The Evolution of Wierdness

Weirdness cannot be defined, but whatever it is, it evolved, which means it provided an evolutionary advantage at many times during human evolution.

One reason it cannot be defined is that what one culture, in space or time, considers weird, another culture may not. One example is psychopaths. In most cultures, most people dislike psychopaths. They are very, very smart, and almost always use their intelligence and their charisma to advance their own interests. We tend to think of the psychopathic mass murderers and other criminals, but many psychopaths (who constitute about one percent of the population) pass as ordinary people and may be surprised by their own (often genetically-based) diagnosis. A lot of politicians and preachers are psychopaths, who cultivate the goodwill of others for their own financial or sexual benefits. And they also like to shame you for suspecting that they are committing acts of evil. It takes highly-developed social intelligence to recognize a psychopath. See the book by Kevin Dutton: The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success. New York: FSG, 2012.

The success of psychopaths depends on the social situation. Adolf Hitler was a psychopath, and he got millions of people to follow him. After Germany lost World War Two, many Germans felt mentally liberated, and wondered, What were we thinking, to follow this jerk? Germany was not a nation of psychopaths, but maybe the Nazis were a party of psychopaths.

But there are many other ways of being weird. Most of us are a little weird in a few ways. But I mean clinical weirdness. One example is Williams Syndrome [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome]. People with Williams Syndrome have distinctive facial characteristics, and medical problems such as heart conditions. They have diminished intelligence, overall. They are extremely talkative, and effusively express their emotions. They are almost always cheerful. I have never knowingly met one but I get the impression that it would be really hard to not like them.

One word you would not associate with Williams Syndrome is suspicious. In order to become socially powerful, within your society, you have to be suspicious of the motives of other people in your society, and certainly of people in other societies. People with Williams Syndrome will walk right up to you and trust you. This is socially awkward. But openness and the willingness to trust is an essential component of altruism, of social bonding. It’s just that these people have too much of a good thing.

Another reason weirdness cannot be defined is that each kind of weirdness has its own social and genetic basis. Williams Syndrome is associated with a specific genetic deletion that affects a specific part of the brain. There is no set of terms in any language that exactly matches the symptoms of this deletion. And, in fact, characteristics resulting from mutations can be highly modified by upbringing and social circumstances. I am thinking of a person who acts as if she has Williams Syndrome, but who looks normal, and is brilliant.

Throughout human evolution, behavior patterns have sometimes been useful and sometimes not. Since each behavior has a different set of causes, human behavior has proven to be immensely variable. This has happened not because natural selection has done a bad job on human behavior, but because both the source and the target of human behavior is constantly shifting.

We can be glad we have empathy and altruism in the human species. And maybe Williams Syndrome is the price we pay for it.

Next, I will write about the evolution of nerds. Or not. Maybe I am a bit too close to the subject to be objective.

Biblical Deserts

There are many references in the Bible to deserts, none of them good. One of them is an Old Testament prophecy that Handel used in The Messiah: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God (Isaiah 40:3).

Clearly, Old Testament deserts are things that we should get rid of. And the Old Testament describes the reclamation of desert areas as the work of God. One of these passages follows immediately after the above quote.

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights and fountains in the midst of valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane, and the pine together, that men may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it (Isaiah 41: 17-20).

The deserts, or wilderness areas, are not to be confused with thriving, highly-evolved desert ecosystems. In natural deserts, the plants have many exquisite adaptations to deal with heat and drought. Succulent plants store water, desert bushes have very deep roots, and desert plants even have special forms of photosynthesis that allow them to make food under all but the driest conditions. Some desert plants are small and tender, and have astonishing flowers, and they appear totally out of place in a dry desert. The way they survive is by living their whole lives, from seed to seed, in the brief rainy season. These are the deserts we need to protect, such as in Saguaro National Park (Arizona) or Anza-Borrego State Park in California. These are not the deserts to which the Bible refers.

