In his book Out of Control, Kevin Kelly wrote:

To evolve is to surrender choices. To become something new is to accumulate all the things you can no longer be.

(Another take on this is the advice to a first-year college student that I once heard: You can take any classes you want, but you can’t take every class you want.)

So even the luckiest lives are going to contain some paths not taken. Everyone’s life contains the ghosts of different selves that might have been developed, given another set of choices and different opportunities. Some recent research investigated the ways that people deal with their regrets, particularly in the face of a serious loss or change of course. It turns out that the people who cope the best have a higher capacity for something called complexity, the ability to see multiple facets of your own experience (e.g., the good along with the bad) and to gain meaning from even negative experiences. This capability develops over the course of a lifetime, so apparently we pick it up as we go along, if we’re lucky and/or disposed to do so.

This New York Times article describes this research in the context of a discussion on regrets. This article from Science Daily is more focused on the recent research.

I once heard a naturalist and nature photographer who specializes in wildlife and plants explain his interest in geology by saying, “You have to have something to put those ecosystems on!” His point was that different geological features give rise to different climates, soil conditions, and other factors that shape the living things that inhabit them, and to understand the inhabitants you have to understand the place. Two geologists at the University of Utah take this idea a bit further; they suspect that geological change played a major role in the evolution of early hominins in east Africa several million years ago.

Climate change drove our ancestors out of the trees; the forest dried up and changed to savannah, and they had to adapt to the different conditions. Some of the adaptations were probably instrumental in shaping the hominins into modern humans. But what caused the climate change?

Royhan and Nahid Gani have examined a stretch of the Wall of Africa, a chain of mountains and highlands that runs from Sudan to South Africa, and determined that the land rose by at least a kilometer (about 3,200 feet) three to six million years ago. The uplift in the area they looked at (in Ethiopia) cut the land off from much of the moisture coming from the Indian Ocean, and in doing so changed the climate and the living conditions for the primates in the area, who had to scramble to cope. Instead of living in lush jungle-like conditions, they found themselves in a much less densely vegetated and drier area. Bipedalism may be one of the most crucial adaptations to the changed landscape.

The uplift is part of the tectonic history of the region, which involves the movement of two of the plates that make up the crust of the earth. The plates are pulling apart, creating a huge rift system several thousand miles long that runs from Lebanon in the north down through the African Rift Valley and on to Mozambique. A large plume of molten rock swells toward the surface under the rift system, pushing the rocks above to either side. From such subterranean forces, much follows, including perhaps you and me.

The Ganis speculate that in addition to driving the shift to bipedalism by pushing up the Wall of Africa, the tectonic activity in the area may have driven further hominin evolution by providing varied and changeable landscapes that required ingenuity on the part of their primate inhabitants. Further research may help determine more precisely the influence that the geology of its birthplace had on humankind.

If you want a quick read that will tell you more about this work, here’s a story from Live Science. For more detail, I highly recommend this press release from the University of Utah (check out the links on the left for some nice images).

Every day in my inbox I get a book review from the independent bookseller Powells.com. Usually they’re reviews of current books, but occasionally they’re classics, and today’s was an anonymous review of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books series from the June 1898 Atlantic Monthly. It was an eye-opening read.

Written nearly 40 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, the review opens with a tribute to Kipling’s accomplishment in making the truths of Darwin’s science palpable. Kipling, in presenting the psychology of animals, has helped people “really know and feel that the larger part of our mental composition is of the same substance as that of our cousins the animals, with a certain superstructure of reasoning faculty which has enabled us to become their masters.” I haven’t read The Jungle Book, so I can’t comment on Kipling’s evocation of animal minds, but I could still appreciate this glimpse into how the relationship between humans and other animals looked at that particular point in history. And I really like the comparisons the author draws between various animal states of mind and the behavior and longings of people.

But I was fairly astonished by the first sentence of the last paragraph:

“Man, as we usually think of him, is a being of pure reason, the product and the aim of countless ages of slow and halting development.”

Leaving aside the incorrect idea of evolution as a process of development that was somehow working to produce us, I can’t imagine anyone typically thinking of humankind as beings of pure reason. Is that really how humans looked to the average Atlantic Monthly reader in 1898?

The paragraph goes on to describe the emotions, sensations, and instincts that underlie “this brilliant flower of the intellect.” The message is that we are linked by our bodily essence to the life of all the other animals, and are not really such a thing of pure reason after all, and a good message it is. But I guess I’ve been steeped long enough in the idea that the thinking part and the meat part are inextricably interdependent and linked that it seems very odd to me to think of the higher, reasoning parts of our nature lying atop and apparently in opposition to this more instinctive undergrowth that we share with the animals. We’re finding that we share more of our cognitive traits with at least some of the animals than anyone guessed (that story about macaque monkeys and arithmetic from yesterday, for example), and we’re also learning that our own reasoning is not divorced from our emotions and instincts but is bound up with them. If anything I write survives for 110 years (which is doubtful), I wonder what I’m writing today, and what assumptions I’m making, that someone from the future will find astonishing.

