Hominids Build Manhattan

The following sketch was originally posted on 6/20/99 and is part of 2 copyrighted chapters about 60pp of material) on Rational Emotive Therapy and Evolutionary Psychology, to be presented in Chicago at the Natl Assn of Cognitive Behavior Therapists, July 9 & 10, 1999.
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Mismatch: Hominids Build Manhattan

It appears dramatically obvious that we evolved in societies vastly different from the one that most of us face today Most of our species' development occurred in environments without cars, electricity, high-rise apartments, rent, cable, the IRS, plumbing, and Hagen-Dasz. Designed by natural selection, our behavioral, cognitive and emotional tendencies evolved to fear public disapproval, to strive for improved social status and feel to anxiety about threats to our access to resources and mating options. Such contrasts underlies "mismatch" theory (Nesse and Williams, 1995; 1998; Nesse and Berridge, 1998) in which technical changes fool our evolutionary equipment. There is substantial evidence behind their observations. Refrigeration gives us fats in great excess, Nintendo stimulates the same receptors as a good hunt but without our breaking a sweat, and cocaine fills our reward sites quickly and leaves quickly in ways for which we have no evolved defences.

Thus, I may feel guilty about mistreating you, and angry about mistreatment from you. These feelings could make me better suited to the "natural environment" wherein there is greatly enhanced mutual dependency and for longer intervals. Our natural environment, sometimes misidentified with the "Pleistocene," an interval of 1.2 million until perhaps 100,000 years ago when rapid climate changes -- ice ages, temperate intervals, floods, and droughts -- put intense selective pressures on planning, memory, innovation, and allowed flexible adjustments (through tools) to a wider range of niches.

Considerations of our history more properly include our billion year span that preceded the Pleistocene, through which we were escorted by serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine and from which we still have chemical and neural and physiological systems in common with non-primates and non-mammalian creatures.

However, things may not be all THAT bad. A current popular film, "The Out of Towners," gives a touching and funny juxtaposition of Midwestern and urban mannerisms and habits --- we're not in Kansas any more nor Ohio nor the Pleistocene. As a result, both the fans and the critics of evolution sometimes trip over the same issue in accounting for human outcomes; that is, given what we think about where we started, how did we get to where we are? How does a nester and roamer, sculpted in African grasslands, floods, and rapid glaciations, build and thrive in Manhattan or Chicago?

Wilson (1976) and Barkow et al., (1992) suggest that whatever we build and keep is likely to be consistent with our "nature," that we discard things that don't work for us and keep the things that do. The subtle, powerful, possibly upsetting argument is that our psychological adaptations still defined the tools and experiences that we will find useful and rewarding. For all the superficial differences between our ancestral homes and the Sears Tower or the Empire State Building, those latter structures and the social and technical lattice around them are products of sexual selection, sensory lateral inhibition (that makes us pay attention to the bigger, brighter, and faster) and our honed preferences for:

Height, nest arrangements --- making "rooms" when none are functionally demanded by our tasks and laying those rooms out hierarchically on the basis of privacy, access to light, and floor space,

Gossip and recreation --- rhesus monkeys will press a lever to watch other monkeys; we pay good money to watch Nicole Kidman; baseball is little different from primitive hunt and equally boring to some of us,

Personal grooming --- a time-consuming corollary and antecedent to food sharing and to reconciliation in chimpanzees and Bonobos; a money maker for chiropractors, hair stylists, beauticians, perfume sellers, and plastic surgeons,

Mate selection --- liveliness, symmetry, and cleanliness are associated with better health, more flexible behavior, heightened word flow, greater access to resources, and greater fertility and healthier young -- we pay beauticians well to help us generate those appearances,

Mobility --- nearly every species resists personal confinement, rats ulcerate more quickly from immobilization than from electric shocks; we sharply resist constraints on our free will and treasure 300 hp automobiles in traffic jams,

Access to resources --- human females seem to have incidental memory that is superior to males, at least in regard to many common objects (comparisons have not been made using weapons or tools as stimulus material!) and no one asks dad where the missing cap is. Likewise, shopping malls still tend to be a "female" event and increase traffic flow by providing bargains,

Child care --- monkeys (and probably our ancestors) allow "aunts" to rear children when the natural mother is injured, dead, or involved in other activity; we use day care,

Female alliances --- older female vervets control the social standing of male vervets (Mcguire and Troisi, 1998) ; human preteen females rally on playgrounds and at rock concerts while older females rally in social protests and sell books to each other.

And on and on --- there is no surprise that we built Manhattan and Manhattan will be functionally identical to every human village that has existed for the past 200,000 years. There are not even differences of scale for an individual human -- our neocortex size is consistent with managing a social network, a window of familiarity, of about 150 people; our usual lists of business and social contacts approximate that number. Manhattan is a Tinker Toy assembly of interconnected social networks, each of which is about 150 people in size; likewise for any public school, for our military groups, and for our political organizations (Dunbar, 1994)

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Copyright, James Brody & Nando Pelusi, 1999, All rights reserved.

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