panksepp

helian |  So who is Jaak Panksepp?  Have a look at his YouTube talk on emotions at the bottom of this post, for starters.  A commenter recommended him, and I discovered the advice was well worth taking.  Panksepp’s The Archaeology of Mind, which he co-authored with Lucy Biven, was a revelation to me.  The book describes a set of basic emotional systems that exist in all, or virtually all, mammals, including humans.  In the words of the authors:

…the ancient subcortical regions of mammalian brains contain at least seven emotional, or affective, systems:  SEEKING (expectancy), FEAR (anxiety), RAGE (anger), LUST (sexual excitement), CARE (nurturance), PANIC/GRIEF (sadness), and PLAY (social joy).  Each of these systems controls distinct but specific types of behaviors associated with many overlapping physiological changes.

This is not just another laundry list of “instincts” of the type often proposed by psychologists at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.  Panksepp is a neuroscientist, and has verified experimentally the unique signatures of these emotional systems in the ancient regions of the brain shared by humans and other mammals.  Again quoting from the book,

As far as we know right now, primal emotional systems are made up of neuroanatomies and neurochemistries that are remarkably similar across all mammalian species.  This suggests that these systems evolved a very long time ago and that at a basic emotional and motivational level, all mammals are more similar than they are different.  Deep in the ancient affective recesses of our brains, we remain evolutionarily kin.

If you are an astute student of the Blank Slate phenomenon, dear reader, no doubt you are already aware of the heretical nature of this passage.  That’s right!  The Blank Slaters were prone to instantly condemn any suggestion that there were similarities between humans and other animals as “anthropomorphism.”  In fact, if you read the book you will find that their reaction to Panksepp and others doing similar research has been every bit as allergic as their reaction to anyone suggesting the existence of human nature.  However, in the field of animal behavior, they are anything but a quaint artifact of the past.  Diehard disciples of the behaviorist John B. Watson and his latter day follower B. F. Skinner, Blank Slaters of the first water, still haunt the halls of academia in significant numbers, and still control the message in any number of “scientific” journals.  There they have been following their usual “scholarly” pursuit of ignoring and/or vilifying anyone who dares to disagree with them ever since the heyday of Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin.  In the process they have managed to suppress or distort a great deal of valuable research bearing directly on the wellsprings of human behavior.

ants have group-level personality

sciencemag |  If you stuck to Aesop’s fables, you might think of all ants as the ancient storyteller described them—industrious, hard-working, and always preparing for a rainy day. But not every ant has the same personality, according to a new study. Some colonies are full of adventurous risk-takers, whereas others are less aggressive about foraging for food and exploring the great outdoors. 

Researchers say that these group “personality types” are linked to food-collecting strategies, and they could alter our understanding of how social insects behave.

Personality—consistent patterns of individual behavior—was once considered a uniquely human trait. But studies since the 1990s have shown that animals from great tits to octopuses exhibit “personality.” Even insects have personalities. Groups of cockroaches have consistently shy and bold members, whereas damselflies have shown differences in risk tolerance that stay the same from grubhood to adulthood.

To determine how group behavior might vary between ant colonies, a team of researchers led by Raphaël Boulay, an entomologist at the University of Tours in France, tested the insects in a controlled laboratory environment. They collected 27 colonies of the funnel ant (Aphaenogaster senilis) and had queens rear new workers in the lab. This meant that all ants in the experiment were young and inexperienced—a clean slate to test for personality.

The researchers then observed how each colony foraged for food and explored new environments. They counted the number of ants foraging, exploring, or hiding during set periods of time, and then compared the numbers to measure the boldness, adventurousness, and foraging efforts of each group. They also measured risk tolerance by gradually increasing the temperature of the ants’ foraging area from 26°C to 60°C. Ants that stayed out at temperatures higher than 46°C, widely considered to be the upper limit of their tolerance, were considered risk-takers.

When they reviewed their data, the scientists found strong personality differences between colonies, they reported online this month in Behavioral Ecology. Some were bold, adventurous risk-takers with highly active foragers. Others were shy, risk-averse, and fearful of new environments. Their foragers were less active, and they were less inclined to search for food at very high temperatures. When the team performed the same tests 11 weeks later, they saw that these differences persisted over time. More than half of all variation between colonies fell into distinct categories known as “behavioral syndromes.” These syndromes—similar to personality types among humans—are present across the animal kingdom and include categories like “proactive” (animals are bold, aggressive, and risk-prone) and “reactive” (animals are shy, calm, and risk-averse).

immigrant crises + pan-troglodytic ethology = accelerated musical chairs

pri |  When two groups of chimps bump into each other in the forest, it always leads to conflict. Males threaten each other with loud calls and aggressive gestures. And, occasionally, things escalate to physical violence and warfare.