Some recent research indicates that chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, do not go through menopause as humans do. For female chimpanzees, reproductive capacity declines at the same pace as the rest of the body ages, and truly ends only with death. It’s not common for human females to have children much past the age of 40, but for chimps it happens more frequently, and there’s no prolonged period of healthy life after the reproductive system shuts down. Humans are rare or perhaps even unique in going through menopause and often having years of healthy post-reproductive life on the other side. This story from New Scientist has more information.

This ties in with a Live Science story from last year about male chimpanzees preferring older females to mate with, in contrast to human males, who tend to choose younger mates. Older female chimps are still in the running as far as having chldren, whereas female humans past a certain age are not. This is a key difference between chimp and human life patterns. (And think of how some deeply ingrained aspects of the human psyche and human culture would be different if female aging were not considered to be an anti-aphrodisiac.)

This story also brings up the perennially interesting (to 40-something females anyway) topic of life after menopause. If you’re a woman, even if you have no intention of having a child in the future, the onset of menopause can make you wonder what your role is, evolutionarily speaking. Why do human females live so long after they can no longer reproduce?

It’s hard saying for sure, but one hypothesis is that childbirth is (or used to be) dangerous enough that after a certain point it’s more genetically advantageous to stick around and raise your existing children and help raise your grandchildren than attempt to have more kids. A news story from Live Science from a few months ago talks about another possibility, perhaps working in tandem with the first. Men often choose younger women as mates, sometimes dramatically younger. When men in their 50s and 60s and 70s continue their own reproductive years by having children with a much younger woman, their children, boys and girls alike, can inherit whatever of their genetic endowment contributes to their longevity, lengthening the lifespan of the human species as a whole.

Time flies when you’re having fun, the saying goes, and it often seems that in emergency situations time slows down. However, a recent experiment indicates that people’s perception of time does not shift during a moment of danger, and that sense of everything moving in slow motion is just a trick of memory.

For the experiment, people did something called Suspended Catch Air Device diving, which involves falling backwards from a platform suspended 150 feet above a safety net. It takes only three seconds to fall, but people are moving 70 miles an hour when they hit the net. It sounds absolutely terrifying, but it’s supposedly safe, so it’s a good experience for testing whether or not time perception shifts during times of crisis.

Participants observed the falls of others and timed them, and then estimated the length of time their own fall had taken; their estimates were about a third again as long as the actual time it took to fall. However, they were wearing a gadget that flashed numbers too quickly for them to make them out, and during the fall they were not able to see the numbers any better than when they were not scared, indicating that they were not really perceiving a slowed-down world. They could see numbers flashed at a slower speed, so the problem was not with being able to read the numbers while in free fall.

What is probably happening to give people that sense of time stretching out is that the brain retains much more detailed memories of what happens in such adrenaline-charged moments. When people look back at the density of memories, it feels like the scary experience must have taken longer than it did, and in retrospect it seems like their perception of time must have expanded to allow for all that experience in such a short amount of time—but in fact it didn’t. This press release on EurekAlert has the details.

One of the things I remember hearing when I was growing up was the advice: “When a job is once begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be it great or be it small, do it well or not at all.” For some this may be an inspiration to achievement, but I found it rather daunting, and I’m afraid it left me likely to not do things at all rather than to risk doing them poorly (as people often do when they’re learning a new skill). However, I can’t blame this advice for my reaction to it, because I suspect that it’s my nature to be dissatisfied with myself anyway. I want not only to do things perfectly, but to do them perfectly the first time I try them. I know, I know, this is an unrealistic expectation. But unrealistic expectations are what perfectionism is all about.

An article on psychological studies of perfectionists discusses recent research that identifies negative thought patterns associated with depression (e.g., all-or-nothing thinking, which you’ll find listed in books on cognitive behavioral therapy as a no-no). The article also mentions a subdivision of perfectionists into three distinct types. I found this part very useful. I’m definitely the first type, hard on myself and prone to self-critical depression. I also tend to be soft-spoken and verbally gentle, even wimpy, which doesn’t match some stereotypes of the perfectionist as demanding and inflexible. However, those stereotypes may fit the second subtype, those who expect perfection in those around them. (If you are of the first type, spending time around someone of the second type can be seriously demoralizing.) Perfectionists of the third type try to measure up to a standard that they believe others expect of them.

One thing therapists try to do with perfectionists is to get them to loosen up a little bit, let some of the smaller things go, and observe that the world doesn’t stop turning as a result. Hmmm. Maybe I should try that someday. Do you think I’ll get it right the first time I try?

I had never run across the concept of a wicked problem before yesterday, but I’m finding it to be a fascinating concept. A wicked problem has no single solution and is intricate, difficult to delimit or even define, and often inextricably linked to other problems. It’s about as different as can be from the kind of puzzle or math problem that has a single answer that can be reached by the careful application of reasoning; a wicked problem often requires an iterative approach to a solution, and a flexibility that recognizes the shifting nature of the problem. Examples of some big wicked problems include climate change, terrorism, dwindling oil supplies, and the US health care system. Wicked problems that are smaller in scope but equally baffling plague many companies and other institutions, judging by the amount of literature there is on the subject of managing this type of situation.