 

The deserts of the Bible are the lands that have been corrupted by human civilization. Poor farming practices swept away the natural plant cover and caused soil erosion, leaving a barren landscape. That is why cities that were once thriving consisted only of collapsed walls surrounded by bare soil. This is what the earliest Sumerian cities looked like even at the time Isaiah wrote his prophecy. There was plenty of degraded land even around Jerusalem that everyone who heard Isaiah’s prophecy could readily see. To this day, most of the land around the Mediterranean remains partially degraded from millennia of human abuse. Today we think of Italy and Greece as dry shrublands; but they used to be, according to ancient writings, covered with thick forests.

If you are someone who is involved in any stage of land reclamation, to take a landscape that has been devastated by decades or centuries or millennia of human mismanagement, and turn it into a thriving ecosystem, you are doing some of God’s work. Although I do not believe that the modern nation of Israel is in fact God’s own special country, it is obvious that modern Israel has done a lot of reclamation, making what had been a devastated landscape bloom. They have been pioneers of soil conservation and dry land agriculture. Drip irrigation was invented in Israel. The joke goes: on the cover of the birthday card it says, In honor of your birthday, a tree has been planted in Israel. Inside the card it says, Wednesday is your day to water it.

The lands that have been reclaimed from human-produced deserts do not look like natural deserts. Just read the list of plant species in the passage above. Cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive, cypress, plane, pine. There is no natural ecosystem where you will find all of these trees together. They have to be planted in a garden that has displaced the degraded land.

None of this is miraculous. It is just good, hard work based on scientific studies (many of them Israeli). Isaiah says that God has done this. But it was not miraculous. God works through us, in this case through scientists and farmers. In order to see it as God’s work, you have to do what Isaiah said: to see and know, to consider and understand together. A quick glance at the trees is not good enough to see the work of God through mankind.

Killing Time? The Evolution of Hobbies

As I have continued reading Lonnie Aarssen’s book, What We Are, I ran across another interesting idea. He claims, and is probably correct, that human evolutionary psychology has been strongly influenced by the awareness that we are going to die. Many aspects of our cultures result from our responses to the certainty of our deaths.

One category of response is to create something that outlives us. Most of the estimated 90 billion people who have ever lived have not left any trace, other than perhaps a name on a record somewhere, that they ever existed. It doesn’t take many generations for this to happen. My great-grandfather exists now, as far as I am aware, of two photos from about 1890, a grave, and some DNA in his descendants.

 

But people who have had more money and power than did my great grandfather can do a lot more to create an enduring legacy. Rockefeller and Carnegie had endowments that are still giving awards to people. Simon Bolívar has a country named after him. These legacies create the false impression, while we are alive, that we will not die, and after we die, that we are still alive. In the Becky Hobbs/Nick Sweet musical Nanyehi, devoted to our ancestor Nancy Ward, the great Cherokee leader, the Nancy Ward character says, when you see the white swan’s wing, know that I am still alive. Of course, she isn’t, and there is remarkably little of her personal effects that can still be found (she died about 1822). But Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bolívar, and Nanyehi are still having an impact on the world.

Sir Francis Bacon noted that childless men put more into their legacies (he was thinking of creativity and intellect) than do men with big families precisely because they have no physical posterity. Wikipedia lists no children for Bacon. I have one child and two grandchildren, but this is below the world average.

The main motivation I feel in creating a legacy of writing is that I do not feel that I should hoard for myself the insights I have encountered in life. I want to share them.

Another category of response is to lose ourselves in hobbies. This allows us to ignore the fact that we will die. My Dad, for example, recorded country music on hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes, and spent countless hours documenting and organizing them. They have almost all disintegrated. I have his tape of country songs sung by our next door neighbor’s brother, Truitt. Are these hobbies just a way of killing time?

That is clearly one purpose of a hobby. But some of us try to turn our hobbies into legacies. I have thousands of photographs. They would be depressing if they were just a pile of pictures. But since 2007 all are digital, and I scanned the others. I labeled each photo with a descriptive name, and the year, so that the next generation of my family will know what each one was. Just in case they ever look at them. Of course, my daughter and family are in my photos also. You can see about a thousand of these photos (mostly of natural areas, not of me and my family) at my newly refurbished author website.