"If they can grab a member of the other community, they may beat on them, bite them, and continue doing so until they're very severely injured or killed," says Wilson.

(See this video for an example of inter-group conflict among chimps. It was recorded by Wilson's colleague in Tanzania, in 1998.)

He says it makes sense chimps defend their territories. Several studies have shown that a bigger territory means more food for the group, and a better chance of survival.

But if chimps say anything about our own evolutionary past, so do bonobos. They're a smaller species of apes, also closely related to us.

Primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University has studied what happens when two groups of bonobos encounter each other.

"They have initial hostility, but then they have sex, and they groom, and very soon it looks more like a picnic than like warfare between them," says de Waal.

No one really knows why bonobos are friendlier than chimps. It could be because bonobos live in forests with more food and therefore don't need to protect their resources from neighbors, de Waal speculates.

So what do we make of our primate ancestry, when two of our closest evolutionary cousins are so different?

a previously unguessed mathematical secret of how the world works?

WaPo |  In nature, the relationship between predators and their prey seems like it should be simple: The more prey that’s available to be eaten, the more predators there should be to eat them. 

If a prey population doubles, for instance, we would logically expect its predators to double too. But a new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, turns this idea on its head with a strange discovery: There aren’t as many predators in the world as we expect there to be. And scientists aren’t sure why.

By conducting an analysis of more than a thousand studies worldwide, researchers found a common theme in just about every ecosystem across the globe: Predators don’t increase in numbers at the same rate as their prey. In fact, the faster you add prey to an ecosystem, the slower predators’ numbers grow. 

“When you double your prey, you also increase your predators, but not to the same extent,” says Ian Hatton, a biologist and the study’s lead author. “Instead they grow at a much diminished rate in comparison to prey.” This was true for large carnivores on the African savanna all the way down to the tiniest microbe-munching fish in the ocean.

Even more intriguing, the researchers noticed that the ratio of predators to prey in all of these ecosystems could be predicted by the same mathematical function — in other words, the way predator and prey numbers relate to each other is the same for different species all over the world.

cathedralized media and politics not dispassionate, they're vindictive, conniving, and passive aggressive...,

theatlantic |  His statements are completely consistent with his approach to both his business and entertainment careers, which was to connect with people’s guts at the expense of their reason. In his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Trump explained his modus operandi: “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies.  People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do.  That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts.  People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”

There has been a tremendous amount of discussion about the “anger”and “frustration”of Trump’s supporters. But it’s not just anger. Tapping all of the passions, including avarice and lust, is the unifying theme of his career. And therein lies the problem.

People have been wrestling with the problem of the passions in politics as far back as Plato and Aristotle. Plato described three parts of the soul—the appetites (like lust), the spirited (military courage), and reason. Reason was a charioteer trying to control the “dark steed” of the passions. The only way to control the appetites was to force the horse to the ground and whip him until he bled.

It’s a violent metaphor, but the ancient diagram has proven stable, continuing today in modern brain science, and even the Pixar movie Inside Out, which tracks the teenage protagonist’s struggle to understand and control her inner impulses.

The problem of the passions in politics was central to the thinking of America’s founders, as well. Take James Madison, the father of the Constitution. As a boy studying with his tutor Donald Robertson, Madison first learned the idea that “our passions are like Torrents which may be diverted, but not obstructed.”

In college, Madison was taught by the great Scottish cleric John Witherspoon that passions originated in an object of intense desire. Passions of love included admiration, desire, and delight. Passions of hatred were envy, malice, rage, and revenge. Most important however was the “great and real” distinction between selfish and benevolent passions. A benevolent passion, Witherspoon taught, came from the happiness of others. A selfish passion stemmed from gratification (like Donald Trump’s stroking of his own ego)—and was the most dangerous to a republic.