A lot of the information I’ve found about tackling wicked problems involves communication strategies for helping groups of people work together to understand the problem and come up with approaches to a solution (e.g., a couple of the methods are called Dialogue Mapping and Conversational Modeling). That makes a recent research project at Sandia National Laboratories particularly interesting. In this real-life study of a genuine problem that concerned them, Sandia employees and interns were asked to brainstorm ideas about the problem, either alone or in groups that pooled their ideas by contributing anonymously to a web site. Those who worked alone had no access to the ideas of their co-workers.

When you think about brainstorming approaches to a complex problem, you might think that the more brains you have, the better the ideas that will be generated (unless perhaps you’ve had to sit through too many fruitless or overlong meetings). However, in this case the ideas generated by the people who worked alone were rated by the organizers of the study as being better in terms of originality, feasibility, and effectiveness. One of the organizers pointed out that if online meetings are cheaper and shorter than face-to-face meetings, having people work alone might be even more cost- and time-efficient. (Not to mention that it gives the introverts like me a big break.) There’s a caveat toward the end of the press release to the effect that in some circumstances online or face-to-face interaction is still going to be needed. Still, this is a very interesting result, especially since it comes from a situation where people were dealing with something that presumably really mattered to them in their working lives.

This essay by biologist E.O. Wilson, published on the New Scientist site, is an excerpt from his afterword to an edition of four books by Darwin that was published a couple of years ago. The essay describes three viewpoints on humans and their place in the universe: a religious view that sees us as created by a deity; political behaviorism, which sees us as more or less perfectible blank slates that can be shaped to the culture’s needs; and scientific humanism, which is the bedrock of my own worldview. Scientific humanism sees us as products of evolution, and scientific humanism alone really sees us as what I call thinking meat—intelligent animals whose nature is a unique and complicated blend of animal necessity and mental activity. Wilson goes on to predict that religion and scientific humanism are likely to go on butting heads, finding neither agreement nor accommodation, because the differences between the two are increasing as we learn more and more about biology.

He says that there’s something about religion that “divides people and amplifies societal conflict”. This brings to mind something that a friend of mine pointed out once. Science tends to hone in on an answer to a particular question; alternatives are pared away by peer-reviewed experimentation and replication of results. At its best, scientific discoveries can not only narrow down the possible answers to a question, but unite disparate facts and observations by finding the underlying order. Religion, on the other hand, is a much more fragmented thing. I doubt there ever was a single religion or deity that everyone on the planet knew, and even religions that have dominated huge segments of the Earth’s population have been characterized by sects and divisions. I’m not sure why this is so, but I think it has to do with the purposes of religion and science. Religion is much more shaped to the needs of a particular community or mindset, whereas science is tuned to the objective facts to be observed in the world. Wilson points out that religion harms as well as benefits humankind, and closes his essay by wondering if scientific humanism might be able to provide the benefits without the social costs of religion. I guess first we have to wait and see if it ever becomes more than a minority viewpoint, and then see how it does.

So what exactly is a religion? More specifically, does the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (aka Pastafarianism) count? The CFSM grew from an amusing letter to the Kansas School Board that requested equal time in the science classroom for the views of the Pastafarians, who believe that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Any scientific evidence to the contrary is merely the result of tinkering done by the FSM’s Noodly Appendage. Funny, yes, but the board at the time was considering whether to include Intelligent Design in the Kansas science curriculum, and the letter makes the serious point that if ID is taught as science, what’s to prevent any other set of non-scientific ideas from forcing its way into the classroom too?

The CFSM is now an official parody religion with its own book of scripture (The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) and a largish cultural presence on college campuses and other hangouts of wise guys and science geeks. Or is it a real religion? This story from Live Science talks about the coverage of the CFSM at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. A panel will discuss Pastafarianism and its connection to the question of what makes a popular movement a religion. It’s a good question. Is Buddhism a religion, or Taoism? Both lack deities but focus on many of the same concerns as religions do. They’re both spiritual systems, I think, but I’m not sure if I’d call them religions. The CFSM is also in a sense concerned with what might very loosely be called spiritual matters, and it certainly shares some of the other features of religions (and it even has a deity).

It’s all tongue in cheek, so the CFSM is known to be a construct of the human imagination. I read a book years ago about an atheist who went to an Episcopalian church; as I recall, he was a little surprised to find others in the congregation who were atheists or agnostics. And I know there are people who call themselves “cultural Catholics”, who go to church for the community, the music, the traditions, but do not really believe what the church teaches about God and sin and so forth. (And certainly the drop in the size of Catholic families indicates a disconnect between official Catholic doctrine and Catholic behavior, even for those who are not cultural Catholics.) If people in mainstream religions can sometimes be fairly loose about their belief in the tenets of their religion, maybe Pastafarianism would count after all. I don’t really know how I’d define a religion, but I’m amused when I think of religious scholars addressing the question in the context of Noodly Appendages.