inspection in the matriline next graduate for tests by groups of males. Rhesus failures, however, are ejected not to juvenile halls but to the jungle. (Suomi, 2000) Human males, like their rhesus brothers, vary more than females for any trait measured. More males than females get sick, fail school, fight, or go to jail; they also win more awards, write more books and songs, and make more discoveries—true sexual equality, therefore, should mean equal access for women not only to top level jobs but also to jail cells! Female choice serves natural selection and picks the males who will become fathers. That sorting occurs during adolescence; it also occurs prenatally, at birth, and during early childhood. Women, whether mothers or prospecting mates, have identical standards for males although for males of different ages. In humans, difficult children, overwhelmingly sons, elicit less cuddling and are often brought, almost always by their mothers, to pediatricians, psychologists, and special educators. Those who survive their mothers graduate to examinations by fathers, peers, teachers, and possible mates. Those who fail sometimes move on to single lives, uncertain employment, divorce actions, probation, and jail. These same evaluations later continue even when mothers and fathers are dead and older males apply, by instinct and by instruction, parental judgments to themselves.

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“There was a guy at gun club, fairly affluent, but also a bit odd, a loner who still lived with his mother. I mentioned having a puppy available for adoption, that the two of them might be a good match. He seemed to be interested. “He came back a week later but turned down the puppy, explaining that ‘Mother said ‘No.’’’ “No long afterwards, he pointed the shotgun’s barrels into his throat, stretched his thumbs down, and pushed both triggers.”

The Last Medicare Dollar In contrast to a murder, human fetuses are frequently killed with no hearings and no rights of appeal. (Hrdy, 1999) Young children are also crippled or slain through neglect by mothers and sometimes stepparents. Children, however, apply their own strategies in battles against parents and parents are suited to be prey for their child. The child may drop a tear or spend a smile, and one of his 150 pound escorts gives him another cookie, changes the television station, stays up with him all night, or pulls out a charge card. Stuffed animals give way to computers and then to cell phones and automobiles, and the girlfriend staying over night, and still later, to college tuition, room, board, wardrobe, alcohol, and stereo. Mom and dad, further, are to take in whatever wild pets their offspring brings home between semesters. Fifty or sixty year later, assets still move from parent to child in the form of early distributions on an estate or when parents “give” their home away only to be evicted later by their son or daughter. The child’s interest is, first, to elbow aside his siblings, make early claims on valuables, and protect his share of the parental estate against nursing homes. While the child may love his or her parents, approximately ninety percent of lifetime health expenses occur in the last six months of life. Parents, however, still want to share with their children and children want to help them share. Children might look away from suicide with indignation while learning how to make it happen. Inclusive fitness has been applied to Eskimo families who hint to their aged mother that “it is time” and seal her in an igloo to freeze in her own tomb. (deCatanzaro, 1981) Modern American children may, more often than admitted, look to total care facilities to do the igloo’s job. We now move into an era when overwhelming numbers of old people, who produced too few children, each of whom will spend more not only on their own parents but also on everyone else’s. (Social Security and Medicare, after all, are Ponzi schemes!) These costs increase every year and represent losses of inclusive fitness measured in units of automobiles, high-def televisions, or a vacation in Costa Rica, Venice, London, or Prague.

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Join this fact to deCatanzaro’s finding that older people consider suicide when they face illness, isolation, and poverty: when losing a home and bank accounts, those assets move not to their own children but to everyone else’s through a government agency. How many of them would be tempted to die a bit younger if they could sell their organs and pass the money to their children? And how many children would implicitly encourage mom or pops to do exactly that? Some of these changes can be seen in the Netherlands where euthanasia can be described as the “Dutch cure for suicide.” (Herbert Hendin, quoted by Colt, 2006, 426) Among Hendin’s findings: roughly half of assisted suicides proceed without formal consent or peer approval, about 25 percent of Dutch physicians have assisted suicides, and the health professionals report that requests for euthanasia come more often from family members than from the patient. Not all responsibility rests on families, however. One Dutch physician explained that he overdosed a patient because he needed the empty bed but the patient would have taken another week to die on her own. (Colt, 2006, 424) The prediction is as easy to make as it will be upsetting to consider: apoptosis and the concentration of medical expenses at the end of a life will push many more elderly to leave sooner rather than later. Erase sanctions against suicide and lines might form as they now do for business commuters out of JFK, LaGuardia, or Logan. And many families of aging Americans and the new generation of younger ones, coming from the south and Middle East, will sometimes help to buy the tickets. Hazel, eighty years old and with children in their sixties, survived her husband but had persistent urges to open his crypt and lie down beside him. These thoughts grew as she spent more and more time alone. I figured out a lecture that sparked her underlying defiance and the two of us moved into sync. Everyone in her family needed her to make a party happen and to be the life of it, to elicit laughter instead of tears, and to set the family standard as she had for sixty years. I also invented a responsibility for this kind lady, a responsibility for showing her aging children and her grandchildren how to die. Her husband would have expected nothing less nor should she expect less of herself. “While you still have time, cut the crap and do the things that you used to do.” I looked forward to her arrival for our sessions and forgot to watch my clock while we talked. She rallied during our weekly meetings, sometimes giggled, and often told me stories of her family and their business adventures. In between our visits, she did as she promised and went with her children and grandchildren on the trips and to the restaurants of her younger days. She smiled again and the family members who once matched her sadness matched her happiness. “‘Gram was back.”

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Unfortunately, injuries and accidents had already taken pieces of her and a recurring cardiac problem dispersed her whirlwind. It’s been my nature never to settle anywhere for long but I carry her now as if she rides behind me on Intruder.

Chapter Twelve Free Won’t105 “… Organisms do not find already existent ecological niches to which they adapt, but are in the constant process of defining and remaking their environments.” (Lewontin, 2000, 125) The stunning fact is that autonomous agents do, every day, reach out and manipulate the universe on their own behalf. Stuart Kauffman (2000, x) “I get knocked down a lot but the Phoenix tattooed between my shoulders reminds me to get back up as myself.” Ketti Melman

As in other synchronous events (Strogatz, 2003), a coevolutionary relationship exists between a living being and its environments. (Dawkins, 1982; OdlingSmee, Laland, and Feldman, 2003; Lewontin, 2000; Brody, Bloom, and Turner, 2002; Turner 2000, 2007; Camazine et al, 2001; Richerson and Boyd, 2005; and Sloan Wilson, 2007) One partner, therefore, changes whenever the other changes, or, as Lotka stated: “… one of the central problems which the organism has to solve in the struggle for existence, is the reconcentration, into his immediate environment and into his body, of valuable materials that have become scattered by agencies beyond his control.” (Lotka, 1924/1956, 36) The same process can be found in environments if you see them as collections of agents that compete, over generations, for retention by their occupants! You and your nest, therefore, are a union of two nodes, one of those developmental partnerships that Raff described: duplicate, compartmentalize, and vary in small steps. Each segment relinquishes functions to its mate. Remove either and the other no longer evolves. Most individuals, for example, who suddenly relocate find themselves disoriented, frightened, sleep-deprived, and hypervigilant. I, personally, have found these effects uncomfortable but relieved once I moved some of my “stuff ” from where I formerly lived. I also know of mentally handicapped adults who died when moved abruptly from one institution to a second one. And I think here of 105 Sergio Della Sala used “free won’t’ in his 2005 paper on “The Anarchic Hand.” 198

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Jews and Blacks who, jammed into freight cars and ship holds and stripped of family and possessions, entered states of isolation and helplessness. The point? You and your collections maintain each other. And what is will no longer be unless you make it again. Personal will must, therefore, be inevitable if a sudden environmental change is not to disintegrate you. It must also be inevitable that, sooner or later, some ape will want more than it has and check out life across a river or on the other side of a mountain. Personal will must be addictive, as mentioned earlier, a cross that you carry and a wine that you sip. It helps you to fail or moves you to sainthood. Your hunger to search, touch, and change whatever you find either opens new territories or rebuilds old ones. Thus, Tennyson had Ulysses match his boring kingdom to his boring son and sail away, once more to crack heads, collect scars, get drunk, and in a replay of Ghengis Khan, possibly warm himself on the wives and daughters of men whom he killed earlier that same day. To one degree or another, every one of us does his or her own Ulysses. So do generations of coral, worms, termites, crickets, or spiders. Some take the big step away from average and safety and lose forever what they had. And any one of them in the desert might see its version of God or find only thirst, hunger, pain, and death. You remember best the advice and lessons that suit your nature. Thus, I still hear over a span of forty-five years the voice of Roger Kotoske, my instructor in Basic Design. He announced to us new art students that sometime during the year all of us would burn our work … not just some but all of it.106 This exercise—announced but never required—was to instill two ideas: 1) strive to surpass what you have already done and, 2) your capacity to create does not rest in a stack of dusty colored papers or smears of dried paint but springs freely from within. Those of you who would have understood the instructor’s point have the character to, at any moment, rebuild yourself from nothing! It will be neither simple nor comfortable but you can do it! 106 Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus movment merged engineering, fine arts, and philosophy during the troubled years between two great wars (Gay, 1981/2001). The instructor, Roger Kotoske, an abstract expressionist painter, like so many spiritual descendants of the Bauhaus, not only painted but also read incessantly. He was often uniformed in a dark sports jacket, dark tie, white shirt, and dark slacks and smears of paint on his fingers or on a cheekbone. He opened the course with “I have an I.Q. of 140, do any of you have anything to discuss?” There were no takers. He followed up with “Korzybski said ‘To be is to be related.’ Talk about it!” Such became our early morning drill. Some of us thrived; others copied whatever the thrivers did.

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Snowstorm Reveries about Freedom In 1934 Hamilton and Ballachey attempted to train a rat to eat from a dish out in the open. The rat insisted on climbing onto a dividing wall, hanging upside down from the wall while picking up the dish in its mouth, and lifting the dish over the wall and to protective cover before eating from it. (Maier and Schneirla, 1935/1964) Lewontin tells us that “Evolution is best viewed as a history of organisms’ finding devious routes around constraints.” Psychologists try to arrange rats but it’s in the nature of rats to arrange themselves.

