Anthropology.net

I haven’t bothered to translate this page, but I’ve stumbled across a collection of 56 family portraits from East Asia that I wanted to share with you. The images give us a quick glimpse of all the different cultures and ethnicities that make up the far East, along with the lat/long of where these people are found. Check it out.

Ethnic Mongol

Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

In regards to my previous post from yesterday, I’d like to quickly share this quote I’ve found from Clay Shirky, a Interactive Telecommunications teacher at NYU. He spoke to TED last year on Facebook, Twitter, and the like, and he was recently asked to comment about the usage of these tools in Iran. Here’s what he had to say,

“… this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.”

Check more of his question and answer session with TED.

I remember taking an ethnography class as an undergrad about the social, cultural, and political revolutions that happened in the Soviet block in the 80′s and 90′s. We discussed topics like how news was disseminated and how there was a massive identity shift. It seems as if this weekend, I saw something similar but not what was traditionally found on television, traditional media, or in a classroom. For the first time in a I witnessed a massive revolution on the Internet.

If you’ve happen to be living in a cave for the last several days let me summarize in a few sentences what I’m talking about. Iran held elections last Friday. The votes were counted at an alarming quick rate, and the incumbent, Ahmadninejad was proclaimed the winner. This immediately outraged Iranians, as they swarmed to the booths in unprecedented numbers to vote — most saying they’ve voted for Mousavi, a reformist. Immediately they took the internet, to voice their concerns and disapproval.

Revolt

And here’s where the revolution began.

Videos of demonstrations were uploaded to YouTube. Photos to Flickr, TwitPic, and the like. Groups and events were organized on Facebook. Short updates were announced on Twitter. Those that didn’t partake in demonstrations posted to their blogs and news spread like wild fire. Photos and video clips from cell phones functioned as our eyes as the Islamic Republic began preventing foreign official press from filming and documenting the protests. I heard from family back in Tehran that these sites were quickly blocked by the government firewalls, but fellow freedom seekers outside of Iran setup proxy servers and SSH tunnels and tweeted about it. Outsiders began DDOS’ing the Islamic Republic news sites to prevent them from spreading propaganda.

I have no idea if the protests in Iran will spark a political revolution. If it does, it will be unlike the 1979 Islamic revolution which was lead by an exiled leader at the time. These current protests are internally lead.

Rise Up Found on TwitPic

The revolution I am speaking about is not particularly about Islamic Republic but rather on the failures of traditional media and the identify shift observed. Twenty years ago the public relied on CNN to cover news on Tienanmen Square. We were consumers then. But CNN has more or less failed in coverage, leading to the great #CNNFail hashtag on Twitter. Where news and media couldn’t logistically cover news, citizen journalists did.

Have we come to understand our new roles and responsibilities as members of this interconnected world… to communicate, share and sympathize?

I hope so.

I’m excited about this shift. As you may know, I am pretty deeply integrated in social media sites, like Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc. I have been registered Twitter user for a couple years now. Up until this weekend, I have used it to mirror my favorite items from my RSS reader. Now have I come to understand the power & purpose of Twitter #iranelection.

EDIT 8:30PM Pacific Time: The New York Times has just written a very similarly inspired article titled, “Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online.” Check it out!

I’m on my way to this symposium, “Humanity’s Genes and the Human Condition,” at UC Berkeley. It should be a day of interesting and relevant talks, especially since the American Society of Human Genetics had their annual meeting this week, and lots of discussions were held about genetic ancestry testing. I’m looking forward to hearing Svante Pääbo and Karin Stromswold talk about human evolution and language, respectively.

If I can live blog, you should check out this post regularly to see minute by minute updates. If I can’t live blog, I will be taking notes the old fashioned way and updating this post later on with my thoughts.

9:04 am: Everyone is getting settled, seems like it’ll be a lively conference. I am live blogging on my phone so excuse the typos.

9:07 am: Joe Palca of NPR is introducing the program. He’s the moderator.

9:10 am: Ed Penhoet is talking about the intersection of genomics and the social sciences. Nobel Prize lecture Sydney Brenner and Gordon Moore (both are in the crowd!) are acknowledged, and the last issue of Science and the genetics of behavior.