One of the best ways to create a unique legacy is to write a book. Major commercial publishers have published six of my books; I plan one more; all about popular science and history. I have also written articles, which are on various databases. My website is me, in the future. The books that I know I cannot publish through increasingly unstable commercial publishers will be, or so I plan, on Amazon. My tech-savvy son-in-law can probably find a few minutes a year to maintain my digital presence long after my passing. The essays on this blog, starting about 2008, will be available perhaps as long as the internet exists.

And that is pretty much what I do these days. I have no hobbies that are just for killing time. Time is precious, and I want to use it—all of it—to make the world better. This includes activities that maintain health and vigor, since I do not want all of my work to collapse if I have a stroke or something. And to keep me happy, since I do my best work as a writer and a grandfather by being happy. I hope to put a reasonable finish to my work and then, one day, I just won’t wake up.

Of course, my main legacy (both biological and cultural, even spiritual) will be my family, which so far is resisting extinction, and consists entirely of good people. World, you will be glad we were here.

Platonic Friendships

I have been reading a book, What We Are, by Lonnie Aarssen. Aarssen is a Canadian plant ecologist, roughly contemporaneous with me. He has made the transition from plant ecologist to evolutionary psychologist—that is, studying the effects of our human evolutionary history on the way our brains work. I have made the transition from plant ecologist to a general science writer, so I know about evolutionary psychology, but do not know as much as Aarssen.

I’m not sure platonic friendship can be defined, but most of us have a general understanding of it. Aarssen makes the assertion that it is very difficult for men and women to form platonic relationships. Why? Rather than attempting a detailed summary of his reasons, I will just say that it is because men are jerks. They want to conquer women, not befriend them. That sort of captures the meaning.

I immediately recognized that this is not true of me. As I think over my life, I have had lots of platonic relationships with women. I recently made a list of people—men and women; all ages; most of them still alive—who have been important in my life, just so I could remember them. The list had 111 names, and the list keeps growing. Of these, 55 are women of a reasonably similar age with myself and with whom I had a close friendship, and with none of which I had sex. What is wrong with me?

In many cases, it would have been professionally unethical—for example, students and colleagues. But in at least 30 cases, there was no such difficulty (they were single and not, at least at the time, my students). So, I ask again, what is wrong with me?

What is wrong with me is love. In earlier decades, it was religious conviction. Later, it was that I did not want to endanger or stress my marriage. Neither of these is known, on a societal level, as a reason why a man does not have sex. But I loved all of these women, and did not want to mess up the trust they were placing in my friendship. I know for a fact that at least a few of them would have welcomed sexual intimacy from me. But a life is something you build, and as I look back on mine, I am satisfied with the choices I have made.

I knew that I was unusual, but I did not realize how unusual.

Sin and Slavery in the Northern States

We generally think of American slavery as something defended by, and practiced by, the states that eventually formed the Confederacy. And it is true that most slaves worked on southern plantations. We also think that the northern states were morally superior because they did not have slaves. Actually, as I now explain, that was not at all true. The North tolerated slavery, but simply had not much economic reason to have slaves. In fact, many northerners were openly hostile toward abolitionists, who wanted the United States to abolish slavery.

One example is an editorial written by William Cullen Bryant in the August 8, 1836 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, an American magazine, of which he was the long-time editor. He wrote about a public meeting of abolitionists in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was solidly on the northern side of the slavery controversy. It was apparently an orderly meeting until the anti-abolitionists came in and disrupted it by force. Bryant, well known as an abolitionist, said that the anti-abolitionists “will stir up mobs against it, inflame them to madness, and turn their brutal rage against the dwellings, the property, the persons, and the lives” of the abolitionists. “There is no extreme of cruelty and destruction to which, in the drunkenness and delirium of its fury, it may not proceed…the whirlwind and the lightning might as well be expected to pause and turn aside to spare the helpless and innocent as an infuriated multitude.” Bryant speculated that the anti-abolitionists could persuade state legislatures to prohibit abolitionist meetings and publications; but “there is not a single free State the people of which would sustain a legislature in so doing. These are the facts, and the advocates of mob law know them to be so…There is no tyranny or oppression exercised in any part of the world more absolute or more frightful than that which they would establish.”

Remember, this referred to the anti-abolitionists of Ohio, not of a southern state. It took bravery to come out against slavery even in the North.

What Bryant was calling for was the freedom of the press, so that newspapers and people could proclaim their beliefs for or against abolitionism. “We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be as it has ever been—as free a subject of discussion and argument…as the difference between…the Armenians and the Calvinists. If the press chooses to be silent on the subject, it shall be the silence of perfect free will, and not the silence of fear. Bryant called for citizens to fight to the death not for abolitionism itself, but for the right to debate it without fear of reprisal.

Today, we can hardly imagine that it might be dangerous to openly condemn slavery. But, apparently, even in northern states, denouncing slavery put a person at risk of mob violence.

More Native American Diversity

 

In my book, Forgotten Landscapes, I wrote that precontact Native Americans accepted more cultural diversity as normal than do most modern white Americans. The principal example I gave was the tolerance of different tribes and languages, which was unavoidable since there were so many tribes with mutually unintelligible languages.

Another example, which I did not include in my book, was an acceptance of sexual diversity. The conservatives would have thrown a fit if I had said this in the book. This is not the reason I left it out, but I just needed to keep the book from rambling. Native American tribes had individuals who did not fit into the model of two distinct genders, just like every other cultural group. In particular, there were some people who did not identify with the prevailing sexual roles. Formerly called berdache, they are today called two-spirit. The meanings of this and related terms, as well as a list of terms used in the Native languages, is given in the Wikipedia article.

The presence of this group of Natives, in each tribe, was recognized as long ago as in a nineteenth-century painting by George Catlin, and in the diary of Don Pedro Fages in the Portolà Expedition in eighteenth-century California. In both of these cases, the two-spirit men were held in esteem by the tribe.

Comrade Corn Cob

Until his death in 1952, Joseph Stalin was practically God in the Soviet Union. Everything that was believed and everything that was done had to conform to his wishes, even, as I described in another essay, music.

Stalin considered himself the ultimate authority in science, as well. He even had his own theory of genetics that was strikingly different from genetics as understood in the western world, and everywhere (even Russia) today. He copied his theory (Lysenkoism) from Comrade Trofim Lysenko. In this theory, things that happen to a plant or an animal during its life get passed on to the offspring. This would include the ability of crops, such as wheat, to endure cold temperatures if the seeds were frozen in cold temperatures. That is, you can create cold-hardy wheat by freezing the seeds. Millions of Russians and Ukrainians died in famines because of this stupid theory: when they planted frozen wheat seeds, the wheat simply died over the winter. (Wheat is often planted in the fall, then it produces seeds in the late spring.)

Lysenko was a fake scientist if there ever was one anywhere.

Another Soviet scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, was a real scientist. He studied genetics extensively and traveled the world to find seeds that carried the genetic basis of adaptation. He knew you had to breed cold-hardy wheat, not just freeze the seeds. Vavilov was a geneticist in the modern sense. In return for his scientific beliefs, he was imprisoned, where he died.

As soon as Stalin died, the Communists felt free, at last, to admit that they had created a “cult of personality” around Stalin, a cult that nearly destroyed the Soviet Union. The new leader, Nikita Kruschchev, was an enthusiastic promoter of agricultural research, after the pattern of Vavilov, not Lysenko. His enthusiasm was so great that he was called “Corn Cob.” When he visited America about 1968, one of his main interests was how Americans grew corn.

Once freed from the Stalin personality cult, conditions in the Soviet Union began to improve a lot, but not enough. The Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia began to enter the modern world of prosperity.

That is, until it entered another period of personality cult, this time centered on Vladimir Putin. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is, as nearly as most of us can tell, just a personal whim of Putin. Maybe in the future Russia will see Putin as an evil dictator, and as destructive to Russia as was Stalin. A lot of pain and suffering remains ahead before that can happen.