Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (55 page)

uterine upsuck hypothesis, orgasm, 50–51

vagina.
See also
female orgasm

bacterial harm, 16

female orgasm, 57

The Varieties of Religious Experience
, James, 230

Veblen, Thorstein, 183

Vespasian, Roman emperor, 214

Vibrio cholerae
, 133–134

viral meme hypothesis, religion, 206–209

Voland, Eckart, 153

Voltaire, 252

Wade, Nicholas, 244, 246, 257

Wallace, Alfred R., 141, 171, 270–271

Darwin and, 142–144, 149

Wall-E
, movie, 310

war

Aztecs, 242–243

Catholic and Protestant in

Ireland, 244

Hindu and Muslim, 244

Islamic suicide warriors, 241

Israelites, 241

Jew and Muslim in Middle East, 244

warfare

intelligence, 287

religion, 240–244

Wason Test, 290

Watson, James D., 170

Wells, H. G., 310

When Harry Met Sally
, 49

Wilde, Oscar, 182

Williams, George C., 81–82, 83

Wilson, David Sloan, 256, 257

Wilson, Edward O., 105, 195, 200

wisdom, knowledge and, 3–4

Wolfe, Linda, 97

women.
See also
female orgasm

breast size and figure, 37–39

reproductive life, 64–65, 66

residual reproductive value, 40–41

self-awareness, 33–34

Woolf, Virginia, 190

Wrangham, Richard, 292–294

Wright, Robert, 238

Xanax, 235

YouTube, 206

Zimmer, Carl, 201

i
. It is an interesting and paradoxical testimony to how much we have learned in the intervening 150 years that today, no one could seriously entertain the prospect of summarizing all knowledge in a book, or series of books, or even via the Internet.

i
. It has been claimed, for example, that menstruating women are more vulnerable to grizzly bear attacks; however, I have not been able to confirm whether this is statistically true.

ii
. Unless greater flow was a
response
to greater infection.

iii
. And a useful lesson for those who think we can derive ethical lessons from evolution. The harsh reality is that evolution by natural selection is a marvelous thing to learn
about
, but a terrible one to learn
from
.

iv
. In this, as in other similar examples, feel free to translate “benefits to an individual” into “benefits to the genes that underlie the trait in question.”

v
. We’ll confront the related question of “group selection” later, in
Chapter 7
.

vi
. More about this in
Chapter 9
.

vii
. At least, during the eons that preceded the invention of “push-up bras” and cosmetic surgery.

i
. One of my biological colleagues has suggested that anyone who seriously thinks of female orgasm as merely an evolutionary shadow of male orgasm is either a woman who has never had one or a man who has never been with a woman who has had one.

ii
. Further abetted by the fact that women, not men, can be confident that they are genetically related to their offspring.

iii
. Technically, I should say that in the case of asexual reproduction, there is a 100% probability that any given gene present in a parent will also occur in every offspring, whereas with sexual reproduction, that probability drops precipitously, to 50%.

i
. Think of an allele as a playing card, say, the jack of spades. In this case, there are four different alleles—spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs—four different manifestations in which the gene for “jack” can appear. In a biological system, these four alleles (the four suits) are competing with each other at any given place on a chromosome, and evolution will favor the one or ones that generate the highest fitness. For an example more connected to human biology, there are three alleles that determine blood type, A, B, and O, and two alleles for the Rh factor, Rh+ and Rh–, and so forth.

ii
. Disease transmission, too, but it is unclear how heterosexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea compare in their fitness consequences with the best-known disease associated with homosexual transmission, namely, AIDS.

iii
. Krafft-Ebing was the first to introduce the terms
homosexual
and
heterosexual
, as well as
masochism
and
sadism
.

iv
. A decade later, he suggested the existence of a “God gene” (see this book,
Chapter 7
). Dr. Hamer hasn’t yet announced that God is homosexual, nor—to my knowledge—has he reported thus far on the existence of a gene for finding genes.

v
. The phrase “inclusive fitness theory” derives from Hamilton’s insight that an accurate account of fitness must be more inclusive than simple reproductive success; it must be expanded to include the effect of a given behavior on identical copies of the genes in question that are carried in the bodies of those benefiting from the seemingly altruistic act.

vi
. There is no particular evolutionary mystery attendant upon getting one’s own food, defending self or family from predators, and so forth. It is only when behavior results in a kind of self-denial that it becomes problematic.

vii
. In many bird species, young adults who are physiologically capable of reproducing do not do so; instead, they remain as “helpers at the nest” of their relatives—typically their own parents—assisting in the rearing of sibs and half-sibs. In the process, genes for altruistic helping and reproductive restraint can be promoted even if the individuals doing the helping do not breed at all, so long as they are present in those additional kin whose success they enable.

viii
. We’ll look at the fraught question of group selection later, in
Chapter 8
, when we consider one of the chief hypotheses for the adaptive significance of religion.

