How Evolution Explains the Human Condition: Or, Why We See Beauty

© 2013 by Roger Bourke White Jr. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/19/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7390-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7391-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012917831

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.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Why Read This?

Teasers

Book Structure

Where This Book Comes From

Book One —Observations About How We Think

Introduction: Why We See Beauty

How Evolution Has Formed Our Thinking

The Human Thinking Stack

What Is a Thinking Stack?

Why Do We Have a Brain?

Using Only 10% of Our Brains?

The Four Layers of the Thinking Stack

Instinctive Thinking and Analytic Thinking

Instinctive Thinking

Analytic Thinking

Implications of the Model

Sports Thinking

Panic Thinking

Too Novel Situations

Hypocrisy and Delusion

Summary

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

The Components: Cooperation and Defection

Structural Effects on the Cost of the Deal

The Prisoner’s Dilemma Compared to Good and Evil

Mother Nature, Design Engineer

Solving the Unsolvable

Sufficient Design

Conclusion of Book One

Book Two—How These Insights Apply to Modern Social Problems

Applying the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Introductory Examples

East is East and West is West

Pricing Goods

Enfranchisement and Disenfranchisement

Introduction

Enfranchisement, Disenfranchisement, and Crime

Enfranchisement in Action

Disenfranchisement in Action

Panic and Blunder Thinking: Expanding the Theory

Definitions

Communities Can Panic-Think, Too

The Stages of Community Panic-Thinking Blunders

Detailed Historical Examples of Community Panic Thinking

The 9-11 Disaster

The American Civil War Era (1850s–70s)

The 2007 Cartoon-Sign Scare in Boston

The War on Drugs

Panic, Blunder, and Terrorism

A Criminal, Not a Military Problem

The Theater of Terror

Dealing with Novelty through Business as Usual

The Curse of Overprotectiveness

Terrorists, Guerillas, and Saboteurs

What Next?

Corrosion of the American Character

Panic, Blunder, and Ruthless Leaders

Gestation of the Theory

Theory

Some Historical Examples

More Theory and Examples

It’s Inconceivable! in Action

Solving Social Problems with Enfranchisement, Not Prescription

Health Care

Making Laws

Not Making Laws: The Military Solution

Breaking Laws

Conclusion

Some Curses and Blind Spots in American Thinking

The Curse of Being Important

The Curse of Unintended Consequences

Blind Spots, Mostly in American Thinking

Booms, Recessions, and Dream Changing

Positive Feedback

The Next Boom

The Lost Decade(s)

The Fight Between Entrepreneurship and Instinct

Social Justice and the Curse of Unintended Consequences

Pillars of Faith

The Common Evolution

The Practical Roots

What Is the Survival Value of Pillars?

Ethical Issues

Abortion

Capital Punishment

Euthanasia

Same-Sex Marriage

War

My Thoughts on Rights

Conclusion

Case Studies

A Criminal Tragedy: 2009, near Times Square, NYC

The YFZ Ranch Incident: 2008, near Eldorado, Texas

Human Enjoyment of Altering Consciousness

The Upper Big Branch Mining Disaster: 2010, West Virginia

Conclusion of Book Two

Book Three—Thoughts on Our Future

Creating a Boom Species

The Human Process

Neolithic Park

The Evolutionary Information Boom

Ongoing Mysteries of Life

Blood, the Ageless Tissue

Why Is Five the Right Number for Fingers and Toes?

Why Are Males Larger than Females?

Is Loss of Vitamin C Synthesis a Marker for a Beneficial Mutation?

Where Is Mankind Headed in the Future?

First Off… a New Tool!

How Our Gene Pool Is Being Pushed by Human Selection of Mates

Surprises

Conclusion

Dedication

To my brother.

I asked my brother why it was important to believe in a Christian God.

He said it was to save us from the jackboot tyrannies of atheists such as Nazis and Communists.

He asked me why it was important to believe in evolution.

I said it was to understand why we are what we are today—including why we have Gods, Christians, atheists, Nazis and Communists!—and what our grandchildren will be tomorrow.