The passions are slippery for anyone seeking to control them, particularly in democracies with free speech. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be tamed.

a loser/victim's worldview has no evolutionary value I'm obliged to acknowledge...,

WaPo |  But a new study called “Survival of the Fittest and the Sexiest” published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence has found that adolescent bullies have higher self-esteem and social status, as well as lower rates of depression and social anxiety. From an evolutionary standpoint, these combined measures also make the meanest in the playground pack the ones with the greatest sex appeal.

This probably comes at no surprise to anyone who’s seen Mean Girls. And it could be important to the development of new bullying prevention programs, which have long operated on the assumption that bullies are troubled kids alienated from a school’s core population.

“The bullies come out on top,” said Jennifer Wong, the study’s lead researcher. Her surveys, conducted on 135 Vancouver high school students, indicate that bullying is biological, as kids who have dominating tendencies and a desire to rise to the top of social hierarchies often victimize others in order to get there.

Wong came to these conclusions by administering questionnaires that allowed participants to be categorized into one of four groups: bullies, victims, bully/victims (individuals who bully but also report being victimized themselves) and bystanders. Within these categories, the bullies reported the best self-evaluations and the bully/victims the worst.

Since her research indicates that bullies are characterized by behaviors that are innate rather than learned, Wong said, schools might want to consider ways of channeling those tendencies towards more healthy activities instead of attempting to quell bullies’ innate drive to dominate.

objective enemies

agingrebel |  What happened in Waco was much more sordid and cynical than the American public has yet been allowed to know and it represents a terrible, possibly fatal, cancer in the body of the American Republic. What happened in Waco will likely seem incredible to the mainstream public. It will seem at least plausible to anyone with knowledge of the motorcycle club world.

What happened in Waco was the tragic culmination of an ongoing, international war against motorcycle clubs that is a logical outgrowth of the Global War on Terror. This secret war is aimed at a fringe counterculture that easily fulfills the role of what totalitarian regimes call an “objective enemy:” which is to say an enemy that is prosecuted mostly for its potential criminality rather than its actual criminality. The war is a manifestation of a sadistic state – a state that can no longer accomplish the basic tasks of government but that projects its power mostly by its unique entitlement to punish its objective enemies and other citizens.

One facet of the war on motorcycle clubs is the exploitation by government officials of what might be called alternative motorcycle clubs. Throughout their area of operation, the Bandidos Motorcycle Club has had repeated conflicts over the last three years with two alternative motorcycle clubs.

cliven bundy says: anyone who resists arrest will be treated accordingly...,

theroot |  As of this writing, almost 500 people—138 of them African American—have been shot and killed by police in the United States this year. These numbers come from The Guardian’s investigation that is literally counting the dead.

Outrage against the epidemic of police killings of unarmed black men helped spark a national #BlackLivesMatter protest movement that called for comprehensive reform of the criminal-justice system. The Obama administration’s Task Force on Policing in the 21st Century is, so far, the major policy response to these shootings.

But as many have pointed out, police violence against black women, girls and transgender people of color is often missing from national discussions. In response, thousands of people have taken to the streets, social media and elsewhere to affirm that the lives of black girls and women matter as much as those of black men. The latest case of police brutality against unarmed black people took place in McKinney, Texas, on Friday, when a police officer brutalized a group of black teens attending a pool party. A camera phone caught McKinney Police Cpl. Eric Casebolt pummeling a 15-year-old black girl on the lawn of a suburban neighborhood and pulling out his gun and pointing it toward unarmed teenagers.

Systematic police violence against black and Latino communities, in the form of killings, overt brutality and general harassment, requires a national database. Anecdotal evidence from social media, personal stories and public documents suggests that we have only scratched the surface of widespread illegal use of force by law enforcement that is directed against the African-American community.

A federal database—one that could be publicly accessed by law enforcement, community activists and citizens—is vital to comprehending the depth of police misconduct and fashioning a cure to a national crisis that new technology has made visible to the world.

Our heightened national sensitivity to anti-black violence is a direct result of information sharing, or crowdsourcing, on social media that has turned small cities such as Ferguson, Mo., into a metaphor for racial injustice in the 21st century.

Information, during the civil rights era and now, is power.

to "protect and serve" you must always give those inside your tribe full benefit of the doubt...,

salon |  people continue to deploy the “one bad apple spoils a bunch” analogy as though the predicate of the sentence is of no consequence. Spoils. The analogy is less about the singular bad apple and more about its multiplicative bad effects on those it keeps company with. I agree that David Casebolt was particularly out of control. I agree that the other officers saw that and got him to stop waving his gun. They did not keep him from kneeling on top of the girl or berating and intimidating the other youth. This means that in a scenario where multiple children were being unfairly treated, the presence of multiple officers did not offer them substantial protection in the face one officer becoming entirely rogue.