The weather service predicted snow and ice for that afternoon, evening, and the next day. I looked forward to confinement, pulled the wire from my telephone, stocked food and caffeine, and moved in firewood from a stand of maples that I planted a quarter-century ago. (In an annoyance with the Arabs, I turned off my oil burner forever when I planted those trees!) I also cancelled a dental appointment that I wanted to avoid—the receptionist would never understand why characters like me would sooner be caught in a mortuary than in a “dental spa”! Snow arrived late and in a fine cloud. One cat napped under the stove, the other behind me on the couch, warming himself under a swing arm lamp and its forty-watt bulb. I rested my feet on a stack of cut branches which I fed to the fire on my right. The whispering stove dried several pieces of wood that it would later consume. It also warmed a red ceramic mug of coffee that I would sip tonight and for the next day or two while I transcribed old memories and made their actors unrecognizable.

Rebellions in an Asylum107 Primo Levi remarked on the self-sorting that occurred when Jews and other prisoners of the Nazis got off the train at Auschwitz. Some announced their determination to find life no matter what the circumstances; most—beaten, exhausted, starved, cold, dirty, and apart from relatives—announced their defeat and the guards endorsed it. A comparable self-sorting occurs in the residents and staff of state institutions and the consequences are similar in quality to those of Auschwitz even if less intense. 107 Everyone has their asylum, their lens of comforting or annoying ideas that suppress, distort, or amplify whatever comes through it. Further, any one of you become more likely to be in a physical asylum if 1) you are broke, 2) neglect your appearance and hygiene, 3) display bizarre behavior, and 4) have no protective family. All four liabilities are required! However, times have changed: asylums are expensive and a physician’s note no longer locks you up.

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The state hospital, formally intended to deliver cures and rehabilitation, kept a few who wanted to go back home, a few who took on staff roles although rarely to the extent of betraying another patient, and a great many who did not want to be found. Some of the patients, especially the male alcoholics and psychopaths came in for the winter, played table games, did chores, and sometimes protected staff or sat up late with them on second and third shift. Spring and warmer weather called many of them back to the road. Asylums had terrible reputations that were not always deserved: even residential hospitals offered not only imposed environments but also chosen ones. Indeed, Braginsky, Braginsky, and Ring (1969) referred to state hospitals as the “last resort,” as if vacation spots! “… many patients were quite adept at managing their impressions in interactions with the staff so as to secure certain benefits that might otherwise be unattainable. In addition to the episodic displays of manipulativeness, we found that patients were able to establish a comfortable hedonic life style in the hospital.… What we observed, in short, was that the mental patients were acting in very much the same way normal members of any ordinary community would be expected to behave.” (Braginsky, Braginsky, and Ring, 1969, 29) None of these outcomes, however, had any relationship to diagnosis. Once in the door, men and women who stayed longer were quicker to learn the location of the theater, bowling alley, and canteen than the name or location of their psychiatrist! As for psychologists, one patient, a female!, remarked, “I think they just take up a lot of room.” (Braginsky, Braginsky, and Ring, 1969, 24)108

“I’m Gonna’ Smash Your F’n Face …” The hospital’s brick buildings with brick walls, porticos, and white columns gave a Jeffersonian quality to the institution: on my first day, four inches of new snow coated every flat surface and crunched whenever I took a step. The sun was out, 108 There have been, and still are, many who neglect Braginsky’s observations and the resilient ability of people to make their own worlds. Some of them include former residents. This one appeared to be one of Eiseley’s companions, a changeling or shaman—weathered and stolid, a silver gray marked her hair, eyes, and skin, and she might have been forty, eighty, or one hundred eighty years old. After decades of psychiatric help, she woke in a panic that someone stole her money, poisoned her pets, or would lock her up. But as for medicines: “They were hard on my body but they let me be free; I’d rather be free than locked up and live until one hundred.”

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the sky cloudless, the air still and, although I did not conceive of chosen environments or of their power, those bricks and porticos sheltered thousands of assembled small worlds. I soon got a close look at some chosen environments and their creators although blinded by my formal training and not understanding what I saw or that Jefferson might have approved of what the patients achieved! 109 My new boss led me on a walking tour past my first important lesson, a gray haired, gray coated lady who glanced around, then lifted the lid of a gray metal trash can, bent into the can, straightened up and looked to the sky as she held a paper bag and bottle to her mouth. She then leveled her head, shook it, looked around again, glanced at me, and returned the bag and bottle to its hiding place. I next met a nurse—a freckled short redhead wearing a tall cap, blue-rimmed glasses, thick calves, and a starch-armored bum that matched her calves. She managed sixty male chronic schizophrenics, nine aide staff, and me. In her spare time at home, she cleaned, made dinner for her trucker husband, and helped eight children with their homework. The little dynamo sized me up: “A new doctor, huh? Practically nobody comes up here to work with us trouble-makers. I’m having a problem with Chuck. Come’n give me a hand.” She led me to a very pale, balding, unshaved thin man who wore cloth slippers and the hospital uniform of baggy khaki shirt and pants. He lay face up on his bed, a lit pipe in his mouth. “Chuck won’t get out of bed. What should I do?” “Chuck, get up!” “Fuck-you-you-sonuvabitch! I’m gonna’ smash your fuck’n face!” “I will need to think about this.” The nurse didn’t laugh but gave Chuck and me time. Unfortunately, I had no idea what to do about Chuck. He had no friends, said almost nothing, and often 109 “Therapy” implied “healing,” a repair. On other hand, there were no budget entries for “therapy or “healing” supplies. Indeed, there was little in the budget for anything but medications, staff salaries and three hots and a cot for the patients. Extras—books, paper, and supplies—had to be finagled through the business manager, coequal with the Superintendent in dealings with the legislature, and taken from the drug budget. The implicit goals were to keep people alive but quiet. Even here, living creatures found devious means around constraints and in ways to make Jefferson smile. For example, anyone taking an antipsychotic medication also smoked incessantly and wore yellow-black nicotine stains on most of their fingers. Cigarettes were wealth, a weapon against psychiatrists: an attempt to remain alert, defeat your medication for ten or fifteen minutes, and wake up to thoughts that you still enjoyed, including the ones that first got you in trouble.

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paced, trailing a wisp of smoke from his pipe, one ship on the ward’s horizon, going nowhere in the eyes of anyone but its captain. He did no work, had no visitors, and was not allowed to leave the locked area. Not a problem for Chuck who had hidden caches of tobacco hustled from one of the aides. I set up a regime that paid points to the residents who got up on time, shaved and took a shower, helped with cleaning chores, and went to therapy.110 The points could be traded immediately for tobacco, cigarettes, coffee, or magazines. Ninety days passed before Chuck came to the office door and grumbled: “I’m out of tobacco, I need a job.” If you had points, you could buy whatever we had to sell: one item was a “privilege card” that let you out of the locked area. Chuck saved for his card, bought it, and despite his wearing hospital garb, thumbed a ride to his former home, fifty miles away. He, mildly diabetic and money-less, arrived on his aunt’s porch with one jelly donut in his mouth and eleven more in a box under his left arm. He pounded on her door and yelled, “Why haven’t you people come to see me!” They called the hospital, we picked him up. Paranoid, hostile, loner Chuck— now sunburned for the first time in seven years—recruited us all to his side that afternoon. We sold him no more privilege cards but he kept his ward jobs for bigger reasons than a pack of tobacco. He had fired his relatives, accepted us as their replacement, and I never did have to fix him. The hospital closed, everyone scattered. Staff and patients arrived as rebels, deviants, and individualists and remained such despite the efforts of the imposed environments—memos, staff meetings, cafeteria food, floor buffing machines, sixty-watt bulbs, and visits from the legislature—to average us out. I think that a few of us, like Eiseley, would want to be remembered for more than what was in our manila folders. Others, of course, would not give a damn.

The Farmer: What Will and Won’t Achieve The neuroscientist, Karl Pribram, was already distinguished when he spoke at the University of Pittsburgh in the late ’60s. I was a graduate student at the time. I next heard him in 1999 when we shared a podium in Boston. Pribram was quick and alert although eighty years old. He completed his talk and walked towards me. I remarked about hearing him thirty years earlier and added, “It’s good to see that you’re still in there.”

110 A dream shattered. The original contract charged points for attending therapy. We fools learned quickly and started paying folks to attend! Therapy left our menu when it became evident we would also have to pay them to talk!

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rebellion He paused, raised his brows slightly, then smiled and replied, “Yes, I’m still in here.” I met a farmer whose defiance once troubled his parents and teachers but later saved him. He explained: “You can’t let the hedgerows get ahead of you. You lose an acre of ground for every one-thousand feet of hedgerow because they take up useful room; they put out branches further each year, and run out roots into the adjacent field to steal nutrients from your crop. That’s not all. When you run a tractor parallel to a hedgerow, you can get knocked off by a branch and mangled by whatever equipment you’re pulling.” A self-organizing, genetically-guided unit grows whether as a blade of grass or a child. Every one of them acts with substantial independence and wants even more resources. My friend, however, like a mother, worked faster or longer but sometimes called friends to help him fight a million parallel processors—trees, thistles, and grasses—that never took a day off while he, in serial mode, did one thing at a time and wrote and rewrote long lists each evening. After the sun dropped, the weeds folded until dawn and the farmer had a drink and a fight with his wife after dinner. He refused to give up.

Creatures discover, rearrange, and make links with the fine details in their settings; they also extend their boundaries. Creatures with larger territories, whether through birdcalls or drumbeats or indirectly through friends, scatter more offspring. Other creatures hide and live while the bold ones die with ease. Variation, thus, can be seen not as a mistake but as the magic that allows experimentation and discovery. Individuals break away from averages and partnerships and in so doing, look squarely into chaos for a different set of opportunities. The traits that we sense as independence and will power: 1. Allow persistence and the sweet elation that accompanies your finishing a quest, a construction, a seduction, or a war. 2. Seek, discover, and manage synchrony with other organizations but often in ways that protect you from good-bye. Partnerships form, endure, change tempo, or end. “Can I have a hug?” is probably our most ancient adaptation and has meanings that go back to seconds after the Big Bang. Fortunately, “Can-I-have-a-hug” encounters “Get-the-hell-away-from-me.” 3. Discover resources: You search more widely and deeply, accepting less of what is available and persisting longer for what you lost or believe that you might find if you look some more.

