The evolution of crying
Carl Zimmer has a very nice piece on the evolution of crying and colic on his weblog, The Loom.
The most interesting part is a review of recent work by Hillary Fouts in Current Anthropology. The gist of this work is that children at the time of weaning have different strategies in foraging groups compared to farming groups. From the abstract:
Parent-offspring conflict theory suggests that the reproductive interests of parents and children may conflict when parents want to have another child and an existing child wants continued parental attention and resources. This conflict leads toddlers to throw temper tantrums and use other psychological weapons to maintain parental investment. Few studies employing this theory have considered both the cultural and the biological contexts of weaning. Using systematic qualitative and quantitative data collected among the Bofi farmers and foragers of Central Africa, we examined the influence of cultural schemas and practices, nursing patterns, child's age, maternal pregnancy, and maternal work patterns on children's responses to the cessation of nursing. As predicted by the theory, Bofi farmer children exhibited high levels of fussing and crying when abruptly weaned while Bofi forager children showed no marked signs of distress.
But as Zimmer describes the situation:
But the researchers kept following the children and found something interesting: the farmer children stopped fussing before long and then cried a lot less in general. The forager children, on the other hand, kept crying more than the farmer children long after they had been weaned.
In other words, toddlers intelligently judge their strategies for procuring care from their parents based on their situation. Of course, Dr. Phil could have told them that; it's just how my toddlers behave also.
The question is whether we need "parent-offspring conflict theory" to tell us any of this. It may be that evolution has left human toddlers with a range of sensitivities for crying that they modulate on the basis of environmental input. But I would put it differently from my own experience: toddlers are learning how to communicate with their parents, and they respond to feedback in choosing how to express themselves. Parents who do not respond favorably to tantrums will face fewer of them in the future. From the child's point of view, her developing brain is bootstrapping itself into effectively obtaining what she wants. In this case, I think rationality is a better answer than evolutionary fine-tuning of behavioral responses.
Why "monkey see, monkey do" isn't for apes
In Carl Zimmer's New York Times article, he recounts how he signed his daughter up to match wits with a chimp. The point was further experimentation on the imitative abilities of apes compared to humans, following after the work of Andrew Whiten and colleagues (which I discussed here).
In Zimmer's story, the apparatus was a transparent box with a Rube Goldberg-like means of opening. The trick is that most of the steps are unnecessary, and the chimpanzees figure this out right away.
But kids don't.
The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.
The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.
The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on."
This phenomenon will be familiar to any parents whose kids bring home undesirable traits from their schoolmates. Smart children are better at copying the stupid behaviors of their peers --- which often induces a descent to the lowest common denominator.
It's a good thing, because school as we know it would be impossible if most children weren't such careful imitators.
Interesting how we end up classifying behavioral variation. Kids who have less of an imitative ability are more "independent", or more "difficult" depending on the circumstance.
It does make you wonder about the reasons for the evolution of such a talent. Is it because it made children better at accommodating to cultures? Or because it made it more convenient for parents to care for them? Or because it endeared them to their parents (or their peers)?
In any event, I'm very sure my daughters are great imitators. Which means they would lose to the chimps, too.
"The brain is still in beta mode"
I really like that quote, by computer security expert Bruce Schneier. The context, though, is sort of silly:
He told delegates at the 2007 RSA Conference that there is a gap between the reality of security and the emotional feel of security due to the way our brains have evolved. This leads to people making bad choices.
"As a species we got really good at estimating risk in an East African village 100,000 years ago. But in 2007 London? Modern times are harder."
Uhh...so it seems to me if you really believed that, you would advocate computers that properly trigger our anachronistic system of risk detection. Like maybe they could give a leopard-like screech when we choose a password of less than six letters?
Or, uhh...maybe you could just make them secure in the first place?
Still, it's interesting to see this idea about human evolution spreading around out there through the world. The "anachronistic brain":
"The brain is still in beta mode, it's got all sorts of patches and workarounds. It's not perfectly created, it's clearly evolved up."
In other words, cruft.
Schneier emphasizes our inaccurate assessments of small risks, proposing that we did much better in our "natural" habitat. I'm not so sure about that -- remember, I'm running a slow-moving series on risk. There's no particular reason to think that our assessments of ancient risks should have been accurate, since accurate risk assessment is not the same as fitness-maximizing risk assessment.
Translate that into the modern environment: Schneier seems to be claiming that the main feature of the modern risk environment is very slight, impersonal, uncontrollable risk margins. Sounds like the flip side of profit-taking opportunities. Maybe we'll evolve safer computers yet.
Brainstorming after Sputnik
On the topic of group decision making, I recommend this interesting column that gives a quick review of creativity research in psychology. The column argues that the area was driven forward in the late 1950's and 1960's by the space race:
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union beat the United States to the launch of the first satellite to orbit Earth. In severe public humiliation, America lost round one of the Space Race. How had it happened? How could America win the next round? The whole education system came under intense scrutiny. "Why can't Johnny read?" became the catchphrase at school, while rote learning and the tendency to reward and reinforce unoriginal thinking came under attack at university level.
"This perceived failure of American science and engineering," wrote educationalists David H. and Arthur J. Cropley of the Sputnik shock, "was attributed to lack of creativity, and judged to be the result of defects in education. University-level teaching of engineering was widely regarded as indifferent or even hostile to creativity, and empirical studies supported this view ... Students who preferred trying new solutions dropped out of engineering courses three times more frequently than those who preferred conventional solutions."
The idea of "brainstorming" was introduced by an advertising executive, Alex Osborn, in his 1953 book Applied Imagination. It isn't often taught anymore the way that Osborn conceived it, with a whole method designed to break down organizational barriers to the new ideas. It formed an important part of the creativity movement, so ubiquitous that today it is unremarkable.
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks