{"id":13963,"date":"2012-01-27T12:12:26","date_gmt":"2012-01-27T17:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2012\/01\/27\/13963.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:03:42","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:03:42","slug":"your-humble-blogger-caught-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2012\/01\/27\/your-humble-blogger-caught-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Science! Sorta!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger caught a few minutes of an On Point<\/i> episode<\/a> the other day, and heard a Scientist! in the context of an evolutionary sense of disgust say, and this is a direct quote, [A]ll of our emotions are there to protect us and keep us alive<\/i>. I reacted strongly against this, and it occurs to me that I don’t have any actual background or knowledge to base that reaction. So I’m going to put this up to my Gentle Readers to explain this shit too me.\n

Here’s the thing: as I understand natural selection, it absolutely depends on the fundamental idea that people, and all animals, are different one to another. That is, because of sexual reproduction (yay! Good Idea, Divine Creator!) every generation is slightly different from the previous generation, and every individual is different from every other individual, even when those individuals have the same genetic parents, because the genes combine differently in different offspring. Almost all those differences are tiny and insignificant—an eyebrow a touch bushier, a tail a trifle straighter, a slightly different arrangement of phosphorescence. Sometimes the difference is a touch significant, because the offspring is taller or shorter, slower or faster, paler or darker, has better eyesight or sense of smell, differentiates colors better or has worse directional hearing. In fact, again because of sexual reproduction and gene mixing, and because mammals (f’r’ex) are really, really complicated animals, offspring are going to be different from their generation in a myriad of ways, although most of those differences will be tiny, subtle or even undetectable. Over time, though, those changes (mutations, really, although we usually use that word to talk about Big Changes) can make a difference. So (again, as I understand it), those incremental mutations that are helpful for keeping that individual alive to reproduce will be more likely to be passed on, and those incremental mutations that hinder are less likely. Am I right so far?\n

Thus, in a zillion generations, giraffes develop long necks and mottled camouflage; because the millions and millions of giraffes that had slightly shorter necks and slightly less effective camouflage had slightly fewer<\/i> offspring than their longer-necked invisible buddies, and those offspring were likely to make with their surviving cousins rather than with lion’s lunch, so further mixing etcetera etcetera. Right? But it does not<\/i> mean, as I understand it, that two twenty-foot giraffes can’t pass along their genetic whatnot to a giraffe that’s only a sixteen-footer, or that the sixteen-footer won’t reproduce as well (particularly if it’s a strong<\/i> sixteen feet, or has some other positive trait, such as keen hearing, above-average eyesight, razor-sharp teeth, or laser farts). It does<\/i> mean that the sixteen-footer with two twenty-foot parents is likelier to have an eighteen-foot offspring than a fourteen-foot offspring, thus in some sense righting the heritage, but another sixteen-footer isn’t out of the question, either. Probably the laser thing will be a recessive, too.\n

I guess I have two points, at this stage. First is that every<\/i> individual will have differences and mutations, and that some of those mutations will be positive and some negative, and that one individual negative mutation isn’t necessarily enough to kick an individual out of the genetic ladder, even if it isn’t likely to breed true. The second is that the two giraffes are not going to generate a cow. An albino giraffe, sure. But not a cow. There’s a range of viable possibilities, and we can put some limits around them, but those limits will be fuzzy and every individual that reproduces will by virtue of its differences from every other individual that has ever reproduced change those limits a tiny bit.\n

I guess that’s my first tell-me-is-this-wrong question: those limits are expanded<\/i> by individual differentiation through sexual reproduction, but contracted<\/i> by gene-mixing back to cousins as much as by really terrible mutations being unable to reproduce (possibly because of that whole lion’s lunch thing). Right? Or not right?\n

Because if I’ve got that much right, and I’ll proceed as if I do, the question for evolutionary psychology (and I’m also proceeding as if evolutionary psychology has some rational, emprical, scientific basis) is whether emotional differentiation, person to person, is in that contracting bit or the expanding bit. Hm, I’ve gone off my metaphor, I suppose—the question is to what extent humans, as a species, are circumscribed in their emotional differentiation by the gene-mixing with our multi-cousins. I haven’t seen persuasive data that, over the last five hundred generations or so, the preponderance of people with substantial emotional differences from their parents have been unable to reproduce. I would say instead that emotional range is orthogonal to reproduction of the genes , so that gene-mixing would be the thing tending to narrow that range in the n<\/i>th generation offspring.\n

So the description that our emotions are there to protect us and keep us alive<\/i> seems to me to be utterly wrong—at most you could say that our emotions tend to be compatible with keeping us alive, and that the dead hand of genetics is restricting our emotions from gross experimentation. Even that I’m somewhat skeptical of. But then, as I say, I have never studied any of this stuff properly, and the little I think I know I probably amalgamated from popularizations and fiction. So I know I have a lot of stuff wrong, I just don’t know what…\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger is terribly unfair to a guest on a radio show, who from all evidence other than one flippant comment is a very clever person who knows what she is on about, and who we can all agree is much, much more informed than YHB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13963"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19486,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13963\/revisions\/19486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}