The Battle to Rise Above the Genetic Imperative

The Economist just tweeted out this fact of the day:
In 2007, Google searches for "Kim Kardashian" overtook searches for "climate change."

All the primates seem terribly interested in the lives of alpha males and their cohorts. They track who is in favor and who is out. Not just opportunities to mate but one's own survival can depend on how attuned one is to the social dynamics that determine who is in and who is out, who is popular and who is not. The politics of high school and who is popular have deep genetic roots.

Apparently this urge never stops. Last night visiting a friend who is dying in a hospice facility, he said that as he lays in bed his mind continues to come back to the same thoughts. "What thoughts," my wife asked. "The politics of this place. So many people think they are superior to you." To our dying breath, I thought. Wow. And then I realized that it is past that: "we" are going to heaven and you are not is one of the oldest stories of civilization. Not just in groups and out groups in high school but straight through eternity.

Meanwhile, carbon emissions are changing the climate. Chicago had no snow on the ground in January or February for the first time in 146 years. Permafrost that has been intact since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago is now collapsing. In states throughout the US, communities are setting new records for heat. Places in Oklahoma - home to our new EPA secretary who sees climate change as a hoax - hit 100 in February for the first time on record.

We did not evolve to worry about climate change in the same way that we evolved to worry about who is in and who is out in celebrity circles. It's stylish to berate the media for what they cover but right now our media is profit-driven. They don't have an incentive to cover what they should; instead, they have incentive to cover what we're programmed to care about. We do have these big brains but what they like to do is fixate on the same things the chimps do: food, sex, our progeny and social status. Religion was one attempt to raise people above the genetic imperative, imploring us to rise above the world, flesh and devil. Science and the modern world is yet another attempt to elevate our concerns to something that wouldn't occur to a fellow primate. No matter whether it's with pulpit or lectern, though, it's a tough battle to wage.

Our Inner Ape

I read this fascinating book over the weekend, Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. Here are a couple of things you might find interesting.

Likewise, watching a group of people, one will quickly notice which individuals act with the greatest confidence, attract the most glances and nods of agreement, are least reluctant to break into the discussion, speak in a softer voice yet expect everybody to listen (and laugh at their jokes!), voice unilateral opinions, and so on. But there are far more subtle status clues. Scientists used to consider the frequency band of 500 hertz and below in the human voice as meaningless noise, because when a voice if filtered, removing all higher frequencies, one hears nothing but a low-pitched hum. All words are lost. But then it was found that this low hum is an unconscious social instrument. It is different for each person, but in the course of a conversation people tend to converge. They settle on a single hum, and it is always the lower status person who does the adjusting. This was first demonstrated in an analysis of the Larry King Live television show. The host, Larry King, would adjust his timbre to that of high-ranking guests, like Mike Wallace or Elizabeth Taylor. Low-ranking guests, on the other hand, would adjust their timbre to that of King. The clearest adjustment to King’s voice, indicating lack of confidence, came from former Vice President Dan Quayle.

The same spectral analysis has been applied to televised debates between the presidential candidates. In all eight elections between 1960 and 2000 the popular vote matched the voice analysis: the majority of people voted for the candidate who held his own timbre rather than the one who adjusted. In some cases, the differences were extreme, such as between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale. And only in 2000 did a candidate with a slightly subordinate voice pattern, George W. Bush, get elected. But this was not really an exception to the rule because, as Democrats will relish pointing out, the popular vote actually went to the candidate with the dominant voice pattern, Al Gore.

pp. 56-7.

Anyone who works with animals is used to their uncanny sensitivity to body language. My chimpanzees sometimes know my mood better than I do: it’s hard to fool an ape. One reason for that is the absence of distraction by the spoken word. We attach such importance to verbal communication that we lose track of what our bodies say about us.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks described a group of patients in an aphasia ward convulsed with laughter during a televised speech by President Reagan. Incapable of understanding words as such, aphasia patients follow much of what is being said through facial expressions and body movement. They are so attentive to body nonverbal clues that they cannot be lied to. Sacks concluded that the president, whose speech seemed perfectly normal to the non-patients around, so cunningly combined deceptive words and tone of voice that only the brain damaged were able to see through it.

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