Those officers did not demand that their colleague take a breather while they got the situation under control. They let him go on and on, half-cocked and ridiculous. The material impact of that was a bunch of children feeling unsafe and traumatized by those sworn to protect them.

The 15-year-old white kid who recorded this incident on his smartphone made it clear that what he saw was a bunch of police mistreating his Black friends, while leaving him alone entirely. For the white people who need to hear it, yes, his presence indicates that “not all white people” are racist. Clearly his parents are doing a good job raising an anti-racist teen. But if the white people who need to hear such things hope to float their consciences to safety on the back of this one kid, the ride might be bumpy. Again we don’t combat racism just by raising our children to have anti-racist attitudes. We also have to confront the systematic residential segregation and privatization that makes pools inaccessible to children who don’t have the privilege of living in suburbs.

Few white people have stood up and called out the white adult women who harassed a fellow neighbor having a pool party with her friends, and with her mother’s permission. But many white people have watched the video and concluded that the officer’s treatment of the 14-year-old girl was justified. The gender dynamics in this moment are interesting. There is no universe in which a police officer would drag a young white girl in a two-piece bathing suit by her hair, demand she put her face on the ground, and then kneel for several minutes on top of her adolescent body. If such a thing occurred, it would elicit massive moral outrage on the part of white people (and Black people, too).

But Black girls are never deemed feminine enough for their sexual and adolescent vulnerability to register for white people. They are frequently viewed as aggressors by both police and regular citizens alike, even for doing very adolescent things like mouthing off to those in authority. This is the reason why education scholars suggest that Black girls are suspended from school six times as often as white girls, because even simple adolescent forms of testing boundaries are perceived as far more aggressive based on race.

And let me be clear: Citizens have the right to “mouth off” to police. We have the right to question how we are being treated, why we are being arrested, why we are even being approached. Far too many police deploy accusations of disturbing the peace or obstructing justice to quiet citizens who question them within legal bounds. As long as we don’t threaten or enact physical harm on police officers, we can “mouth off” all we want. We don’t have to be polite to police officers, and they clearly have very little interest in being polite to us. And for those who keep demanding that we act civilly, the point is, “incivility” is not a crime.

.........

To continue to tell Black people — as many white folks and respectable black folk on the social media threads I participated in have said — that if these children “would have just done what the officers said, none of this would have happened,” is to be deeply invested in exercises of racial ignorance. Proper behavior has never, ever protected Black people from police.

Most of these children came to a pool party with an invite, got harassed and physically assaulted by white residents who didn’t want them to be there, and then mistreated by the police. The ones who didn’t have an invite came because perhaps it was a rare opportunity to get in a clean, safe swimming pool in the heat of a Texas summer. Good policing could have dealt with this matter sans violence and without incident.

But that didn’t happen here.

Instead, the police mistreated these teens (including those who had been invited) because they started by giving the white residents the benefit of the doubt, even though good credible evidence suggests that white racial aggression spurred this incident in the first place. But Black children and Black people are never given the benefit of the doubt. We are policed first, and only ever apologized to later, if at all.

White people in the aggregate value the “safety” of their private, segregated, residential spaces far more than they value a system of policing that protects and values all lives equally.

undermining everyone outside your tribe establishes the superiority of everyone inside your tribe...,

guardian |  Black male recruits make up only 6.86% of the 2015 police academy class. At the end of civil rights movement in 1970 it was 7.3%. When Eric Adams was a lieutenant with the New York police department, he took a white rookie into public housing in their precinct. When they got on the elevator, they saw a puddle of urine in the corner.

“You see, lieutenant,” the officer said to him, “these people are all animals; they don’t deserve anything.”

“Only one person pissed in the elevator,” Adams responded. “The people in this building are just as upset over that piss as you are.”

Adams, who is black, was an officer for 22 years. On the force, he spoke out against police brutality and served as president of the black fraternal NYPD Guardians Association; he was a captain when he left in 2006 to enter politics.

Now the Brooklyn borough president, Adams says officers and management must stop making assumptions about poor communities based on the “numerical minority” that commits most of the offences.