Acknowledgements

This book would not have come into being without the help of a lot of teachers and science magazines that instilled in me a love of and wonder at good, unbiased science. Thanks to that background, when I looked to science for answers, I found them.

My thanks to George Trosper and his fine editing skills. His help and advice have put the professional polish on this work of love for me. George has contributed a lot to making these concepts clear, comparatively concise, and internally consistent. However, as is the heart of healthy intellectual exploring, this does not imply that he shares all of them.

The same applies to Richard Block and Martin Prier: The only opin-

ions attributable to them herein are those explicitly so attributed. I thank them for those, and for where they’ve led me in my own thinking.

Introduction

Why Read This?

The goal of this book is for you, the reader, to better understand what’s going on around you. If after reading this you look at developing situations around you in your home life, business, politics, wherever, and say, Ah-hah! I understand better what’s happening here. And because I do, I can respond better, then I as a writer have succeeded.

Teasers

Writers, grandmothers, and others have developed some pithy and profound descriptions of our human condition. Can science, in particular evolutionary science, explain these?

I’ve listed some of them below, showing where I’ve attempted to explain or illuminate them in this book.

• Old proverbs: You can’t judge a book by its cover. Beauty is only skin deep.

o In Book One, see Introduction: Why We See Beauty and the short section on The Evolutionary Arc: Bride Thinking under Blind Spots, Mostly in American Thinking.

• Quotation: Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? —Shake-

speare, Romeo and Juliet.

o See The Prisoner’s Dilemma, about betrayal and cooperation.

• Soap opera, generic: Gasp! He’s leaving her for… [whispered] a younger woman!

o See Why We See Beauty again.

• French proverb: Revenge is a dish best served cold.

o See Panic Thinking.

• Quotation: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts ab-

solutely. —Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887.

o See Hypocrisy and Delusion.

• Facts of life: Bad teeth and/or nagging moms.

o See Quirky Effects on Evolution under The Human Process in Book Three.

• Solving a mystery: How did the Unabomber get caught?

o See Enfranchisement in Action.

• Quotation: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. —FDR’s First Inaugural Address, 1933.

o See Corrosion of the American Character.

• Slogan: Big Brother Is Watching You. —George Orwell’s 1984.

o See A Fictional Example in the More Theory and Examples section under Panic, Blunder, and Ruthless Leaders.

• Old proverb: Too many cooks spoil the broth.

o See The Curse of Being Important

• Old proverb: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

o See Guilt Thinking under Blind Spots, Mostly in American Thinking.

• Pseudo-Biblical quotation: So let it be written, so it shall be done.¹ —Pharaoh Rameses in The Ten Commandments (DeMille’s 1956 ver-

sion).

o See The Evolutionary Information Boom, about the Living Library of Life.

• Old proverb: Behind every good man there’s a good woman.

o See Feminism and the Rise of Matriarchy under Surprises at the end of Book Three.

Book Structure

Not all this book’s topics are closely related to each other. So I’ve divided what follows this Introduction into three smaller books.

• Book One—Observations about How We Think

This section begins by talking directly about the thinking processes: The Thinking Stack, Instinctive and Analytical thinking, and Panic and Blunder thinking. Then it establishes the foundation for analyses based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and views the mechanisms for changing the human design employed by Mother Nature, Design Engineer.

• Book Two—How These Insights Apply to Modern Social Problems

This section applies Book One’s insights. We see how the wacky-seeming solutions to many current issues are the product of poorly applied Stone Age thinking.

• Book Three—Thoughts on Our Future

This section gets almost mystical. I talk about our place in the universe—

about the Living Library of Life and how we’re contributing to it, why being a boom species is great but requires us to take precautions, and what some of the still unsolved mysteries of the human condition are.

For those who just can’t wait, or who like a well-rounded structure, there’s also a Conclusion that summarizes what I think are my most important points from all three Books.

Where This Book Comes From

I’ve been watching the world go round for sixty-some years now. And I admit that for most of those years I’ve been as mystified as the next person as to why things happen and people act the way they do. But eventually I started seeing patterns that tie together some of the mysterious actions and choices of the people around me, how they make sense… and how they can be predicted.

I hope that these insights are the well-known wisdom of age. Whatever they are, I leave it to you, the reader, to see if you too can benefit from them.

I believe that two skill sets have let me see these interesting patterns: Good listening and good science.

Good Listening

When I listen to people with whom I disagree, I presume they believe what they’re saying, even though I don’t believe it. Once I believe that they believe, I try to figure out how they can do that. What is their basis for thinking this way of thinking is right? This technique lets me get inside another person’s head and identify what he or she thinks is important.

This is important because what this other person thinks is important is rarely the opposite of what I think is important… it’s on a whole different line of thought. This is what I call skew thinking. In geometry, skew lines are lines that are neither parallel nor intersecting, they just miss each other entirely! Once I understand that a person’s thinking isn’t parallel to mine, and doesn’t even intersect with mine, then I can work at figuring out what their skew line is, and I can start better predicting how they will react in various situations.

Good listening helps in understanding the world.

Good Science

Good science is very important, and surprisingly hard to get. Because it’s hard to get, I recommend you work diligently on your science foun-

dation.

Beware Cable-TV Science!

When I talk about good science, I mean science based on careful and wide observation of the world around us, and not science based on the agenda of a particular storyteller, what I call cable-TV science—where a show has such a strong agenda that it considers only the science that proves what it wants proved, or else is interested in getting good ratings by presenting only the science that people want to hear, not science based on what the real world is about. To be fair, video documentarians, book writers, movie makers, and other kinds of teachers can be just as guilty as TV producers of presenting science with an agenda.

You can also call this pseudoscience or fake science, although that terminology is more usually applied to whole organized fields of non-

science, such as astrology and creationism.

An example of a pseudoscientific belief that has been strong for decades is the idea that people only use about 10% of their brain at any one time. More on this later.

Be aware of cable-TV science, and beware of it.

Evolution Theory

The particular area of science from which I get most of the insights in this book is evolution theory.

My basic postulate is that humans are highly adapted to living on Earth, and our thinking is part of our high performance adaptation. Hu-

man thinking is not a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which anything at all can

be written. Rather, it is a collection of processes designed to solve problems very quickly and efficiently.

But the problems it evolved to solve are those of day-to-day living in the Stone Age—humans’ lifestyle for the many thousands of generations before we invented the Agricultural, Industrial, and Information Age life-

styles. Many oddities of human action, the kind that make us look at a person’s or community’s behavior and scratch our heads in wonderment, happen when the wrong kind of thinking is applied to a situation. Most often it’s Neolithic thinking being applied incorrectly to a more civilized situation.

Other Sciences

Other sciences also contribute to this book.

Economics, for instance, helps by teaching how to frame choices in terms of benefits and costs, including the costs of lost opportunities.

From mathematics, specifically game theory, comes the Prisoner’s Di-

lemma concept explained at length in Book One.

And other branches of learning contribute by providing more solid science context. Evolution, for instance, is supported by findings not only in biology, but also in geology (the age of the earth) and astronomy (the age of the universe). If a person denies evolution because they don’t feel the biological support is valid, they also need to explain how the geological and astronomical support is not valid. A wide science background helps a lot in determining when an idea being presented as fact, or a choice being recommended, is sensible or silly.

Broader Thought Contexts

When a situation has gone badly, someone may blame it on another participant, saying She was greedy, a motivational judgment, or He was evil, a moral judgment. Or when one has gone well, He was generous or She was good or perhaps decent.

But while such judgments can seem to explain a situation comfortably after the fact, and they can explain characters in fiction, they don’t predict well in real life. In the words of a fellow discusser of such issues, Martin Prier, ‘Evil’ is good at explaining something that has gone wrong and that’s poorly understood.

Or as I like to put it, Few people wake up in the morning… stretch… and say, ‘What a great day to do evil!’ (Admittedly, more may say I’m feeling generous or What a great day to do good! and a few I’m feeling greedy. But then they all go out and act largely on self-interest as variously defined by their actual thought contexts, based on

the thinking patterns that have helped mankind survive through thousands of generations of living on earth.)