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4. Balance exploration and costs. You retain some gambits but abort others. In the children’s game of Go Fish, when one player demands, “Give me all your threes,” he doesn’t make random demands but those for materials that match what he has and, thereby, Go Fish repeats a gambit that children understand and live has always used. 5. Refine instinctive behaviors so that you accomplish more with less effort. You are more attracted by long term consequences than by what you can have by midnight. 6. Adjust your position inside of a cluster. Progress is, after all, most easily judged in relation to the position and speed of the guy next door. 7. Shore up your executive functions that allow you to plan, sustain focus, return to task if interrupted, project past trends into future outcomes, and innovate when you face an aggravation. These mental capacities parallel for your physiological ones and prepare you not only for what is but also for what might be. Good weather is your rehearsal for the next storm. While you stack chaos into checkerboards and lay groundwork for boredom, you also prepare to go further “out there.”

Rebels Find, Invent, and Reorganize “Darwinism teaches that organisms become adapted to the environment through natural selection. And it teaches that they are passive throughout this process. But it seems to me far more important to stress that the organisms find, invent and reorganize their environments in the course of their search for a better world.” (Popper, 1989/1994, p. viii) Cats turn fish into fur every day. Jesus was impressed.

No matter what memories or debris you accumulate, there is a genetic contribution to what you retain, embellish, or minimize. Genes help you to manage “now,” a phase transition wherein you connect yesterday and tomorrow. Your past, in the form of a grocery list, an obsession, or a DNA–RNA sequence, escorted by acetyl and methyl groups that turn sequences on or off, influences both your today and the memories that you keep of it. Thus, the records of your pasts are as biased as your schemes are about your futures. When you write a script for tomorrow, you may pick a villain, go to sleep, and after sunrise, collect the evidence that hangs him. You do the same for possible loves and disasters. And you do it for yesterday’s news as much as for tomorrow’s. You pilot yourself from moment to moment like

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a searching ant, unsure of your destination but recognize where you want to be when you get there. And, still like that ant, you know how to run a straighter path back to where you started. Francis Galton probably meant for his thoughts from one hundred twenty years ago to apply to the intimacy that you feel with your family but his ancestry, yours, and mine go back a very long time. You and your ancestors have explored, taken, created, and renovated for the last fourteen billion years: “The world is beginning to awaken to the fact that the life of the individual is in some real sense a prolongation of those of his ancestry. His vigour, his character, and his diseases are principally derived from theirs; sometimes his faculties are blends of ancestral qualities; but more frequently they are mosaics, patches of resemblance to one or another of them showing now here and now there. The life-histories of our relatives are prophetic of our own futures; they are far more instructive to us than those of strangers, far more fitted to encourage and to forewarn us.” Galton (1883/1907/1911, 30) “What will I be when I grow up?” is less foreboding than it once seemed. Your bubble, made for free by Mother and decorated with effort, joy, pain, and blood, means that you are more likely to face problems that you can solve, do more of what you enjoy, and avoid what makes you sick. You should skip the “what shall I be” angst because the consequences of bad choices are softened and good ones more likely: Like one of Raff ’s assemblies, you search, respond, arrange a second chance, and sometimes buy another go around. You glimpse both origins and destinations in what you learn of your parents and grandparents. The clustering that you see in families is also a set of Kuramoto’s pendulums that they move into sync because similarity and influence form with their heroes and villains. In short, if you have three generations of horse thieves in your family, don’t let your son work in a stable unless he is to be a jockey. If he rides fast in front of 30,000 people, he probably won’t steal the horse! Acceptance of genetic and evolutionary influences reduces guilt for your parents who think that they didn’t make you perfect; It also reduces your blaming them for that same lapse. Small wonder that both primitive and modern people believe children are reincarnations of grandparents. How else to describe the reappearance of departed relatives if you don’t know about genes? DNA, handmaiden to statistical physics, brings to singletons the behavior of twins. And because of genes, some of you rear doppelgangers of your parents and grandparents or sometimes an uncle or aunt. You will also find that you argue with your son or daughter because you are too much alike.

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A Mouse in a Box Wins a Nobel: Rita Levi-Montalcini111 “The knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foothold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient of truth on the one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create.… In other words, there belongs to mind from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker on.” William James, Essays in Philosophy. Quoted in Richardson, 2006, p. 183. “What men have done and what they will do, these are merely aspects of what they are doing now, some well, some badly.” (Cyril Dean Darlington, 1962, 9) As one gentleman put it: “Therapy is to help me get other people to accept me as I am.”

Rita Levi-Montalicini could have been one of Darlington’s “men.” Personal will can have large outcomes as, for example, when a shy, dimunitive Italian lady discovered some of the rules for how brains organize. Rita Levi-Montalcini (1988) was born in Torino, Italy, in 1908. She was a fraternal twin but seemed to be less talented and less confident than her sister, Paola, who became an artist. Rita was short, thin, clumsy, anxious, easily frightened in the dark, self-isolated, and certain that she had no abilities. She was also a Jew in the middle of a fascist plague. She was one of four children born to an engineer and his wife in the northern Italian industrial city of Torino. Rita—after a long period of uncertainty—chose a medical career after her governess, Giovanna, died of stomach cancer. She had not been in a classroom for three years but she and a girlfriend found a tutor, studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics for eight months, and passed the entrance examination for medical school: Rita was at the top of the list. Medical school also meant helping Guiseppe Levi, a red-haired lion who happened to be a professor of anatomy, with his research where she learned histology and practiced the errorfilled, eternal counting of thousands of developing embryo cells … a project that absolutely no one else was willing to do. The Italian fascists were active since the early ’20s but started more serious antisemitic campaigns in the mid-’30s. In November, 1938, Jews were excluded from the professions and forbidden to marry Aryans. Rita continued to see patients 111 The following is abstracted from her 1988 autobiography, In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work, NY: Basic Books. My copy cost $3.00 plus shipping. In the late sixties, I fell in love with her work on nerve growth factor; her biography was almost a coming home. It also duplicated the try-and-select strategies that she saw on microscope slides and, for that matter, the basic themes of Rebels. Nearly a century old, she still lives in Rome where she’s a senator-for-life. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini)

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privately in their homes but missed research, counting things, and looking for patterns. Rodolfo Amprimo, a friend who visited from the States, advised Rita: “‘One does not lose heart in the face of the first difficulties. Set up a small laboratory and take up your interrupted research. Remember Ramon y Cajal who in a poorly equipped institute, in the sleepy city that Valencia must have been in the middle of the last century, did the fundamental work that established the basis of all we know about the nervous system of vertebrates.’” (1988, 89) Rita asked her mother, brother, and one sister to make a lab for her at home. She needed an incubator for warming chicken embryos, a microtome for making very thin slices of tissue, a stereomicroscope, watchmaker’s scissors, and an oven for sealing paraffin … all arranged in her bedroom but carried to the basement at night during British bombing raids. For approximately a year and a half, until the actual invasion of Italy by German forces, Levi-Montalcini carried on her research in a small world that would have been a cell if she had not chosen to be there. Spring 1942: She observed that embryonic neurons died if they did not find targets: she concluded that a “trophic factor” existed, one emitted by targeted sites. This discovery was a figurative hox gene that duplicated itself and arranged much of her remaining life for the next half-century. The immediate outcome of her research, however, was that Gino, her brother who once loved her omelets, no longer ate them after learning what she first did to the eggs! In July 1942, the Germans took control of Torino and the Levi-Montalcini family went to the mountains and tried crossing into Switzerland but could not. They reversed direction and settled in Firenze (Florence) where they lied to a landlady about being Jewish. No longer counting cells in chick embryos, Rita forged lots of identity cards. In 1943, the Germans paid bounties for Jews and in the summer of 1944, bridges across the main river were blown up and the partisans and Germans took turns controlling sections of Firenze. Fascist snipers often shot from roofs and mined the streets. September 2, 1944: the British army arrived and the Star of David could again be displayed in public. Rita became a war medic until May 1945. 1946: Renato Dulbecco, a friend from medical school and a future Nobel winner, returned from service on the Russian Front and urged her to continue her research. In July, Viktor Hamburger of Washington University Medical School contacted Rita about her paper on neuronal growth, the one that contradicted his own conclusions. He invited her to St. Louis for six months in order to replicate her findings: she accepted but stayed nearly thirty years! She also contacted a friend at Indiana University and influenced their accepting Renato: the two of them moved to the States in 1947.

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She consulted Salvatore Luria, who was also a friend from medical school, about her leaving neuroembryology. Luria told her to stay with what she already did so well. Renato told her the same thing. Levi-Montalcini may have been ready for a change but it came in Raff ’s way, through a slight change in what she did with what she already knew. Many embryologists removed and added limb buds to developing embryos. Elmer Bueker, in 1948, however, transplanted clumps of neoplasms—abnormal cellular masses— and found them to attract nerve fibers. Bueker asked Hamburger for an opinion in January 1950, Hamburger turned to Levi-Montalcini and they agreed to replicate Bueker’s work. Jackson Memorial Institute supplied mice carrying Sarcoma 180 and Sarcoma 37 tumors. Rita transplanted bits of tumor to chick embryos and, as Bueker observed but could not explain, the tumors attracted nerve fibers, some from sensory ganglia but mostly from sympathetic ones. Developing organs, beyond the tumor, also attracted nerve fibers. Levi-Montalcini and Hamburger concluded that the tumor possibly dumped a hormone for nerve growth into the veins and the sympathetic and sensory ganglia responded to it. Her former teacher, Guiseppe Levi, on a surprise visit to St. Louis, insisted that she was mistaken, the brain simply did not develop as she described. Rita conned Levi into visiting the Grand Canyon! While he was gone, she transplanted bits of tumor onto the chick’s corio-allantoic membrane so that there was no direct contact between tumor and embryo. The extra nerve fibers grew as she predicted and stubborn Levi, back from Arizona, conceded that she might be right! Levi-Montalcini wanted to do in vitro work rather than depending on embryos and turned to an old friend, Hertha Meyer, whom she had known in Torino. Meyer had meanwhile joined Carlos Chagas in Rio. Rita implanted two mice with S 37 and S 180, put the mice and a piece of apple into a box in her coat pocket, and left St. Louis for Rio. For several months, this tiny Italian lady, the one who had ignored authoritarian males, bombers, snipers, and mines, commuted to work hanging off the side of a packed tram with God knows what in her pocket! She enjoyed almost every minute, replicated the embryo effect in vitro and, satisfied, stayed for a month of carnivals before returning to St. Louis. Hamburger knew they needed to identify the growth factor. Stanley Cohen, a young biochemist, joined Hamburger and Levi-Montalcini from 1953–1959 and brought along his flute and dog. She grew lots of tumors, Cohen tried to collect, separate, and identify the growth factor. At one point, Cohen used snake venom to break down nucleic acids that might be in the growth factor. Instead of eliminating the growth effect, the venom itself produced growth ten times greater than could be obtained from mouse tissues! Cohen mumbled, “I’m afraid we’ve

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just used up all the good luck we’re entitled to. From now on, we can only count on ourselves.” Mouse submaxillary salivary glands are sexually dimorphic: extracts from males have greater effects on sympathetic and sensory nerve growth than those from females. Males also pass a toxin when they bite during fights just as snakes sometimes do! Cohen also found that antiserum to snake venom inhibited ganglionic growth in vitro and in embryos. Cohen eventually purified the nerve growth factor. These discoveries led to Cohen’s and Levi-Montalcini’s sharing the Nobel Prize in 1986. (Her old friend, Luria, shared a Nobel Prize in 1969 for his study of viruses and Dulbecco shared one in 1975 for studies of viral-DNA interactions.) Rebellion kept her warm. (There was also a hint of dinichism!) “The pleasure I was already savoring in anticipation was enhanced by the prospect of carrying out the project under the conditions contingent on the prohibitive racial laws. If Ramon y Cajal, with his giant’s step and exceptional intuition, had dared foray into that jungle, why should I not venture along the path he had opened for me?” (Levi-Montalcini 1988, 90)

The Driver’s License Frankl (2006. 99) captured the hub of the matter: “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life … This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning.… I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my ‘defense mechanisms,’ nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my ‘reaction formations.’” “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide—or a drill-book.” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908;//www.dur.ac.uk/martin. ward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch3.html). “What drives and validates self-help is a belief, a religious conviction, that our energies and convictions are finally congruent with the universe; that our minds—as Francis Bacon had proposed and hoped back in the Renaissance— are at bottom a match for the nature of things; that we are not fallen, incapable, helpless, doomed, or damned.” William James, quoted in Richardson, 2006, 360.

You can find Levi-Montalcini’s courage in a marathoner. Uta Pippig won the Boston Marathon in 1994 and 1995 but had an onset of menstrual cramps and

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diarrhea in the final miles of the 100th Anniversary race in 1996. She stopped near Boston College but the crowd’s chant, “Go!, Go!, Go!, Go!” got her moving again as if Uta heard the advice that part of her wanted. Despite feces and blood running down her legs and disgusted looks from women in the crowd, Uta caught the leader, passed her, and won Boston for a third time and, I like to think, for reasons greater than what she found in a pot of money. (Uta was on the cover of the September 2007 issue of Runners World.)112 Her finishing the ’96 race gave me the opportunity to take her picture two miles from the finish and I glance at that picture most evenings as I put out the light in my bedroom. You can find Levi-Montalcini’s courage not only in marathons but also in a small town’s tedium. My friend at age sixty was not allowed to drive. Psychiatric medication scrambled her concentration just as it does for many bright individuals and, after she had a series of minor traffic accidents, her husband and the cops took away her license. Fibromyalgia prevented her exercising and being trapped at home aggravated her irritable bowel problem. Still defiant but feeling hopeless, she spent most of each day in bed. She was also reared to be a traditional Presbyterian, but her nature doubted whatever she was told: she didn’t fit with her husband, her church, or her neighbors and thoughts of death kept her company. Of course, we got along. It took a year to challenge her diagnosis of “bipolar,” to reduce her medication, and to recover some of her clarity. As she moved more into sync with me and less with her former beliefs, she got up, exercised despite her pain, and attended more social events. She bitched about every new step in her program but it was her program, one that she defined! She once hiked three-quarters of a mile in sleet in order to get to Curves. I passed her on the opposite side of the road that morning. She hiked into the wind and a snow shower. I thought of turning around to pick her up but a voice commanded, “No, it’s important that she do this without you.” 112 Short version of a longer tale: I “ran” the Boston Marathon’s route alone on the day before the 100th Anniversary race. It took me eight hours, including pizza stops. I covered the first ten miles at ten-twelve minutes per mile, I shuffled, then walked, and then limped the next sixteen. I got soaked by light rain, lost my ability to speak, and spent twenty minutes getting warm in a gas station. I snacked on soda and slices of pizza at mini-marts and got lost for two miles. I felt like the last person to travel that course in its first 100 years! I found some adrenaline, however, and actually ran the final blocks on Boylston Street between lines of cars stalled in a traffic jam. I also refused to punch the fat lady who jumped into my path and shouted, “It’s tomorrow, it’s tomorrow!” It was a near thing but I failed to act on what I visualized. I watched Uta the next day. The sun was out and the temperature too warm for marathoners but ideal for old men in glasses.

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She also wanted to take SAMe for her moods rather than a standard antidepressant. The psychiatrist objected until someone pointed out that SAMe was effective for fibromyalgia. Approval followed for her to take SAMe so long as it was not for depression! (It is right and just that some psychiatrists commit suicide!) Misery took more holidays: she fretted less about her husband, children, grandchildren, and physical problems. Her activity and her family contacts improved although she remained a skeptic. She, with a big gene for grammar, eventually proofed drafts of this book and remarked, “I like doing this, I don’t know why. Is there more?” A librarian, her first question about Rebellion was its location in the Dewey System. (“Hell, I dunno. Make up sumpthin’!”) We shared lunch not too long ago. Afterwards, she left the restaurant ahead of me while I put on my jacket and helmet before mounting my bike. I noticed a new green sedan pass on the street. She drove. She also found the car, arranged financing, and had it delivered to her door … all by means of the Internet!

Trusted Sources and Notes About Them My intention here is to lead you to reliable friends rather than giving you a Manhattan telephone directory. I do this because of a problem faced by most generalists, including Arnold Toynbee. His magnificent, twelve-volume, Study of History was praised for its scope but duck-nibbled by specialists who argued that: 1) AJT knew a lot of stuff but not about the Brobignagians in the tenth century, 2) historians should tell stories and preserve details but not find reasons for change, or 3) AJT enjoyed too much being the West’s funeral orator. (See Montagu, 1956.) Rebellion summarizes my own grand unifying theory, my GUT, but, as with AJT, I often fail with details … certainly, I can give plenty of them but not the same collection that a different scholar would hand to you. MacArthur and Wilson (1967/2001) claim success if a biological theory accounts for eighty-five percent of what it seeks to explain. I would be very proud to do as well although Einstein might have found M&W to be slackers. All of you will have opportunities in time and information to go far past what I offer here. James Brody

Introduction to Your Life’s Story Pinker, Steven (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. NY: Viking. Challenges traditional concepts about human nature—the blank slate, the noble savage, and the little fellow that rides inside of us—and the neurological and biological roots of such. More fun than many evolutionists and less incensed against religions. Jacob, François (1998) Of Flies, Mice, and Men. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Describes evolutionary traits as modular things that can be turned on or off by experience. Anticipated the evo-devo revolution six years later. Short, fun, clear, enriched by characters and fables from Greek mythology. Read it in a day, think about it forever.

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Lewontin, Richard (1998/2000) Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment. Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univerisity Press. A chiseled explanation that respects both environments and organisms as partners, or “constructions,” that play together at selection’s table. Zimmer, Carl (2006) Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. NY: Harper Collins. Developed as a companion to the PBS series of the same name. A popular introduction to modern evolutionary-developmental biology. The latest edition, unfortunately, lost some of the great pictures of the first: Buy used. Buy the first!

1st Quarter: From Numbers to Stubbornness 1. Phase Transitions: To Do or Not to Do Start with: Gladwell, Malcolm. (2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. NY: Little Brown. (A bestseller, probably the place to begin if you are new to these ideas,) See also Johnson, Neil (2007) Two’s Company,Three Is Complexity. Oxford, England: Oneworld. Gleick, James (1987) Chaos: Making a New Science. NY: Penguin. Fits well with Kevin Kelly, (1994) Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Continue with: Ball, Philip (2002) The physical modelling of society: a historical perspective. Physica A. 314: 1–14. Available on the Internet,//www.philipball.com/. Next, if you like Ball’s style and these concepts, pick up his Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Kauffman, Stuart (2000) Investigations. NY: Oxford. The most lucid of Kauffman’s writings on living organizations and a foundation for his more difficult At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self Organization and Complexity (1995) and his even more difficult, Origins of Order: SelfOrganization and Selection in Evolution (1993). Survival tip: read Gleick, Kelly, or Waldrop first!

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Kerr, Michael (1988) Chronic anxiety and defining a self: an introduction to Murray Bowen’s theory of human emotional functioning. The Atlantic. (September), 35-58. Parallels Kauffman but with clinical stories. Nisbett, Richard (2003) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. NY: Free Press. Nisbett’s explanations do not include concepts from physics but his experiments and data line up beautifully with what Kauffman and others tell us of chaos and order. Sigmund, Karl (1993) Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. NY: Penguin. If you enjoy Sigmund and know some basic calculus, try Nowak, Martin (2006) Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Waldrop, Michael (1992) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. NY: Touchstone. He creates a welcome mat and an open door by means of facts and gossip.

2. Sync: You Do My Thing and I Do Yours Start with Strogatz, Steven (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. NY: Hyperion. Should be required for introductory psychology as well as high school graduation! Watts, Duncan and Steven Strogatz (1998) Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks. Nature. 393: 440–442. One of the most cited scientific papers. Some of the key ideas in Linked emerged from Watts and Strogatz.

Continue with: Poundstone, William (1992) Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb. NY: Random House. Gintis, Herbert (2000) Game Theory Evolving. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Have several pencils and plan on using up some time.