9:21 am: David Botstein is taking the stage for the keynote speech. Admits he has no idea what this conference is all about. Everyone laughs.

David Botstein

9:25 am: Botstein is defining many terms like structural & functional genomics. Slide up on size of genomes. Function has little to do with number of genes. Structure and function of protein encoded genes are conserved. He calls it the breadcrumbs of evolution, I like the analogy.

9:32 am: Sequence comparison of DNA is a function of time and the basis of comparing genomes. Tricky inference with associating a gene to a function. The sequence means nothing to function, until it changes the function of the protein. He’s now talking about reviving knockout yeast with inserted human equivalent genes.

9:37 am: Introduced multiple sequence alignments and drawing phylograms. Defining orthologs and paralogs, seems like an intro to genetics 101 class. Talking about duplications in tumorigenesis and using yeasts to see how tumor genes from colon cancer affect yeast phenotyping. Finding mutant genes in humans and using yeast homologs to seek out functional effects.

9:43 am: Variations in sequences, fragment length, one if the first methods to determine how genes vary from one person to another. Distinguishing individuals, DNA hype in pop culture. Using DNA variation in CSI, CODIS: the 13 markets that define the individual.

9:47 am: Single gene diseases like Huntington’s and cystic fibrosis can tell us about basic biological functions of the genes.

9:49 am: Mapping the genome with a microarray chip the has a representative of every gene. Can learn expression of genes in certain tissues at certain developmental stages. Gene expression at certain tissues and stages are conserved between individuals.

David Botstein, Joe Palca, Jasper Rine

9:54 am: Everyone needs a basic understanding of statistics and probabilities. Q&A session with Jasper Rine and Joe Palca.

Jasper Rine took a snipe at ancestry testing, “cheaper assays at determining blue eyes and ear wax.” Haha.

10:37 am: Coffee break is over. Svante Pääbo is taking the stage. Thanking Sydney and confused on howto pitch his talk. Seems like the organizers didn’t prep speakers enough.

Using sequence comparison to understand human evolution. Nothing particularly new being said, but he’s estimating the most common recent ancestor of human-chimp at 4-5 million years ago.

How much variation in human populations exist? 4 base pair differences in 100,000 bases per individual. Shows a tree of gorillas to chimps to bonobos to orangutans and humans.

10:45 am: Are there common variations in populations in Asia, Africa and Europe? There is some geographic-genetic structure to populations. Focus on variants, there are specific variants to each major continent.

Svante Pääbo

10:48 am: Stressing what happened to human lineage after the split from the most common recent ancestor with chimps. Our first problem is defining how humans are unique. We have had a hard time defining human nature: language and tool use in nonhuman primates.

10:50 am: Did human nature evolve recently? We must use Neandertals to find that out but the technical challenge is that Neandertals are thought to be extinct. Replacement vs. Integration of the two species.

10:52 am: High-throughput sequencing let’s us figure out the above questions. Shoutout to 454 technologies, says well have 3 billion base pairs of Neandertal genome by the end of this year. Contamination and degradation of aDNA discussion.

10:55 am: Only .5% contamination has been identified by the last sequencing freeze. Last common ancestor to Neandertals is 800,000 years ago. Neandertals ate deeply diverged. Did mixing occur? Replacement and assimilation again.

10:57 am: Does a random European or African look like a Neandertal genetically? Not right now, but we will have more data. He’s conservative, ‘not by much.’ Loci on chromosome 17, fertility gene western Europe and Eurasia, do modern humans share this sequences? No, but we need to look at more Neandertals.

Dan Rokhsar

11:01 am: He’s sequencing Neandertals not for Neandertals but for a greater understanding of what makes us humans. Now talking about drift and selective swifts, looking for positive selection on modern humans.

Dan Rokhsar, a discussant, is taking the stage. Discussion variation within humans, why did Neandertals die out? Division of labor? Language? Tool making? Agriculture?