The heart of this book is helping you understand thought contexts beyond motivation and morality, so you can get into other people’s heads and anticipate their choices in new situations. Then you can take advantage of those choices and motivations, especially those that seem strange, in the best way you can. For instance, if you understand another person’s thinking context, then you can offer them persuasive thoughts.

While people around you are letting their heart be their guide, you can be using your head to go through life more placidly and win bigger.

Now let’s get on with the main show. In Book One, we learn how high-performance human thinking really is, and why we nevertheless make big mistakes.

Book One

—Observations About How We Think

Introduction:

Why We See Beauty

OK! Let’s get to why you probably picked this book up in the first place.

Why do we see beauty? We see beauty because it is a signal to cooperate.

In the Stone Age environment, the environment in which the human species has lived the most time, two groups need a lot of help: Children and young mothers having their first or second child. If they get it, their community prospers a lot more than if they don’t.

This reality was a challenge for Mother Nature.

(Mother Nature is how I anthropomorphize the evolution and nat-

ural selection processes. I envision her as a design engineer at a drafting board, with each mutation in an organism being a change in its blue-

print.)

She asked herself, "When big, tough, older men and women are hun-

gry themselves, how do I get them to not grab food from babies, kids,

and weak young mothers, but give them food and other resources in-

stead? That calls for a radical change in their thinking depending on the situation!"

Fortunately, she had a lot of time to work on the problem of having us contest with members of one group and treat those in another group totally differently. Proto-humans and humans are not the only species that care for their young ones; Mother Nature has been working on this issue through millions of generations.

So she tried hundreds of thousands of experimental changes. (That’s all mutations are, changes.) About 99 percent were dismal failures, a few of the others made no difference, and an even smaller number helped. A collection of those changes added seeing beauty to our thinking process, which helped humans survive.

The root use of seeing beauty is as a signal to cooperate with kids and young women, but that use is as capable of being changed as any other part of being human is, and it has changed. We now see beauty in animals, in things, and in other kinds of people, and we feel like cooperating in some fashion with whatever’s making us see it.

So it’s a very practical solution toward the long-standing challenge of humans living successfully on Earth. Just as many other peculiarities of human thinking turn out to be, when viewed in the right Neolithic contexts. It’s only when they appear in the various more civilized environ-

ments that they look like fascinating mysteries.

Now that you’ve seen an example of the kind of insight that this book is about—there’ll be more on this point in Book Two—let’s look at the bigger picture: The whole business of how evolution has shaped human thinking.

How Evolution

Has Formed Our Thinking

All living things on Earth today are high-performance beings, the

result of a trillion experiments run by Mother Nature to solve the challenge

of living on Earth: They all had a trillion ancestors who were winners—

meaning they had many grandchildren—so most are well adapted to

living in their current surroundings. (A significant number are well adapted to living in environments that are no longer available, or not available in sufficient area, and are therefore in danger of extinction.) The humans alive today are one of the success stories, with our physical shape, our internal chemistry, and our thinking all part of the experiment.

But evolution takes time. The quickest and simplest chemical adjust-

ments to how a body works take about ten generations to take hold, and changing thinking is neither simple nor quick. So human thinking is still well adapted to the Stone Age lifestyle, not to the smart phone–and–Internet lifestyle many of us experience today, or even to the Industrial Age or Agricultural Age lifestyles that led to it.

But as we will see in this book, human thinking is now being pushed to change in new directions by civilized lifestyles.

I will be talking about how our thinking is organized. I will be intro-

ducing a new concept—the Thinking Stack—and then talk about the rami-

fications of that on how we make choices. The Thinking Stack concept leads to good explanations for such interesting phenomena as Instinctive and Analytic thinking, and also for Panic and Blunder thinking, the choi-

ces people and communities make that cause us to scratch our heads and ask, "What were they thinking?"

After establishing the Thinking Stack concept, we’ll look at the Pris-

oner’s Dilemma and delusional thinking, and how those too influence de-

cision making.