The majority of residents in every community, Adams says, want the “same thing as a millionaire”, that is, “an environment where they can raise a healthy child”. And most work hard. “They may not go to a high-paying job on Wall Street, but they go and clean the streets. But if the police don’t have interaction with the healthy people in that community, then they’ll never know how to properly police it.”

Ray Benitez, who retired in 2004 after 20 years, mostly in Bedford-Stuyvesant, agrees. He watched officers stereotype entire neighborhoods. “You’ve got to know that 95% of the people in the community have no dealing with the police at all. None.” That includes positive interactions, adds the Flatbush native who identifies as black Hispanic.

Benitez is blunt about how some officers view majority-black and Hispanic neighborhoods: “I’m talking about a thinly veiled disgust … simply because they appear to be in distress, with a different station in life. Maybe the sociological condition is that somehow those cops feel they’re more entitled, that they’re better.”

Both men say this often unconscious bias makes policing harder: those cops are not building relationships that, in turn, can yield the intelligence they need. When a cop tells a mother about a program for kids, or even says “good morning, ma’am”, she may reciprocate. “She’ll tell you, ‘You know, I saw somebody carrying a gun.’”

identity, caste position, or procreative reality?

newyorker |  The dispute began more than forty years ago, at the height of the second-wave feminist movement. In one early skirmish, in 1973, the West Coast Lesbian Conference, in Los Angeles, furiously split over a scheduled performance by the folksinger Beth Elliott, who is what was then called a transsexual. Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker, said:

I will not call a male “she”; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the title “woman”; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares, he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister.

Such views are shared by few feminists now, but they still have a foothold among some self-described radical feminists, who have found themselves in an acrimonious battle with trans people and their allies. Trans women say that they are women because they feel female—that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”

In this view, gender is less an identity than a caste position. Anyone born a man retains male privilege in society; even if he chooses to live as a woman—and accept a correspondingly subordinate social position—the fact that he has a choice means that he can never understand what being a woman is really like. By extension, when trans women demand to be accepted as women they are simply exercising another form of male entitlement. All this enrages trans women and their allies, who point to the discrimination that trans people endure; although radical feminism is far from achieving all its goals, women have won far more formal equality than trans people have. In most states, it’s legal to fire someone for being transgender, and transgender people can’t serve in the military. A recent survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force found overwhelming levels of anti-trans violence and persecution. Forty-one per cent of respondents said that they had attempted suicide.

we know we're awful, but they're sooo much worse...,

NYPost |  Oh, how the feminist movement has lost its way. And the deafening silence over ISIS’s latest brutal crimes makes that all too clear.

Fifty years ago, American women launched a liberation campaign for freedom and equality. We achieved a revolution in the Western world and created a vision for girls and women everywhere.

Second Wave feminism was an ideologically diverse movement that pioneered society’s understanding of how women were disadvantaged economically, reproductively, politically, physically, psychologically and sexually.

Feminists had one standard of universal human rights — we were not cultural relativists — and we called misogyny by its rightful name no matter where we found it.

As late as 1997, the Feminist Majority at least took a stand against the Afghan Taliban and the burqa. In 2001, 18,000 people, led by feminist celebrities, cheered ecstatically when Oprah Winfrey removed a woman’s burqa at a feminist event — but she did so safely in Madison Square Garden, not in Kabul or Kandahar.

Six weeks ago, Human Rights Watch documented a “system of organized rape and sexual assault, sexual slavery, and forced marriage by ISIS forces.” Their victims were mainly Yazidi women and girls as young as 12, whom they bought, sold, gang-raped, beat, tortured and murdered when they tried to escape.

In May, Kurdish media reported, Yazidi girls who escaped or were released said they were kept half-naked together with other girls as young as 9, one of whom was pregnant when she was released. The girls were “smelled,” chosen and examined to make sure they were virgins. ISIS fighters whipped or burned the girls’ thighs if they refused to perform “extreme” pornography-influenced sex acts. In one instance, they cut off the legs of a girl who tried to escape.

These atrocities are war crimes and crimes against humanity — and yet American feminists did not demand President Obama rescue the remaining female hostages nor did they demand military intervention or support on behalf of the millions of terrified Iraqi and Syrian civilian refugees.

An astounding public silence has prevailed.

the science of scarcity

harvard |  scarcity had stolen more than flesh and muscle. It had captured the starving men’s minds.