11:10 am: Quoting Kremer: more people more brilliant minds, population bottleneck type talk. Humans took advantage of population boom. Question about language, FOXP2, no reason to think Neandertals didnt have language, but talked about recent selective sweep in modern human. Question about what does the 1.2% difference between human & chimp genomes and one about alignments of genomes of modern populations.

11:18 am: Tim White on stage. Talks about religious opposition to human evolution and shows us lots if human fossils. The fossils tell us what they looked like, what they ate, what tools they used. Recommends a synthesis of DNA and fossil evidence.

Tim White

11:21 am: Tim talks about Prabhakar’s paper on finding the unique allele that makes human opposable thumbs. Points out exhibit on human evolution, encourages inspiring youngins.

11:24 am: Question about unique genes to agriculture. Lactose tolerance, audience points out. Amylase and sickle cell. Surprised that Paabo didn’t answer this. An audience member had to answer it! Anyways, culture in these situations led to genetic changes. Question about Flores hominid genomics. Svante says he tried a tooth but did not work. Tim is asked to comment on controversy between paleontology and genetics, about human-chimp split. Paleontologists were wrong in thinking humans-chimps split 15 mya because they interpretted the fossil record incorrectly. Suggests a spring date for Ardipithecus publication that could be most common ancestor. Question about why Neandertals died? Svante says Tim is the paleontologist, Tim bounces back saying Svante is the European!

11:31 am: Moving to talk about infectious diseases. I’m taking a live blogging silence to conserve battery power because after lunch there will be a talk about language. I’ll update this with my old fashioned notes later at home.

Svante Paado & Tim White

1:45 pm: I’m back from lunch. The last talk on immunology was fascinating and I’ll fill in the hand written notes later. Now, Karin Stromswold is gonna talk about language.

1:51 pm: She’s defining language and linguistics and how language touches so many fields like neuroscience, genetics, clinical sciences, pyschology. She’s going to talk about what we know and don’t know about language.

11:54 pm: People do differ in linguistic abilities. Two year old have different know number of words and fluency/proficiency of second languages. What about language impairment, not hearing, so do genetic factors play a role in linguistic variability. She’s drawing an analogy of the genetics if language to the genetics of finger length and number of fingers. Different variants can knock out language while others can effect the extent of language cognition.

Karin Stromswold

1:59 pm: 9+ loci linked to dyslexia and language disorder. She’s talking about the KE family, automsomal disorder. She’s bringing up the new FOXP2-CNTNAP2 paper and how downstream targets of FOXP2 also affect language phenotypes.

2:02 pm: Language disorders do cluster in families despite the fact there’s not a clear Mendelian inheritance. She’s bringing up twin studies to quantify the extent language is genetic. Probability of language impairment between more-or-less identical twins. Compared many variables, between language related and non-language. Vocab is least genetically related, but syntax is.

2:07 pm: Overlap of linguistic and non- linguistic, genetic correlation between fine motor division and linguistic abilities. Why is there a great overlap between syntax and articulation? Perceptive vs. Production. Maybe there’s a hierarchical structure? Not the linear order!

2:11 pm: Key feature of language is that we can embed sentences within each other. Language apes can’t! Argued that us the only specific feature of human communication. We can see non human organism model, but can’t embed multiple messages.

2:13 pm: Genetics affects all aspects of language, and some are specific. Specific neural circuitry, ie articulation and syntax. Different evolutionary histories for faculty. She’s rushing because she’s out if time. Summarizing pleiotropy and phenotype manifests different at different ages. Child can’t speak at two but recovers 100% later, but develops slower.

2:19 pm: Common alleles that contribute to a disease under a environment may not in a different environment. The whole genome + environment = phenotype.

2:20 pm: Dan Geschwind and Marc Feldman take the stage.

Joe Palca, Dan Geschwind and Marc Feldman

Dan’s talking about specificity, genes of language are related to other cognitive traits. He’s talking about CNTNAP2 and where it is expressed and regulated, and assigning function. Asks about recursion, does it have specific heritabilty? Are frontal systems for memory and planning that help us with lanuage? Language us built on existing systems. “We have assymetric brains while chimps don’t,” that’s what Dan says. Karin is explaining how a combination if traits is more complex than keeping things in memory.