The Human Thinking Stack

What Is a Thinking Stack?

The human Thinking Stack is not a scientific fact but simply my model of how human thinking is organized. It is based on the ISO OSI model of computer networking.² In that model’s terminology, interaction between computers is controlled by a communications stack—thought of as layers of networking protocols, which are the procedures that programs use to talk to each other, each communicating with the protocols above and below it in the stack.

In humans, and in all multicellular organisms, the complex task of thinking—in the sense of responding to our environment—is similar. Sensory input is collected, refined, and passed on to a decision making module, and the decision made is sent out to the various action takers: Muscles and secreting organs.

In addition to that complexity, there’s the complexity of multiple thinking processes going on inside people, most of them unconscious. For instance, your stomach and intestines have to decide how to digest food—which enzymes to secrete. That decision has nothing to do with the decisions involved in keeping your body’s balance while leaning across the restaurant table to take your date’s hand, or in looking into your date’s eyes, or in saying something to impress him or her. Whew! Complex, indeed!

However, this book considers only the part of the human Thinking Stack involved in conscious thinking that relates to voluntary decisions. That means concentrating on the input and output connected to the brain.

Why Do We Have a Brain?

Single-celled organisms can respond to food sources, adapt to chang-

ing environmental conditions, and flee or shut down in some fashion when conditions get too harsh. Likewise, growing plants respond to their environments.

Neither single-celled organisms nor plants need brains for this. Why do animals have brains?

Brains make moving around work well for multicellular organisms. They provide quick communication between input sensors (touch, taste, smell, and muscle status in the simplest organisms, plus hearing and sight in organisms with ears and eyes) and motion activators (muscles) on what to do and where to go next, plus high-level coordination for the processes involved.

Brains are expensive. They are tricky to make and they consume lots of energy. For that reason some animals lose theirs when they are no longer needed. A baby barnacle, for instance, is a free-swimming tadpole-like creature. It has a brain. But when the barnacle attaches to something and becomes a stationary adult filter feeder, it resorbs its brain and does just fine without one.

Coordinating movement was the reason Mother Nature invented brains. The rational thinking that humans do with theirs is rich, rich dessert beyond that meat and potatoes function.

Using Only 10% of Our Brains?

There is a widespread urban myth, about a century old, that humans use only 10% of their brains at any one time. This idea endures because it offers hope of developing extrasensory powers, or just improving our memory, concentration, and decision making capability. Those hopes are used to sell product—by entertainers and charlatans on the psychic end, and by lifestyle trainers with think-better techniques on the self-improvement end.

There is no truth to the myth.

The whole brain is very busy all the time. These days we have brain scans that show that clearly. And before we had brain scans we had the evidence of strokes. Strokes are devastating, and they happen when the brain gets damaged, usually because the blood flow to a region of the brain gets messed up for one reason or another. Has anyone ever said, Oh, I had a stroke, but I’m OK because it happened in the ninety percent of my brain that I don’t use regularly?

The human brain is high-performance, and it’s all used.

The Four Layers of the Thinking Stack

The human Thinking Stack can be characterized as having four layers: Reflex, Habit, Morality, and Judgment.

Reflex

The Reflex layer is not in the brain at all, but mostly in the action areas, such as the muscles. This layer makes fast, simple responses to simple inputs such as muscle position and tension. When the doctor taps your knee, s/he’s changing the position of the knee tendon, your leg Re-

flex nerves sense the change and try to compensate by activating muscles, and all this happens without brain intervention.

Although Reflexes don’t happen in the brain, they are still very much a

part of the Thinking Stack. Evidence includes the phenomenon of "phan-

tom limb: If an arm or a leg is amputated, the brain will quite often still feel" sensation coming from that limb. The Thinking Stack is so strongly adapted to getting and sending messages from the lost limb that when real

messages don’t come, some still intact part of the Reflex layer makes something up to send on to the rest of the nervous system.

Tinnitus, the ringing in their ears some people hear in very quiet places and/or when they lose some hearing, is similar. When no input is available, it gets fabricated.