ix
. Incorrectly because as we’ll see, it doesn’t really imply altruism at all, but rather, selfish benefit for the supposed “altruist.” Hence, I prefer to call it simply “reciprocity.”

x
. Please note: This is not to suggest that homosexuality is a pathology! Rather, the example of sickle cell disease simply provides a well-known model for how any trait can in theory be maintained over evolutionary time.

xi
. This difficulty, although seemingly insuperable at present, could conceivably be overturned by a research announcement tomorrow.

xii
. Among birds, males are designated ZZ and females WZ.

xiii
. It could also be argued that defense of women, and all that this implies reproductively, is among the deeper evolutionary underpinnings of war fighting itself—in which regard people might not be all that different from bottlenose dolphins.

xiv
. The past tense is appropriate here, since these detailed studies of brain anatomy necessarily have to be conducted as autopsies.

i
. By coincidence, a climbing equipment store used to market a device they called a Skyhook. It was a piece of steel, roughly S-shaped; the accompanying instructions called for hooking the topmost curve on overhanging rock and connecting the lower part to one’s person, after which, “thinking only pure thoughts,” you step on it.

ii
. Presumably it is less rewarding as well, but that’s another question.

iii
. Or maybe it’s not surprising after all, since Flaubert was renowned for laboring intensely over a single phrase, trying to capture—via his art—the precise expression of his own yearnings.

i
. Not meaning to be too hard on Aristotle, it is nonetheless hard to refrain from noting that he also wrote that things accelerate while falling because they become increasingly “jubilant” as they approach the ground. Given the often disastrous consequences of the encounter, one might have expected falling objects to be evermore apprehensive instead.

ii
. Indeed, their discovery of the structure of DNA took place in the context of a vigorous race among several scientists, working competitively in different laboratories.

iii
. I thank Brian Boyd for pointing me to this selection. Like so many others, I had read
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking Glass
, but nothing else by Lewis Carroll.

iv
. Personal note: After reading Miller’s book on the subject, I inadvertently found myself muttering, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that,” in unintentional mimicry of Thomas Huxley upon first reading
The Origin of Species
.

v
. One could argue that this has already occurred, given the current state of the Internet, with nearly everyone, it seems, being a blogger and no one having the time to pay attention to each other’s efforts.

vi
. In practical, proximate terms, this has meant a sexually attractive one.

i
. This is not the same as claiming that all people within every society engage in religion. By the same token, all human societies have some means of solemnizing marriage, but this does not mean that all people are married.

ii
. This brings up an important distinction, between proximate causation (the immediate cause of something) and ultimate causation (the evolutionary reason for the proximate mechanism existing at all). Thus, people typically eat “because” they are hungry, with hunger produced by stomach contractions, blood sugar changes, certain hormone levels, etc. These are all proximate mechanisms. At the level of ultimate, or evolutionary, causation, hunger occurs as a way of inducing individuals to nourish themselves when such nourishment is biologically adaptive.

iii
. The mathematical procedure used to determine rates of change, including the acceleration due to gravity.

iv
. To be honest, I am more likely to agree with the inverse: All religions are false.

v
. And, to be honest, the author of this book.

vi
. According to Hindu belief, Lord Shiva, the bane of sorrow and of evil, sits in a state of perpetual meditation at the summit of this mountain, along with his wife, Parvati. Climbing Mt. Kailash has long been forbidden so as not to disturb the holy couple.

vii
. So long as the perception in question does not reduce fitness, there is no reason for it to have been selected against.

viii
. Brother of Aldous, the writer; half-brother of Nobelist Andrew; and grandson of Thomas, aka “Darwin’s bulldog.”

ix
. Of course, they also use pollen, for a delightful vowel-switch coincidence.

x
. Admittedly, this would seem to be contradicted by frequent recourse to prayer, which Ambrose Bierce, in his aptly named
Devil’s Dictionary
, defined as requesting “that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

xi
. The story has it that Nils Bohr kept a horseshoe above his office desk in Copenhagen. When a visitor asked the great Nobel Prize–winning physicist whether he believed in such foolishness, Bohr responded that he absolutely did not—but he had been assured that a horseshoe was likely to bring luck whether or not someone believed in it!

xii
. Interestingly, Newton was a devout if idiosyncratic Christian, writing far more about the Books of Daniel and Revelations than about all his work in mathematics and physics combined.

xiii
. Biologists distinguish between the evolutionary origin of a trait and the factors leading to its maintenance once it has evolved (and regardless of how it was initially derived). The “Early Learning Hypothesis” discussed here is an argument for religion’s maintenance, not its origin.

xiv
. Dostoyevsky was a devout Russian Orthodox believer, for whom the villain wasn’t religion, and certainly not Christianity, but Roman Catholicism.

i
. Note the “almost,” since there is a crucial difference between scientific “belief” and its religious counterpart: The former is susceptible to empirical testing and confirmation.