2:28 pm: Marc explains the problems of the language if genetics. Herditabilty of height is 90%, know 30 SNPs, but the height of Japanese changed 4 inches in a couple generations. No major genetic changes in the Japanese. Warns that we must be careful with heritability because it doesn’t indicate penetrance. Mentions the New York Times recent coverage on genetics and epigenetic phenomenon.

2:33 pm: Marc says language and genetic trees of populations are very similar, almost too similar. Language and genes are almost synonymous. History of humans is if migrations and who married whom. People marry others who speak their language more often than not, so that’s why languages and genetics correlate.

2:36 pm: “Heritabilities account for the amount of variation,” Karin. Marc says that 30% heritability isn’t good enough. 60% variance due to environment is too random. Audience questions recursion in starlings, which refutes humans being only recursive communicators. Karin, “starlings aren’t technically recursive.” There’s a bit of a pissing match between the two, it gets heated. Joe Palca had to moderate. Molecular biologist asks for definition of recursive.

2:42 pm: Genetics of psychosis up next. I’m gonna stop live blogging again to save battery power. I thought my battery would last longer. I’ll update my hand written notes later.

4:53 pm: Sydney Brenner is about to come up. He’s gonna tell us if this was a successful talk.

Sydney Brenner

4:54 pm: Starts off with a zinger: “Biological evolution for humans has stopped.” Uhh, really Sydney? You better do better than that. He uses an analogy about how if we feel cold, we don’t ‘adapt’ we just kill an animal, skin it, and wear its pelt as evidence of relaxed natural selection. I can see how he’s gonna use cultural evolution as a foundation for the rest of his wrap up, but he didn’t use a good analogy!

4:58 pm: Sydney Brenner coins a new term, social therapeutics. Calls it the new public health. The most outstanding and impacting breakthrough of public health in the last two centuries was advising the public to keep drinking, potable water separate from soiled water. Asks what is the new challenge for public health for the 21st century?

5:00 pm: Obesity! Lists how our hypothalamus drives us to eat more and convert to fat which means our genomes are mal-adapted to the current cultural environment. Jokes that obesity should be a crime. He points out Alta Charo, the previous speaker on Ethics & Epigenetics. Says she must be jailed and forced to cycle to generate electricity. Sydney advocates that this will kill two birds with one stone, obesity and the energy crisis. There are some uncomfortable laughs. The joke isn’t being taken that well.

5:05 pm: Moves on to say that science is extremely flawed nowadays. In his hay day, science was medieval. There was a skilled journeyman and a cohort of apprentices that sought to learn and absorb their mentor’s knowledge. Nowadays big science, big pharmaceuticals and what not, has created drones. Lost is the creative thinking process. The public depends on big science to solve problems, pill for this pill for that, pill for something else. Says, “We must be accountable for our own health.”

5:11 pm: Further advocates to study our fellow humans. How did the human eye evolve? Why not use blind people to see what certain allelic variants cause different phenotypes. We don’t need elaborate mouse models, the world is one big petri dish and the whole human population is one big experiment.

Joyce Marcus has published a bold review in the Annual Review of Anthropology where she argues that anthropology must be willing to generalize — cultures must be compared and contrasted in order identify similarities in the ways cultures have responded to challenges. In other words, relativism has no place in trying to understand the evolutionary pattern to human social structure.

She further argues that such a comprehensive and comparative analysis of cultural evolution must be done with collaboration between ethnologists and archaeologists. She stresses the impact of archaeology has in investigating cultural evolution, using the transition to agriculture and animal domestication as a critical moment when we can see the emergence of institutions not seen in previous lifestyles. She further relates the relationship between ethnology and archaeology is analogous to that,

“… between zoology and vertebrate paleontology. Zoologists are able to study both muscle tissue and behavior at a level of detail unavailable to paleontologists. Paleontologists, however, can find the muscle attachments on fossil bones that provide evidence for specific muscles; they can then draw on the zoological literature both on those muscles and on the behavior they reflect. Paleontologists can also elucidate long-term trends and recover the skeletons of transitional species unknown to zoology; such fossils show us the order in which certain structures (and hence behaviors) arose. In an important sense, the fossil record is the proving ground for any theory of change based on comparisons of living species.”