Another example is Charles Bonnet Syndrome, visual hallucinations experienced by some legally blind people.³

These all indicate that thinking is a body-wide activity.

Besides doing such thinking on its own, the Reflex layer also carries out simple commands sent from Habit, the next level of the stack.

Habit

Habit is the layer that tells the Reflex layer what to do. Once we decide at the conscious level to walk somewhere, then unless something is strange about where or how we’re walking, we hand off the details of how to get there to Habit, which tells Reflex what to do based on sensory in-

put from sight, hearing, touch, and memory.

Next to Reflexes, Habit provides our fastest thinking. It can handle much more complicated tasks than Reflex can. When you are playing a sport, playing a musical instrument, or doing any other activity you know so well that you can go with the flow, you have engaged Habit thinking.

So is a telephone marketer who’s been reciting their script so long that they can think about something else as they talk. This is why such a person sounds sing-songy, different from the person who’s thinking about what they’re saying.

Morality

Habit thinking is about automatic actions. Morality thinking is about actions that you’ve made up your mind on. So when the question comes up you do think about it, but you don’t have to think much. If you don’t have to think about it at all, then it’s become a Habit.

So if you turn right or left from the water fountain when you go to the office restroom, that’s a Habit. When you read the signs on the restroom doors at an unfamiliar restaurant before opening one, you’re invoking the Men’s or Women’s? decision in your Morality layer.

Note that in my usage, religion and/or ethics feed into some but not all Morality layer decisions! Morality covers a whole lot more.

Another example: When someone in the US asks you, Are you a Democrat or a Republican? you give the answer quickly and smoothly. (It may, of course, be Neither!)

Air traffic controllers, police dispatchers, and similar professions use Habit thinking most of the time on most days, but when an emergency comes up, Morality thinking engages.

Building up Morality thinking is the reason for public safety drills. The most widespread current examples in the U.S. are school fire drills, but earthquake drills, air-raid drills, etc., use the same principle. A real emergency comes rarely, but if people have practiced even a little over time, Morality thinking can take over, and getting to safety happens more rapidly, smoothly, and predictably.

Judgment

The Judgment layer is the highest, most conscious layer. It makes new choices and learns how to do new things. Then Judgment trains Habit and Morality.

Judgment thinking can handle a wide variety of topics, but it is slow and clumsy and takes a lot of energy. So it’s easy to get tired and irritable when you have to use Judgment thinking for too long. But it’s the only level of the Thinking Stack that can handle new situations and come up with new ways of handling old situations.

To feel pure Judgment thinking in action, try doing something you haven’t done before.

Go ahead… take a moment and try it… try doing something new. I’ve listed some suggestions in the next couple paragraphs.

For some tasks where you’ll get significant help from your Habit and Reflex layers: Write your name several times with your off hand. Shovel snow or rake leaves or pitch hay for a while with your hands reversed (un-

less you habitually do so already to save your back). If you’re musical but not a pro, play a familiar tune on a familiar instrument in a different key.

Or for a more purely Judgment layer experience: Write this sentence with your off hand, or copy a sentence in an alphabet you don’t know. Make a comparatively easy move in a sport you’ve seen but don’t want to play—taking a tennis or golf swing, making a basketball free throw, what-

ever. Play an unfamiliar instrument and/or piece you dislike.

Do a novel project such as one of these for a little while, and notice:

 How tired your brain gets

 How quickly it gets tired—and how irritable you get

 How slowly and clumsily you perform

If the new task were something you actually wanted to learn and do regularly in the future, Judgment would be screaming for Morality and Habit to take over and let it off the hook, which is what practicing a skill is all about. And as they took over, you’d do the task faster and better.

Instinctive Thinking and

Analytic Thinking

The human brain makes lots of choices. The styles of thinking in which those choices are made fall into two broad categories—Instinctive thinking and Analytic thinking.

Instinctive Thinking

Evolving Instincts

Instinctive thinking is very different from learned thinking—alias Ana-

lytic thinking. Instinctive thinking comes about as part of genetic evolu-

tion, not as part