Mullainathan is not a psychologist, but he has long been fascinated by how the mind works. As a behavioral economist, he looks at how people’s mental states and social and physical environments affect their economic actions. Research like the Minnesota study raised important questions: What happens to our minds—and our decisions—when we feel we have too little of something? Why, in the face of scarcity, do people so often make seemingly irrational, even counter-productive decisions? 

And if this is true in large populations, why do so few policies and programs take it into account?

In 2008, Mullainathan joined Eldar Shafir, Tod professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, to write a book exploring these questions. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013) presented years of findings from the fields of psychology and economics, as well as new empirical research of their own. Based on their analysis of the data, they sought to show that, just as food had possessed the minds of the starving volunteers in Minnesota, scarcity steals mental capacity wherever it occurs—from the hungry, to the lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor.

That’s a phenomenon well-documented by psychologists: if the mind is focused on one thing, other abilities and skills—attention, self-control, and long-term planning—often suffer. Like a computer running multiple programs, Mullainathan and Shafir explain, our mental processors begin to slow down. We don’t lose any inherent capacities, just the ability to access the full complement ordinarily available for use.

But what’s most striking—and in some circles, controversial—about their work is not what they reveal about the effects of scarcity. It’s their assertion that scarcity affects anyone in its grip. Their argument: qualities often considered part of someone’s basic character—impulsive behavior, poor performance in school, poor financial decisions—may in fact be the products of a pervasive feeling of scarcity. And when that feeling is constant, as it is for people mired in poverty, it captures and compromises the mind.

This is one of scarcity’s most insidious effects, they argue: creating mindsets that rarely consider long-term best interests. “To put it bluntly,” says Mullainathan, “if I made you poor tomorrow, you’d probably start behaving in many of the same ways we associate with poor people.” And just like many poor people, he adds, you’d likely get stuck in the scarcity trap.

why good pan-troglodytes do bad things...,

sciencedaily |  The study, "Anticipating and Resisting the Temptation to Behave Unethically," by University of Chicago Booth School of Business Behavioral Science and Marketing Professor Ayelet Fishbach and Rutgers Business School Assistant Professor Oliver J. Sheldon, was recently published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. It is the first study to test how the two separate factors of identifying an ethical conflict and preemptively exercising self-control interact in shaping ethical decision-making.

In a series of experiments that included common ethical dilemmas, such as calling in sick to work and negotiating a home sale, the researchers found that two factors together promoted ethical behavior: Participants who identified a potential ethical dilemma as connected to other similar incidents and who also anticipated the temptation to act unethically were more likely to behave honestly than participants who did not.

"Unethical behavior is rampant across various domains ranging from business and politics to education and sports," said Fishbach. "Organizations seeking to improve ethical behavior can do so by helping people recognize the cumulative impact of unethical acts and by providing warning cues for upcoming temptation."

evolutionary criminology: towards a comprehensive explanation of crime

physorg |  "If we want to understand why men are much more likely to perpetrate crimes than women, why offending peaks during late adolescence and early adulthood, and why crime is often related to the experience of social and economic disadvantage, then we need to consider the selection pressures faced by our species in ancestral environments," says Dr Durrant. 

"Around 90 percent of homicides are perpetrated by males and most of those are directed against other males. We argue that humans largely follow a pattern of sexual selection similar to what we see in other mammalian species." He says this includes males competing for access to status and resources which in evolutionary terms would have led to increased reproductive success. 

"It is important to recognise, however, that there is nothing inevitable about male violence—although risk-taking and fighting is one way that males obtain status, there are alternative routes that separate us from other mammals, such as demonstrating skills, valuable knowledge and prosocial behaviour," says Dr Durrant. "It would make sense, then, to focus on policies and programmes that enable males to pursue status through non-violent means."

Early social environments have a strong impact too, he says. Young children who are exposed to dangerous and unpredictable environments will adapt their behaviour rapidly in anticipation of an unsafe future. "This is a period where individuals will shift their behavioural strategy to one that involves more risk taking and competition," says Dr Durrant. "This makes early intervention crucial, in order to shift individuals along more pro-social pathways."