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3. Emergent Networks: Life Organizes in a Tinker-Toy Way Start with: Barabási, Albert-László (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus. Clear, systematic, fun, interwoven with histories of ideas about networks and their major contributors. Continue with: Csermely, Peter. (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer. A rougher go than Barabási, Csermely, a chemist, fell into networks research and creatively applies them from cells to art and cultures. Dry humor, separates from what is known from what he suspects. Lots of visuals. Buy used!

Continue with: Huxley, Aldous. (1952) The Devils of Loudun: A Study in the Psychology of Power, Politics, and Mystical Religion in the France of Cardinal Richelieu. NY: Harper. A sociological and clinical study of networks and influence in medieval times. Levitt, Steven and Stephen Dubner (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. NY: Morrow. Sowell, Thomas (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books. Sowell (2002) gives a magnificent introduction to “constrained” and “unconstrained” visions of human nature. Top-down collectivism (e. g., Rousseau, Thomas Paine, progressivism, and contemporary liberalism) finds our differences to be the fault of context and rearing; bottom-up believers (Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, F. A. Hayek, and classical liberalism) accept human variation and human faults, and find personal incentives to be more important that slogans such as “the greater good.”See also Hayek FA (1944/1994) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press. Fits tongue-in-groove with Barabási and Csermely in regard to scale-free and winner-take-all networks! Wright, Robert (2000) NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny. NY: Pantheon. Societies stabilize through win-win strategies that emerge when technologies and goods are traded. Human history told in a different version of cultural evolution. Howard Bloom (2000) The Global Brain. NY: Wiley, tells a similar tale but with different content.

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2nd Quarter: Pattern-Makers—Brains Are Made to Read Goldberg, Elkhonon (2001) The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. NY: Oxford University Press.

4. Exploration: Keeping What You Have and Getting More Carroll, Sean (2006) The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution. NY: Norton. Evolutionary history by means of genetic trees rather than bones, and a departure from traditional essentialism. Gould, Steven Jay (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Belknap. An important story of life, beautifully written, finished just before he died—a very large story, often to be appreciated, like evolution itself, one segment at a time! Kirschner, Marc and John Gerhart (1998) Perspective: Evolvability. Proceedings National Academy of Science. 95(15), 8420–8427. Concise, introductory. If you like this one or Carroll (2006), also read Kirschner, Marc and John Gerhart (2005) The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Raff, Rudolf (1996) The Shape of Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. A great introduction to evolutionary-developmental biology by one of its founders. Well-accented with stories of human searches for biological knowledge. For people who love squishy things rather than things that go bang (physics) or that smell (chemistry)!

5. Harrison Bergeron: The Outside, the Average, and the Outstanding Bak, Per (1996) How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. NY: Springer-Verlag. A foundation text but not a great one. Go here later if you have a love for the history of ideas. Hayes, Brian (2007) Fat tails. American Scientist OnLine, May–June, 2007. www. americanscientist.org. Start here! Also check Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Fat_tail_distribution, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_tail_distribution)

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Provine, William (1971/2001) The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. (Revised Ed.) Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press. His doctoral dissertation, published before his orals! Still absolutely clear. Includes a final chapter on how his views changed in the last thirty years. Great stuff, not a lot of money. Original edition available on Alibris: buy the newer one! Vonnegut, Kurt (1961) “Harrison Bergeron.” In Kurt Vonnegut (1968/2006) Welcome to the Monkey House. NY: Random House, 7–14. Captures natural selection in a way you will NOT forget! Also available at://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html

6. Common Sense Important Reading Browne, Janet (1995) Charles Darwin: Voyaging. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———(2002) Charles Darwin: the Power of Place. NY: Knopf. Conway Morris, Simon (2003) Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. NY: Cambridge University Press. Dennett, Daniel G. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. NY: Touchstone. Gazzaniga, Michael (1992) Nature’s Mind. NY: Basic Books. Introduces natural selection and applies it to your immune system, the death of psychoanalysis, and all whistle-stops in between. Wilson, Edward O. (1978/2004) On Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press. Written when Wilson, accused of “racism,” was attacked by Harvard liberals, both faculty and students. Eloquent and convincing, Wilson’s Pulitzer is a small compensation for what he endured. Wilson, David Sloan (2007) Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About our Lives. NY: Dell. Thirty-six small chapters, perhaps a collection of his favorite class presentations. Lively, interesting, explorations. Most people will enjoy this book, I am thankful that not everyone will change their minds about religion! Wright, Robert (1994) The Moral Animal. The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Pantheon. A remarkable braid, woven from Darwin’s

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life, Victorian society, and what evolutionary psychology suggests. Written by a serious moralist and truth-seeker.

Details about Common Sense Barkow Jerome, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (eds.) (1992) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford. Opens with a manifesto. Yawn. Then, sixteen interesting chapters on cooperation, mating and sex, parental care, perception, language, and esthetics. Buss, David (2007) Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. (3rd ed.) NY: Doubleday. Hardback, about $95, shop for used! ———(1994/2003) The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. NY: Basic Books. Evolutionary psychologists gossip lots about sex and death and the sync between men and women. Buss and his students led much of this work. (The 1994 edition is shorter, more straight-forward.) See also Donald Symons (1979) The Evolution of Human Sexuality. NY: Oxford, and Helen Fisher (1992) Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce. New York: Norton. Crawford, Charles and Dennis Krebs (eds.) (1998) Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Twenty-one chapters: similar to The Adapted Mind but this bus often goes to different places and carries a different set of riders. You can get it for $150 or for $75 from the publisher. Haggle! Dawkins, Richard (1976/1989) The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford. A popularization of W. D. Hamilton’s theories of evolution seen from a gene’s back porch. Done with zip and brilliance. Eiseley, Loren (1961) Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. NY: Doubleday. Phi Beta Kappa prize-winner! Gaulin, Steven and Donald McBurney (2000/2003) Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach. NY: Prentice Hall. Great companion to Buss’s Evolutionary Psychology. These introductions by Buss and by Gaulin and McBurney bring three dimensions to evolutionary psychology. Maynard Smith, John & Eörs Szathmáry (1999) Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. NY: Oxford.

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McGuire, Michael and Alphonso Troisi (1998) Darwinian Psychiatry. NY: Oxford. Also pick up a copy of Stevens, Anthony and John Price (2000) Evolutionary Psychiatry: A New Beginning (2nd ed.) NY: Routledge. Complementary approaches to evolution, instincts, and the problem of human emotional and cognitive lapses. Miller, Geoffrey (2000) The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. NY: Doubleday. Language, music, art, and athletics as decorative emergents from sexual selection. Murray, Charles (2003) Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 NY: Harper Collins. Documents the interaction of religious belief and human talents in western culture and in Rome, Egypt, and China. Also argues that the West started to ebb sometime in the 1890s and that males, because we are more variable than females, capture the peaks in sciences and the arts; we also go to jail more often! A good partner with Geoff Miller’s book. Weiner, Jonathan (1994) The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. NY: Knopf. Tells not only about evolution but also Peter and Rosemary Grant who went to the Galapagos Islands and measured changes in finch anatomy in relationship to changes in climate and diets. Wilson, Edward O. (1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. NY: Knopf. Wilson’s a formidable pattern-maker who makes big pictures with dots and dashes from many sources.

7. We’re All Twins Great Reading Cohen, David (1999) Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Shape Their Child’s Personality, Intelligence, or Character? NY: Wiley. Remarkable, practical insights, thoughtfully expressed. Much of what I believe but explained far better than I ever could! Colapinto, John (2000) As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. NY: Harper Collins. Guaranteed to make you furious! Darlington, Cyril Dean (1953) Facts of Life. London: George Allen & Unwin. Counters the externalist illusion that your nests are molds that you fill. Your opportunities and limits are those that you make for yourself, often for rea-

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sons anchored in your genes. Also a clear view of biology, genetics, and our views of human nature in the era between Frank Galton and Ed Wilson. Galton, Francis (1892/1972) Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. See also Galton, Francis (1899/1997) Natural Inheritance. Placitas, New Mexico: Genetics Heritage Press; and Galton F (1907/1911) Inquiries into Human Faculty. Dutton: NY. Chatty, clear, profound. Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, would have been horrified by the misapplications of his views in the United States and Europe. Galton also missed the possibility that high intelligence may be maladaptive! See also Nicholas W. Gillham (2001) A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. NY: Oxford. Nearly all of Galton’s works, like those of Darwin, are available on the Internet. http:// www.galton.org/ King-Hele, Desmond (1999) Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequaled Achievement. London, UK: Giles de la Mare. Segal, Nancy (1999) Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us about Human Behavior. NY: Dutton. Weiner, Jonathan (1999) Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior. NY: Knopf. A fine, well-crafted partner for Darlington’s book.

Good Reading Colt, George Howe (1998) Were you born that way? Life. April, 38–50. Stellar writer, an fine article that didn’t seem to accomplish very much. Read it anyhow! DeFries John, Peter McGuffin, Gerald McClearn, and Robert Plomin (2000) Behavioral Genetics (4th ed.) NY: Worth. Probably the best formal survey of behavior genetics research. Getting long in the tooth, watch for a newer edition. See also Plomin, Robert, John DeFries, Ian Craig and Peter McGuffin (2003) Behavioral Genetics in the Postgenomic Era. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Assn. Jacob, François (1973) The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity. NY: Pantheon. See also his 1988 autobiography, The Statue Within: An Autobiography. NY: Basic Books.

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Lagnado, Lucette Matalon and Sheila Cohn Dekel (1992) Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Stoory of the Twins of Auschwitz. NY: Penguin. Ridley, Matt (2000) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters. NY: Harper Collins. (Lines up each gene with what we know of it. Also fascinating history of eugenics as an outgrowth from socialists in Europe and the United States. Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt thought it was a good idea and how a libertarian stopped its adoption as policy by the UK!) Follow with Ridley, M. (2003) Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human. NY: Harper Collins. (Readable but expert and available for not much money.) Wright, Lawrence (1997) Twins: And What They Tell Us about Who We Are. NY: Wiley. Wright, William (1998) Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality. NY: Knopf.