In order for us to understand how cultures evolve, she’s very right, cultural anthropologists and archaeologists do need to collaborate. Hell, archaeologists even need to understand that they’re not just digging up cultural noise. Both disciplines need to agree upon a common terminology and see that cultures can be compared. But I don’t know if many cultural anthropologists are ready to hang up their relativist coats on the hanger just yet.

Joyce Marcus (2008). The Archaeological Evidence for Social Evolution Annual Review of Anthropology, 37 (1), 251-266 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085246

A new paper in PNAS reports on an interesting find from a 12,000-year-old Natufian burial complex in the Hilazon Tachtit cave site in Israel — a shaman, which is unlike any other Natufian burial known to date. Before I get into the details of the paper, let me first introduce the Natufian culture and the ecological context members of this culture lived in.

Map of the Hilazon Tachtit Cave Site, Israel

The Natufian culture existed in the Levant from 14,500 to 11,500 years before the present. They were hunter gatherers at first and had a microlithic industry, perfecting short blades and bladelets. Two different human burials at the Ein Mallaha and Hayonim sites include dogs, suggesting they domesticated dogs around 12,000 years ago. The spread of the culture can be estimated by the presence of Anatolian obsidian and shellfish from the Nile-valley being found at Ein Mallaha.

Around 12,800 to 11,500 years ago a climate shift occurred. There are many names for this climate change, I’ll call it the Younger Dryas event. During this period, there was a rapid return to glacial conditions caused by a significant reduction of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. And by rapid I mean it happened within 10 years. The cold and dry Younger Dryas climate lowered the biological carrying capacity of the Levant. This ecological change from the Younger Dryas forced cultures into planting seeds obtained from elsewhere, and practicing agriculture.

Illustration of the Shaman Grave from Hilazon, Tachtit, Israel

Okay going back to the paper, archaeologists have recently excavated the Hilazon Tachtit cave site. Hilazon Tachtit is located about 15 km west of the Sea of Galilee in Israel. The site is dated to be 12,400 – 12,000 years old, right at this ecological and cultural transitional period. The site is primarily a burial ground of at least 28 Natufian individuals. Most of the remains are buried in one collective pit, but one burial was special. The remains of a 45 year old woman was separate and accompanied by lots of animal remains. She had bone spurs on her pelvis and spine, indicating she suffered physical ailments. Accompanying her burial are the remains of the tail bones from a cow, a wing bone from a golden eagle, a forearm of a boar, 50 tortoise carapace pieces, two marten skulls and a large foot from another person. She’s intricately buried in a certain position with a stones arranged in a certain fashion and unlike the other individuals.

Some Animal Remains From the Shaman Burial in Hilazon Tachtit, Israel

The authors argue that she was a shaman. Although the term shaman originally comes from the Tungisic speaking people from Siberia, many gatherer groups and small-scale agricultural cultures have had a shamanistic role — a member of the community who functioned as an intermediate between the human and spirit world. They were healer-magician hybrids. The elaborate burial of this physically disabled woman accompanied with tortoises, cow tails, eagle wings, and fur-bearing animals fall in line with our observation of other shaman burials found throughout the world.

The presence of a shaman in this critical transitional period of human cultural evolution suggest that the seeds of organized religion were already planted. Now, there are controversial depictions of shamans in cave art from 15,000 years ago, but this 12,000 year old burial is the first physical evidence of the ideological and socioeconomic changes that accompanied the forager-to-farmer Neolithic transformation. The development of spiritual ideas and religion are a big part of human cultural evolution. We don’t know exactly when human ancestors developed such thoughts, it could certainly be earlier than 12,000 years ago, but at least we now know that early Neolithic peoples, like the Natufians had at least one shaman.

When do you think religious thoughts emerged during human evolution. Oh yeah, I have to ask, does anyone roll shaman in WoW?