Although frequent media coverage of crime can tend to make us think that violent and antisocial behaviours are rife in society, humans are actually a remarkably cooperative and prosocial species, says Dr Durrant. This reflects a long evolutionary history of living in small groups where antisocial behaviour is punished by group members.

is genocide human nature?

yourdosage |  To some extent, a bias to favor the self, where the self could be people who look like me, people who act like me, people who have the same taste as me, is a very strong human bias. It’s what one would expect from a creature like us who evolved from natural selection, but it has terrible consequences (3).

So, is the human’s inclination to form irrational biases an unavoidable biological characteristic of the human race? We are born with an innate ability to discriminate, and genocide is, it can logically be argued, a consequence of such biological predispositions. We identify a difference, say the varying width of a nose, and cling to those similar to ourselves while alienating the other group. In Rwanda, when Europeans introduced differing Rwandan “ethnicities” based on barely differing physical characteristics, the Rwandans were receptive. Why would a nation of people allow outsiders to introduce ideas that divide their society? It seems strange and a bit too simplistic to blame it solely on conformist values. Rwandans’ conformity played a large role in causing the genocide, but I also believe that it is human nature to discriminate. It is undeniable because as time goes on, genocide has not disappeared from society’s landscape. If there were not some biological cause, all types of discrimination would have disappeared years ago, as we would learn from our mistakes. Genocide’s continual occurrence in history can be attributed to the human desire to distinguish between “us and them” and an innate need to punish the different.

In Zistel’s “Remembering to Forget” she identifies “chosen amnesia” as a result of the Rwandan genocide. Chosen amnesia is the conscious decision of Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi, to forget the causes of the genocide. All too recent memories of war and genocide ware on the minds of all Rwandans, many of whom were soldiers and victims themselves; therefore, chosen amnesia seems to be the only “strategy to cope with living in proximity to ‘killers’ or ‘traitors’”(132). They must rely on each other regardless of Hutu of Tutsi affiliation because their home has been destroyed by war. In the wake of mass destruction and widespread death, it has become extremely difficult for any Rwandan to access necessary resources, such as food and water. Rwandans have indicated through their ability to conveniently “forget” the many crimes committed against humanity that their will to survive is stronger than the hatred contained in their hearts. The lingering problems plaguing Rwanda, such as trauma, depression, and HIV/AIDS, affect all Rwandans, not one specific group. As a result, putting differences aside is a necessary measure for the recovery and survival of Rwanda. Thus, the tensions leading up to the genocide were forgotten in hopes for peaceful coexistence. Although the intentions are ultimately good, chosen amnesia impairs Rwanda’s chances for full recovery and enables similar situations to arise in the future.

looking for the kill switch...,

nature |  Groups of humans have always slaughtered those who belong to other groups. The twentieth century was shot through with numerous examples, from the genocides of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey and of Jews in Nazi Europe to the massacres of ethnic rivals in civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia during the 1990s. Today, the fundamentalist group ISIS is spooking the world with its willingness to butcher others who do not adhere to its extremist form of Islam.

Attempts to understand such events tend to focus on political reasons. But a conference in Paris last month dared to ask a different question: how, biologically speaking, do normally non-violent and psychologically stable people overcome the instinctive human aversion to killing when faced with circumstances of war or extremism? What drives them to participate in acts of genocide? This is arguably the biggest challenge for interdisciplinary dialogue across the fields that consider brain and behaviour.

All human behaviours originate in the brain, which computes cognitive and emotional information to decide what to do. So what, precisely, happens in that organ at the moment that a person’s natural abhorrence of harming others is computed out of the equation?

The organizers of last month’s conference at the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies — ‘The Brains that Pull the Triggers’ — deserve credit for even posing this question. It goes against another human instinct: to consider evil in moral rather than biological terms, as if identifying a biological signature in the brain might somehow be exploited as an excuse to absolve a person of his or her responsibility.

Neuroscientists have studied the abnormal condition of psychopathy in addition to components of normal cognition — such as the recognition of emotions in the faces of others — that may have a bearing on the problem. And psychologists and sociologists have looked at the behaviour of ordinary individuals who identify themselves with particular groups and align their behaviour with that group.

evolutionary game theory

wikipedia |  Evolutionary game theory (EGT) is the application of game theory to evolving populations of lifeforms in biology. EGT is useful in this context by defining a framework of contests, strategies, and analytics into which Darwinian competition can be modelled. EGT originated in 1973 with John Maynard Smith and George R. Price's formalisation of the way in which such contests can be analysed as "strategies" and the mathematical criteria that can be used to predict the resulting prevalence of such competing strategies.^[1]

Evolutionary game theory differs from classical game theory by focusing more on the dynamics of strategy change as influenced not solely by the quality of the various competing strategies, but by the effect of the frequency with which those various competing strategies are found in the population.^[2]

Evolutionary game theory has proven itself to be invaluable in helping to explain many complex and challenging aspects of biology. It has been particularly helpful in establishing the basis of altruistic behaviours within the context of Darwinian process. Despite its origin and original purpose, evolutionary game theory has become of increasing interest to economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers.