8. Conceived to Rebel Great Reading Goos, Lisa and Irwin Silverman (2001) (2001) The influence of genomic imprinting on brain development and behavior. Evolution and Human Behavior. 22, 385–407. See also the introduction to genomic imprinting by Jirtle RL and Weidman JR (2007) Imprinted and More Equal. American Scientist, 95:143–149 (//www.geneimprint.com/media/pdfs/17363974_fulltext.pdf ) and Hunter P (2007) The silence of genes: Is genomic imprinting the software of evolution or just a background for gender conflict? EMBO Reports, 8(5) 441–443. (//www.geneimprint.com/media/pdfs/17471258_fulltext. pdf ) Haig, David (2002) Genomic Imprinting and Kinship New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. His classic papers but rough going in places! Start with Jirtle and Weidman or Goos and Silverman. Sulloway, Frank J. (1996) Born To Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. New York: Pantheon. See also Sulloway FJ (2001) Birth order, competition, and human behavior. In PS Davies and HR Holcomb, (Eds) Conceptual Challenges in Evolutionary Psychology: Innovative Research

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Strategies. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 39-83. Available at://www. sulloway.org/Holcomb.pdf.

Far More than the Basics Burt, Austin and Robert Trivers (2006) Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard. Generally written for advanced students and geno-fans. Chapter 4 is most relevant for most of us. Trivers’s early works are available in a convenient package: Trivers R. (2002) Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers. NY: Oxford.

9. Your Divided Self Ought-to-Be-Required Reading Eiseley, Loren (1975) All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life. NY: Scribners. Also find a copy of Kenneth Heuer’s The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley (1987), NY: Little Brown. If you love the history of science, read Eiseley’s 1981 prize-winner, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. NY: Doubleday. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1877-1886/2003) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories. NY: Barnes & Noble. Most of my clients admit to having conflicts similar to those described by Stevenson although less intense. They are also relieved to be average in these matters. Paul Harvey told of Stevenson’s writing this story in an evening, throwing it in the fire, and rewriting it, all of it, in a second evening! Motivated because Stevenson sensed a best-seller. Or was his writing, burning, and rewriting it a hint of his own story?

More Reading Bogen, Joseph E (2000) Split-brain basics: relevance for the concept of one’s other mind. J Am Acad Psychoanal. 28(2): 341–369. (//www.its.caltech. edu/%7ejbogen/text/onesothe.htm) Gazzaniga, Michael (1998) The Mind’s Past. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.

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Haig, David (2002) Genomic imprinting, sex-biased dispersal, and social behavior. In Haig D Genomic Imprinting and Kinship. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 161–177. (Softbound) Also, Haig D (2003) “On intrapersonal reciprocity.” Evolution and Human Behavior. 24(6): 418–425. Short, important, but have that pencil and pad with you! Harrington, Anne (1989) Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study of 19th Century Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wigan, Arthur (1844/2006) A New View of Insanity: The Duality of Mind. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing. (Softbound reprint, buy it over the ‘Net.)

10. Old Dogs, Young Tricks Warren, Robert Penn (1946/2006) All the King’s Men. NY: Harcourt. Jack Burden eventually settles down with his high school sweetheart. But there’s more, so much more.… Burden looks to his past to find his present. (There is abundant literature about older people becoming “childlike” in the sense of needing physical attention. Childlike fears also appear in the guise of “sundowning” but may be attributed to madness rather than understood for their content. I’m not sure that anyone has looked for, or explored in therapy with older adults, a systematic reversal in interests that starts in the mid-forties and eventually replays those of adolescence.

11. Suicide and Apoptosis: Mother Said “No.” Required Reading Colt, George Howe (2006) November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide. NY: Scribner. A revised telling of his 1991 text, The Enigma of Suicide. The best introduction to suicide because Colt clearly takes his time and has no sales pitch. He presents lots of case histories, asks good questions, and prejudges nothing. A page-turner even though a long one.

Good Reading Baldessarini, Ross J. and John Hennen (2004) The genetics of suicide: An overview. Harvard Review of Psychiatry. 12(1), 1–13. Meta-analyses combine data from several studies. Dr. Baldessarini has a thorough mind, immense

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experience, and there are surprises in this careful review. He still teaches at Cape Cod every summer, enjoys encouraging students, always courteous, and probably knows more, and writes more, than anyone else I have met. deCatanzaro, Denys (1981) Suicide and Self-Damaging Behavior: A Sociobiological Perspective. NY: Academic. Choron, Jacques (1972) Suicide: An Incisive Look at Self­Destruction. NY: Scribners. Tells much the same story as Colt but in several hundred fewer pages and more than thirty years sooner. Cohen, David (1994) Out of the Blue: Depression and Human Nature. NY: Norton. Analyzes the interplay between genes and environments that sometimes leads to our shutdowns and deaths. Frankl, Viktor (1959/2006) Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. A remarkable affirmation of connectivity with not only other individuals and with life but also with the future. You live not for what you have done but for what you must yet do. Jamison, Kay Redfield (1999) Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. NY: Vintage. A talented bipolar, sometimes suicidal, psychologist who also writes about creative minds because she moves in sync with them. Generally convinced that suicide rests on an unstable mental platform. See also Jamison (1996) An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. NY: Knopf.

12. Free Won’t These people renovate their cave and chase out the bad guys. They can be recognized by network theorists as not only innovators but also as a type of weak link or loner and a necessity for group resilience in networks and reciprocity.

Great Reading Levi, Primo (1958/1993) Survival in Auschwitz (orig. If This Is a Man) NY: Touchstone. Will make you cry. Will also make you angry when you realize that institutional care is more subtle today but mimics, especially in cases of familial abandonment, the phenomena that Levi saw in concentration camps. Also, Levi Primo (1986) The Drowned and the Saved. NY: Summit Publishers. Available on the Internet for just a few dollars each.

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Levi-Montalcini, Rita (1988) In Praise of Imperfection: My Life and Work, NY: Basic Books. Close up and personal about a woman’s career, her experiences in Italy during the last world war, and her discoveries that led to her sharing the Nobel Prize with Stanley Cohen in 1986. Remarkable chapter on neurodevelopmental thinking in the first half of the twentieth century when people, many of them very smart, doubted Ramon y Cajal’s idea that the brain is a collection of neurons. Ray, Janisse (1999) Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. Recommended by E. O. Wilson. Gifted southern girl, raised by an extraordinary, investing, mother and a bipolar, sometimes psychotic father who didn’t always support his family with his religion and his junk yard in rural Georgia. Ray alternates chapters about her and local characters with chapters about the surrounding swamps, rivers, ecology, and the first European settlers: “Crackers,” Celts, and Borderlanders from the hills between Scotland and England. Powerful. Beautiful. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. “Ulysses” “Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ first appeared in Morte D’Arthur, and Other Idyls. By Alfred Tennyson. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, MDCCCXLII, 67. This, however, was a trial book, printed but not published. The first publication of the poem occurred in Poems by Alfred Tennyson. In Two Volumes. London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street. MDCCCXLII. pp. vii, 233; vii, 231.” (//www.victorianweb.org/authors/ tennyson/ulyssestext.html)

Bibliography Abdallah RT & Simon JA (2007) Testosterone therapy in women: its role in the management of hypoactive sexual desire disorder. Int J. Impot Res. June 21, [Epub ahead of print] Akiskal H (1995) Developmental pathways to bipolarity: Are juvenile­onset depressions pre­bipolar? Journal American Academy Child Adolescent Psychiatry. 34: 754–763. Albert R & Barabási A­L (2002) Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of Modern Physics 74: 47–97. Early publication in June 2001 at// arXiv.org/PS_cache/cond­mat/pdf/0106/0106096.pdf Allen A (1998) Nature and nurture. The Washington Post, 1/11/98 Allman JM (1999) Evolving Brains. NY: Scientific American. Allport G (1955) Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson P (1999) Computing: Solving problems in finite time. Nature, 400: 115–116. Axelrod R (1997) The Complexity of Cooperation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press. ———(1984) The Evolution of Cooperation. NY: Basic Books. Badyaev AV, Hamstra TL, Oh KP, & Seaman DA (2006) Sex-biased maternal effects reduce ectoparasite-induced mortality in a passarine bird. ProceedingsNational Academy of Science, 103(39): 14406–14411. Bailey J M (1998) Can behavior genetics contribute to evolutionary behavioral science? In C Crawford & D Krebs (eds.) Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 211–234. Bak P (1996) How Nature Works: The Science of Self­Organized Criticality. NY: Springer­Verlag.

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Baldessarini RJ & Hennen J (2004) The genetics of suicide: An overview. Harvard Review of Psychiatry. 12(1), 1–13. Ball P (1999) Transitions still to be made. Nature, 402, 73–76. ———(2002) The physical modelling of society: a historical perspective. Physica A. 314: 1–14. Also may be vailable at www.philipball.com. ———(2002) The physics of society. Nature, 415: 371. ———(2003) The physics of institutions. Symposium at the London School of Economics, March 26. ———(2003) The physical modelling of human social systems. Complexus. 1: 190–206. ———(2004) Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. NY: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Barabási A­L & Albert R (1999) Emergence of scaling in random networks. arXiv: cond­mat/9910332v1, 21 Oct 1999 Barabási A­L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus. Barbellion WNP (1919) Journal of a Disappointed Man. NY: George H Doran. Barkley R (1997) ADHD and the Nature of Self Control. NY: Guilford. ———(1990) Attention­Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment. NY: Guilford. Barkow J, Cosmides L, & Tooby J (eds.) (1992) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford. Beck A (1976) Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. NY: New American Library. ———(1988) Love is Never Enough. NY: Harper. Beck A, Resnik H, & Lettierri, D. (1986) The Prediction of Suicide. Philadelphia: Charles Press. Bianconi G & Barábasi A­L (2000) Bose­Einstein condensation in complex networks. arXiv:cond­mat/0011224 v1 13 Nov 2000. Bianconi G & Barabási A­L (2000b) Competition and multiscaling in evolving networks. ArXiv:cond­mat/0011029 v1 2 Nov 2000.