L. Grosman, N. D. Munro, A. Belfer-Cohen (2008). A 12,000-year-old shaman burial from the southern Levant (Israel) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0806030105

Dienekes shared the abstract to a paper that seems to completely contradict an earlier study. It is pretty evident from the title of newer study, “Do humans prefer altruistic mates? Testing a link between sexual selection and altruism towards non-relatives,” what the authors tested. And they confirm that there is a linkage between the propensity to be giving and being perceived as a good parent/partner.

The previous study, led by Peter Jonason, suggests quite the opposite — that someone who holds a “dark triad” of traits, like callousness, impulsive behavior, extroversion, and narcissism attract mates more effectively than someone who expressed empathy for others…. Better expressed by the cliché, “nice guys finish last.”

The crux of this difference is between short term mating and long term mate choice and which is more evolutionarily valuable in humans. People who express the “dark triad” of traits have a higher number of sexual partners than those that don’t. These relationships are short term. Some consider this to be successful, in other words, self absorbed traits have persisted because they seem to be advantageous.

But as the new paper shows, increased altruistic personality correlates significantly with the spouse/partner chosen. Humans aren’t mosquitos. Because of the relative developmental immaturity of the human newborn and its dependency on long-term care to reach sexual maturity, the reproductive success of humans isn’t all about ‘spreading the seed.’ This makes us relative K-strategists, where we put an emphasis on high levels of parental care, resource acquisition, kin provisioning, and social complexity and not on gamete production, mating behavior, and high reproductive rates which r-strategists like fish, frogs, etc. emphasize.

Tim Phillips, Chris Barnard, Eamonn Ferguson, Tom Reader (2008). Do humans prefer altruistic mates? Testing a link between sexual selection and altruism towards non-relatives British Journal of Psychology, 99 (4), 555-572 DOI: 10.1348/000712608X298467

When the headlines behind this story came across my RSS reader the other day, I was gonna file it under my proverbial “Captain Obvious” category. The basic premise is the potential link between last name and Y chromosome type. We already know that in deep ancestries, like among Jewish people, the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH) is notably frequent amongst Cohens. Cohens are a lineage of Jews believed to be direct relatives to the Biblical Aaron. They have a relatively strict marital tradition, one where the last name is preserved paternally.

Many other cultures are structured paternally and last names are inherited, for the most part, from the father’s family. Turi King made this otherwise obvious observation and tried to look for similar Y-chromosome haplotypes among two and half thousand men with 500 different last names. She presented her results to the Doctoral Inaugural Lectures being held in the Frank and Katherine May Lecture Theatre, Henry Wellcome Building, University of Leicester last week.

While not as deep as Cohens, there should be a linkage with almost any man’s last name and his Y-chromosome genetics… So long as name changes, adoptions and multiple foundations of the same last name by different individuals (like Smith) haven’t been prevalent. And that’s why I changed my mind about posting this research. King explains,

“The last name Smith is a good example of this as it derives from the occupation of blacksmith so many men could have taken on the last name Smith. This means that instead of just one type of Y chromosome being associated with a last name, many different types of Y chromosomes would be associated with this single last name. On the other hand, for rarer names, there may have been just one founder for the name and potentially all men who bear that last name today would be descended from him and could be connected into one large family tree.”

When King compared the Y-chromosome makeup of non-related individuals limited down to 40 last names, she was able to see that last names like Attenborough and Swindlehurst showed that over 70% of the men shared the same or near identical Y chromosome types whereas last names such as Revis, Wadsworth and Jefferson show more than one group of men sharing common ancestry but unrelated to other groups.

Ultimately, King was able to show between two men that share the same last name, there is a 24% chance of sharing a common ancestor through that name but that this increases to nearly 50% when their last name is rare. For forensic scientists out there, especially forensic anthropologists who regularly deal with skeletal remains, this can be a godsend because a prediction of a male’s last name is potentially possible from DNA alone. Now disclaimer aside, the press release didn’t really mention her methodology, i.e. how many loci she compared. Of course, the more the merrier. Either way, I’m sure many out there will look forward to larger comparisons of last-name to Y-chromosome correlations.