The most classic game (and Maynard Smith's starting point) is the Hawk Dove game. The game was conceived to analyse the animal contest problem highlighted by Lorenz and Tinbergen. It is a contest over a non-shareable resource. The contestants can be either a Hawk or a Dove. These are not two separate species of bird; they are two subtypes of one species with two different types of strategy (two different morphs). The term Hawk Dove was coined by Maynard Smith because he did his work during the Vietnam War when political views fell into one of these two camps. The strategy of the Hawk (a fighter strategy) is to first display aggression, then escalate into a fight until he either wins or is injured. The strategy of the Dove (fight avoider) is to first display aggression but if faced with major escalation by an opponent to run for safety. If not faced with this level of escalation the Dove will attempt to share the resource.

Payoff Matrix for Hawk Dove Game

	meets Hawk	meets Dove
if Hawk	V/2 - C/2	V
if Dove	0	V/2

Given that the resource is given the value V, the damage from losing a fight is given cost C:

• If a Hawk meets a Dove he gets the full resource V to himself

• If a Hawk meets a Hawk – half the time he wins, half the time he loses…so his average outcome is then V/2 minus C/2

• If a Dove meets a Hawk he will back off and get nothing - 0

• If a Dove meets a Dove both share the resource and get V/2

The actual payoff however depends on the probability of meeting a Hawk or Dove, which in turn is a representation of the percentage of Hawks and Doves in the population when a particular contest takes place. But that population makeup in turn is determined by the results of all of the previous contests before the present contest- it is a continuous iterative process where the resultant population of the previous contest becomes the input population to the next contest. If the cost of losing C is greater than the value of winning V (the normal situation in the natural world) the mathematics ends in an ESS – an evolutionarily stable strategy situation having a mix of the two strategies where the population of Hawks is V/C. The population will progress back to this equilibrium point if any new Hawks or Doves make a temporary perturbation in the population. The solution of the Hawk Dove Game explains why most animal contests involve only “ritual fighting behaviours” in contests rather than outright battles. The result does not at all depend on “good of the species” behaviours as suggested by Lorenz, but solely on the implication of actions of “selfish genes”.

angels, bandidos, outlaws, and pagans: the evolution of organized crime among the big four 1% motorcycle clubs

angelo.edu |  This paper outlines the evolution of the Big Four one percent motorcycle clubs—Hell’s Angels, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Pagans—from near-groups to well-organized criminal confederations. The insights of criminological theory unify a variety of journalistic and scientiŽc sources into a holistic picture of the development of these organizations. The interaction of members’ psychological needs with group dynamics and mainstream social forces lead to periods of expansion as core values shift to emphasize dominance over rivals. The resulting interclub tensions encourage the creation of organized criminal enterprises but also attract police attention. Internecine rivalries were eventually subordinated to these enterprises as their profiŽt potential was recognized and intergroup warfare took its toll. Core biker values were reasserted as certain aspects of club operation became less countercultural in order to assure the future of the subculture and its basic components.

first computational genomics, now computational ethology...,

academia |  Abstract: For the past two decades, it has widely been assumed by linguists that there is a single computational operation, Merge, which is unique to language, distinguishing it from other cognitive domains. The intention of this paper is to progress the discussion of language evolution in two ways: (i) survey what the ethological record reveals about the uniqueness of the human computational system, and (ii) explore how syntactic theories account for what ethology may determine to be human-specific. It is shown that the operation Label, not Merge, constitutes the evolutionary novelty which distinguishes human language from non-human computational systems; a proposal lending weight to a Weak Continuity Hypothesis and leading to the formation of what is termed Computational Ethology. Some directions for future ethological research are suggested.

 Keywords: Minimalism; Labeling effects; cognome; animal cognition; formal language theory; language evolution