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———(1978/2004) On Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press. ———(1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. NY: Knopf. Wilson EO & Hölldobler B (2005) Eusociality: Origin and consequences. Proceedings National Academy of Science, September 20, 102(38), 13367–13371. Published online before print September 12, 2005, 10.1073/pnas.0505858102. Wilson EO & Lumsden, C. (1981) Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. Whiten A, Goodall J, McGrew W, Nishida T, Reynolds V, Sugiyama Y, Tutin C, Wrangham R, & Boesch C. (1999) Cultures in chimpanzees. Nature. 399: 682–685. Wood BA (1992) Evolution of australopithecines. In Jones S, Martin,R, & Pilbeam D (eds.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. NY: Cambridge, 231–240. Wrangham R & Peterson D (1996) Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. NY: Houghton Mifflin. Wright L (1997) Twins: And What They Tell Us about Who We Are. NY: Wiley. Wright R (2000) NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny. NY: Pantheon. ———(1988) Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in a Age of Information. NY: Times Books. ———(1994) The Moral Animal. The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Pantheon. Wright S (1932) The roles of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding, and selection in evolution” Proc. 6th Int. Cong.Genet.1: 356–366. Wright W (1998) Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality. NY: Knopf. Yakovlev PI and Rakic P (1966) Patterns of decussation of bulbar pyramids and distribution of pyramidal tracts on two sides of the spinal cord. Trans. Am. Neurol. Assoc. 91: 366–367. Yook SH, Jeong H, and Barabási A-L (2002) Modeling the Internet’s large-scale topology. Proceedings of Natural Academy of Science. 99(21): 13382–13386.

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Young LJ, Lim MM, Gingrich B, & Insel TR (2001) Cellular mechanisms of social attachment. Hormones and Behavior. 40: 133–138. Zimmer C (2001) Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures. NY: Touchstone. ———(2006) Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. NY: Harper Collins. Zhong L-X, Zheng D-F, & Zheng B.(2005) Evolutionary snowdrift game with loners. arXiv:physics/0605010 v1 1 May 2006 Zipf GK (1932): Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ George_Kingsley_Zipf. Also referenced in Britannica)

About the Author James Brody has a Ph. D. in psychology and has been listed in the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology since 1975. He has written more than a dozen book reviews, most of them on //www.human-nature.com and found most simply by asking Yahoo or Google for “James Brody, evolution.” He has three book chapters and a list of research papers in psychopharmacology, operant conditioning, and clinical applications, including one long ago, in Psychopharmacologia and another, equally long ago, in Nature. (The 1970 paper on serotonin led to 1300 reprint requests, the 1969 paper in Nature to 650.) Brody also pioneered a series of courses for the Cape Cod Institute. They included “Taking Charge of Your Genes,” “Healing the Moral Animal,” “Darwinian Feelings and Values,” and “Twins and Us” and he involved notables such as Robert Wright, Frank Sulloway, John Pearce, Russell Gardner, and Nancy Segal in the presentations. He has presented at state-wide, national, and international meetings and hosts and contributes regularly to the Evolutionary Psychology forum at //www.behavior. net/bolforums. The EP forum has roughly 350,000 visitors per year.

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… no two individuals have to put up with the same environment we have a choice. C.D. Darlington 67 … our minds … are at bottom a match for the nature of things … we are not fallen, incapable, helpless, doomed, or damned. Wm James 210 … we may define ‘normality’ as the condition in which no single pathway controls the organism Richard Lewontin 46 A child is an exploring vortex 64 Adam Smith 50 Adapted Mind 91 Africa 15, 92, 101, 106, 124, 126, 166, 167, 185 A gene from dad differs from that same gene from mom 135 Alcoholic 35, 82, 182, 189 Alex-Brody, Diane xiii, 108 Anderson, Terry 45 Animism 54 Animism, carefully used, might pay off 55 Anxiety Social 79, 155, 191 anxiety 53 Apoptosis xxi, 162, 178, 179, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186 Connectivity 193 Definition 183 Disassembly 184 Levi-Montalcini, R 183 Natural Selection 178 Necrosis 182 Suicide 178, 187, 196

Approach-Avoidance Conflict 30 Archy-the-cockroach 50 Asia 15, 84, 101, 185 Attention deficit, hyperactivity disorder 116 Auschwitz 200 Average xix, 24, 79, 82, 85, 88 Bacall, Lauren 2 Bailey, Michael 116 Ball, Philip 1, 2, 6, 8, 10, 11, 82, 83, 84 Barabási, Albert L 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 48, 50, 66, 85, 87, 132, 179 Barbellion, W. N. P. xv Barnes and Noble xiii, 72, 107, 180 Beck, Aaron 9, 22, 33, 53, 189 Bell curves 37, 79, 87, 89 Biggs, Lucy Evelyne (Eva) 173 Biography 110, 119 Bloom, Howard 184 Bogart, Humphrey 2 Bogen, Joseph 57, 59, 146, 149, 151, 152 Boids 74 Born to Rebel xx, 130, 132 Bose, Satyendra Nath 20 Bose-Einstein 20, 45, 47, 87, 182 Bose gas 47 Boston Marathon 210, 211 Bowen, Murray 11, 92 Braginsky, Benjamin 201 Brains are made to read 57 Brody, James 191 Burt, Austin 135, 137, 138 Bush, George 45 Cajal, Ramon y 208 Camus, Albert 178, 185

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Cat xviii, 5, 8, 12, 31, 35, 37, 39, 54, 100, 168, 176, 200 Siamese xxii, 27 Cats turn fish into fur every day 205 Chagnon, Napoleon 11, 72 Changing too quickly or too much outruns the niche … 13 Chaos 7, 45 Cheating 99, 103, 116 Chimps 97, 98, 100, 167 Clumps. See Clusters Clusters xix, 8, 21, 36, 37, 41, 44, 55, 61, 77, 87, 178 CNS asymmetry 58 Cognitive therapy 53 Cohen, David 126, 138 Colt, George H xii, 84, 117, 128, 146, 147, 179, 180, 181 Common sense xx, 53, 98 Connectivity 2, 7, 11, 12, 13, 35, 38, 42, 43, 66, 77, 87, 178, 179, 180, 182, 184, 188, 191, 192 Crucifixion 188 Csemerly, Peter xiv Csermely, Peter xiii, 49, 50, 216 Darlington, C. D. xv, 22, 26, 63, 67, 68, 80, 82, 106, 111, 162, 163, 166, 207 Darwin Emma 110 Erasmus 110, 122, 125, 126 Darwin, Charles xiii, xvi, 1, 3, 19, 61, 62, 67, 71, 81, 83, 89, 103, 110, 114, 119, 122, 123, 125, 132, 145, 173, 174, 178, 179 Davenport, C. B. 67 Dawkins, Richard 82 DeCatanzaro, Denys 184, 188, 189, 192, 195, 196 Delusion 82 Delusions get tougher as competing ideas get weaker 47 Demons 50

Depression 12, 23, 47, 53, 117, 120, 126, 142, 179, 181, 188, 191, 212 Dinichism 106, 107 Divided self xx, 91, 144 DNA 106, 113, 114, 135, 168, 205, 206, 210 Dolphins 26 Dopamine, a get started, get finished, and enjoy 59 Dresher, Melvin 32 Dunn, Judy, and Plomin, Robert 122 Durkheim, Emile 8, 41, 178, 179, 184, 193 Edmund Burke 50 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Iranäus 101 Einstein, Albert xiii, xviii, 2, 20, 36, 45, 64 Eiseley Clyde 154 Daisy 154 Loren vii, xx, 110, 154, 156, 157, 203 I chose a fall Saturday and I rode Intruder 157 Mabel Langdon 156 Ekman, Paul 98, 101 Emergent networks xvi, xviii, xix, 2, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 54, 65, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 97, 106, 132, 179, 190, 216 Evolution 94 Exploration 64 English teachers 39 Environment Chosen 69 Common 68 Nonshared 68, 69 Harris J.R. 133 Shared 68 Unique 68 Ertel, Suitbert 48, 92 Essentialism 82 Evolvability 62, 65, 66, 86, 137

Index Executive functions 1, 17, 53, 77, 78, 205 Exploration xix, 61, 62, 63, 66, 83, 148 Exploratory systems 61, 63, 64 Externalism 79, 80, 81 Fabré, Henri 22 Fat-tail 85, 87, 92 Fechner, Gustav 1 Feltham, Claire xiii Female 134, 137, 167, 191 Ants 26 Birth order 131 Black 182, 193 Bullies 161, 186 Cerebral cortex 59, 148 Child care 102 Choice 138, 192, 195 Deception 141 Depression 193 Dinichism 15, 16, 106, 107, 148, 161 Internalism 81 Mate choice 15, 21 Mating 68, 71, 85, 96, 97, 100, 124, 137, 161, 165, 167, 170, 175 Food 98 Power laws 91 Moths 22 Nerve Growth Factor 210 Phase transition 15 r-selection 134 Suicide 186 Testosterone 171 Trucker 16 Variation 140, 153, 165, 194 Feynman, Richard 1, 110, 142, 150 First Arrivals 41 Fisher, R. A. 50 Fitness networks 41 Flood, Merrill 32 Foster, Herbert 146 Frankl, Viktor 178, 185, 187, 189, 193, 210 Freedom 34

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Free won’t xxi, 161, 162, 198 Galton, Francis 67, 68, 73, 82, 89, 110, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 165, 171, 173, 174, 206 Gazzaniga, Michael 14, 57, 60, 62, 146, 149, 150, 152, 167 Genetic similarity across generations 126 Genomic imprinting xx, 58, 104, 133, 134, 137, 192, 193 Genomic imprinting may arrange your becoming a follower or rebel 135 Georgetown Family Center 12 Gerhart, John 64, 65 Goldberg, E 58 Goldberg, Elkhonon 58, 61, 77, 135, 138, 144, 146, 148, 152, 153 Gould, Steven J 1, 2, 17, 18, 63, 71, 80, 113 Grammer, Karl 19 Haig, David 58, 137, 138 Haldane, J. B. S. 25, 62, 83, 109 Hamburger, Viktor 208, 209 Hamilton, William D. 145, 184 Hamlet xvii, 5, 13, 17, 138 Harley 16, 66 Harris, Judith R. 132 Harrison Bergeron xix, 24, 33, 79 Harvard Human Relations Area Files 102 Hayek FA 50 Hayes, Brian 10, 85 Head injury 48 Hebb, Donald O. 2, 20 Helmet Effects 43, 44 Heritability 68, 115, 141 Heuer, Kenneth 154, 155, 156, 157 High Flight, JG Magee 96 Hitler, Adolph 48, 92 Howard, Mary 122 Howells, William Dean 121 Hox genes 71, 168 Mall chicks 70 Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer 10, 15, 138 Hsp 90, heat shock protein 48, 168

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Huxley, Thomas Henry 122 Hyde, Edward 145 Immaturity 13 Imperfect, complex unions 153 Imprinting 61, 149 Inclusion bodies 95 Inclusive fitness 41, 180, 184, 185, 188, 190, 195 Suicide 188 Inhibitory surround 15 Injury makes rigidity and impulsiveness more likely 48 Intelligence 11, 21, 23, 62, 69, 88, 89, 90, 91, 96, 97, 98, 104, 110, 116, 117, 139, 145, 165, 170, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 189, 194 Criminal behavior 91 Jackson, John Hughlings 146 James Henry 110, 119, 120 Henry, Sr. 120 Mary Walsh 119, 121 William 16, 73, 109, 110, 119, 120, 122, 146, 150, 207, 210 JB 148 Jekyll, Henry 145 Kaplan, Stan 142 Kauffman, Stuart 2, 7, 11, 18, 21, 26, 37, 42, 50, 51, 58, 65, 83, 86, 87, 92, 115, 163, 178, 179, 182, 198 Kerr, Michael & Kathy 11 Keverne, Barry 138 Kirschner, Marc 64, 65 Kuhn, Thomas 22, 68 Kuramoto, Yoshiki 20, 153, 187 Kuramoto demonstration 20 Language 76 Leakey, Mary 110, 122, 123, 125 Levi, Primo 178, 182, 200 Levi-Montalcini, Rita 110, 183, 207 Levin, Gilbert xiii

Lewontin, Richard xvii, 2, 22, 26, 36, 46, 63, 64, 66, 67, 83, 114, 115, 127, 153, 162, 167, 179, 198, 200, 214 Life is like a puppet show in which stage, scenery, actors and all are made of the same stuff. Alfred Lotka 5 Literature of the double 146 Loners 50 Lotka, Alfred 2, 5, 20, 50, 83, 86, 115, 198 Love 169, 170, 191 Lucretius Evolution 80 Mackay, Charles 74, 149 Male 15 Dinichism 161 Mating 137, 167, 170, 175 Nerve Growth Factor 210 Suicide 186 Variation 153, 165, 194 Mates xviii, 5, 15, 23, 33, 53, 60, 72, 74, 89, 90, 97, 98, 117, 138, 178, 186, 194 Maybe 10, 16, 18, 81 Mayr, Ernst 2, 41, 65 Melman, Ketti xiii, 198 Mencken, Henry L 166 Millay, Edna St. Vincent 141 Miller, Geoffrey 96, 153, 181 Montaigne, Michele de 111 Mother love 97, 122, 123, 131, 139, 142, 148, 161, 168, 173, 174, 192 Abortion 139 Cerebral cortex 193 Daisy Eiseley 154 Depression 193 Difficult infants 194 Evaluating children 139, 140 Evaluating sons and lovers 194 Oxytocin 191 Prenatal 134, 135, 136, 137 Psychopathology 193 Schizophrenia 193

Index Stress, impulse control 193 Suicide 193 Mother said, ‘No.’ 192 Motorcycle 19, 40, 70, 158, 166, 169, 176 Harley 12, 16 Murder 180, 181, 186 Murdock, George 102 Murray, Charles 76, 153 Natural Selection 46 Natural selection 62 Nature of nurture 127 Necrosis 182 Neodarwinians 25, 80 Nerve growth factor 208 Networks are sensitive to strategic attacks but not to random ones 48 Nietzsche, Friedrich 48, 53, 92 On cognitive therapy 53 Nisbett, Richard 16 Nobel Prize 1, 18, 125, 142, 207, 208, 210 Now 13 Obsessions 45, 48, 51 Lewontin 46 Obsessive 13, 48, 51 Old dogs xxi, 161, 165 Order 7, 20 Oscillator 21, 90, 151 Oxytocin 191 Love 191 Panic 186 Past 13, 14 Pattern-maker 57, 59, 135 Pearson, Karl 174 Personal will xvi, xvii, xxi, 3, 5 Personal will appears 112 Phase transitions 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 205 Evolution 79, 94 Physics 1, 5, 85 Picasso, Pablo 91 Pinker, Steven 149 Pippig, Uta 210

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Pleistocene xx, 96, 97, 106 Plomin, Robert 68, 128 Pole, Elizabeth 122 Political independents, however unpopular, may both stabilize groups of cooperators and increase the adaptability of their society 50 Poundstone, William 31, 32 Power laws xix, 5, 37, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91 Criminal behavior 91 Human sensation 88 Psychological adaptations 79 You evolved in the middle of them 79 Power laws may be associated not only with external change but also with your first noticing it 88 Prisoner’s Dilemma 31 Provine, William 89 Psychiatry into managed-care 45 Psychological Adaptation 59 Psychological Adaptations 94, 97, 98, 99, 102 Psychopath 140, 146 Psychopathology 23, 48, 49, 52, 117, 122, 140, 141 Psychophysics 90 Putnam, Robert 8, 41 Quantitative trait locus 114 Quételet, Aldophe 82 Raff, Rudolf 59, 63, 71, 80, 83, 95, 132, 152, 168, 206, 209 Raise the Stakes 33 Random networks 37 Rebellion 141, 210 Rebellions In an asylum 200 Regardless of a Designer, there are designs. xviii Regression to the Mean 82 Reynolds, Craig 74 Rushton, J. Philippe 23, 53, 90, 91 Sagan, Carl 74

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Sarandon, Susan 141 SAT 10, 11 Satisfiability problems 10 Scale-free networks 41 Schadenfreude 84 Schedules of reinforcement 28 Serotonin 191 Sexes 14 Phase transition 14 Sexual selection 152 Shared & Nonshared to Imposed & Chosen Environments 67 Similarities between non twins 119 Similarity 2, 3, 23, 41, 52, 53, 72, 86, 90, 96, 100, 105, 116, 119, 125, 128, 179, 206 Similarity & Influence 135 Similarity & influence 2, 20, 23, 88, 93, 146, 187 Similarity and influence 153, 191 Small worlds 43, 44 Social anxiety 126 Sowell, Thomas 50 Speck, Frank 156 Sperry, Roger 57, 146, 149 Sports bike 169 Stages in Network Org. 40 Stevens, Stanley S. 88 Stevenson, Robert Louis 145 Stress—heat, poisons, or radiation 48 Strogatz, Steven xiv, 8, 20, 21, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 77, 198 Suicide xxi, 84, 117, 140, 161, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 190, 212 Adaptation 181 Adoptees 187 Apoptosis 161, 178, 187, 188, 189, 196 Auschwitz 187 Childhood 186 College 186 Depression 181, 187, 190 Donne, John 181

Dutch Cure 196 Ethnicity 192 Female 186, 193 Genetics 187 Inclusive fitness 188, 189 Intelligence 189 IQ: Voracek 182 Jail 187 Male 186 Black 193 Medicare 195 Neurochemistry 190, 191, 193 Notes 189 Poverty 182, 196 Professions 185 Social Security 195 Suicide bombers 188 Violent 194 War 182, 188 Sulloway Birth order 131 Sulloway, Frank xx, 119, 130, 131, 132, 133, 173 Birth order xx Swarms 188 Mates 75 Swarms and spirituality 73 Sync xvi, xviii, xx, 2, 19, 20, 21, 23, 31, 32, 33, 69, 85, 89, 96, 128, 152, 177, 179, 180, 191, 196, 206, 211 Afterlife 75 Amplifier 24, 115 Behavior of Organisms 28 Biography 110 Cerebral cortex 59, 91, 149, 152 Clusters 20 Cognition 39, 53, 155 Computer code 54 Conflict xx, 155 Cross-generational 109, 127, 210 Cross-species 26, 28 Developmental failure 46 Diagnosis 21

Index Domain specific 35 Eiseley 156 Emergent network 179 Environment 26 Evolution 59, 70, 71, 94, 179, 204 Generality 22 Impulse & forethought 137 Lucretius 80 Mates 25, 89 Mating xx, 1, 19, 21, 23, 34, 39, 70, 152, 175 Niche construction 80, 98, 135 Oscillation 19 Oscillator 21 Power laws 88 Regression to the mean 85 Schedules of reinforcement 28 Similarity & influence 34, 179 Small worlds 44 Species 19 Suicide 178, 187 Intelligence 189 Swarms 75 Twins 24 Synchrony 2, 20, 90 Testesterone Mating 171 Testosterone 171 Mating 167 The brain’s two halves do one thing but for different classes of events 59 The decisions that complicate or simplify life will occur 12 The game really is about … xxii The more we learn about genes, the more we learn about how environments work … Robert Plomin 113 The possibility of doubt 16 Therapists 51, 90 Thought 76 Tit-for-Tat 31, 33, 134, 137 Townsend, Frederic 133 Toynbee, Arnold J. 76

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Tracking a Niche 13 Trivers, Robert 12, 58, 85, 133, 135, 137, 138, 192 Truckers 3, 107, 174, 202 Twins xx, 12, 23, 24, 26, 35, 69, 104, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 127, 138, 174, 180, 206 Minnesota study 115 Twins, dizygotic 112, 113, 116, 118, 187 Twins, monozygotic 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 148, 187 Twins reared apart 117 Universality 101 Vocabulary xix, 38, 76, 90 Vogel, Peter 57, 146 Vonnegut, Kurt 82, 85, 146, 147, 218 Voracek, Martin 189 Water 6 Watts, Duncan 20 Weak links 49, 50 Wedgewood, Susannah 122 West, Mae 141 Wigan, Arthur 57, 144, 146, 149, 151 Wikipedia and Britannica xiv Will power 204 Wilson, Edward O. 91 Winner-take-all 9, 42 Winter cold, gloom, pain, and illness make tormenters from annoyers 78 Wismer, Donna xiii Women 13, 16, 17, 20, 24, 34, 35, 59, 67, 75, 92, 98, 107, 108, 123, 137, 153, 161, 165, 166, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 194, 201 Suicide 186 Wright, Richard 141 Yakovlevian torque 58, 148 Yanomamo 11, 12, 72 Your mind becomes a transmitter, antenna, and receiver 88