I mentioned the drawn out process of me trying to download this new paper, “Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution,” the other day. I’ve read it and although I found it to be a difficult and theoretically dense paper, I believe you should also read the open access piece if you have any interest in understanding how culture evolved and the possible mechanisms of egalitarian behavior early on in human evolutionary history. The paper’s first author is Sergey Gavrilets, a theoretical evolutionary biologist from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The other co-authors are also from the same institution.

You may know Gavrilets’ other piece on cultural evolution, the 2006 paper in which he and Aaron Vose built a mathematical model to test out the social brain hypothesis — creating situations where genes control brains which invent and learn strategies that are then used by individuals to gain advantage in competition for mates. He’s continued researching the evolution of social behavior, and in his most recent piece he and his team tackle the dynamics of coalition formation.

The observation that Gavrilets et al. make is that while our closest living evolutionary cousins form alliances and cooperate in groups, their social systems are extremely hierarchical. The most glaring example can be seen in a gorilla troop where a dominant silverback presides over a few adolescent males and a harem of females. The group dynamic is fluid throughout life history, but each member of the system ultimately plays a role in the dominance hierarchy.

But early human societies, such as the quintessential hunter-gatherer society, is generalized as being egalitarian. Prior to the agricultural revolution, hunting and gathering is thought to have been the only subsistence strategy deployed by early human cultures. Studying modern day hunter gatherers, ethnographers have noted that such societies distribute dominance much more equally and thus tend to be non hierarchical. Leaders are comparatively weaker than their subordinates which reverses the pyramid of power.

So why was there such a big behavioral shift during our evolutionary history? We may never know for sure. There are ideas floating around that all seem to suggest the lack of food and realization that cooperation, rather than competition, was more beneficial for overall survival. When food sources became more dependable, as seen after the Neolithic and the dawn of agriculture and pastoralism, is when we’ve seen a return to a traditional hierarchy.

Gavrilets and team created a complex model which ultimately relied on probability to solve problems. They simulated alliance formation among a group of individuals who had different fighting abilities. Their system distinguished between conflicts that existed only between pairs of individuals and conflicts that were composed of more than two individuals. In situations that conflicts existed solely between two individuals, a very structured hierarchy emerged, favoring the ones best able to fight for their interests. In situations that composed of more than two individuals, there was interference or a balance of power, where the hierarchy was biased towards one result over another.

With an increase of group size, Gavrilets et al. were able to see an increase in dyadic conflicts. When members of a group were aware of other conflicts, of which they were not directly related, there was also an increase of dyadic conflicts. Naturally, larger coalitions have a higher probability of winning a conflict and a positive outcome increased affinity between members of the coalition.

Again, this was a rather hard paper to read, and I’ve left out a lot of details. I’m a bit unclear about what was rewarded to drive forward the model, i.e. what were they fighting for? Some of you may write off models as being controversial and reductionist. You’re right. For starters, it is difficult to interpret methods and the data doesn’t seem like it factors in the interactions of so many different variables — some come from evolutionary, ecological, behavioral, and social factors and all acting simultaneously. It is also awkward to evaluate relevant time-scales, aside from generation turnover, and to figure out possible evolutionary dynamics.

But the model did show that the tendency towards egalitarianism is rapid — it consistently happened in the course of several generations. Under situations where all members of a group were a part of one alliance, where not all members were equal, they still remained united. But alliances weren’t permanent. They would phase and out of intensity. Outsiders were also a crucial part of keeping the dynamic alive.

Gavrilets and crew suggest that egalitarianism came along with changes in mating systems and influenced by primate mother-daughter bonding. They also noted that the emergence of language most definitely facilitates the formation of alliances. One last thing, the authors sent out a warning against considering modern day humans under such constraints, because when we join alliances, our decisions are strongly affected by how much we perceive to get out of the alliance versus the costs and risks of being a part of the alliance, which are factors not included in the model.

All aside, this model is informative but it is by no means the way human social behavior evolved. I’ve already outlined some of the caveats to modeling. To further supplement, there are exceptions to the rule that all hunter gatherer societies are/were egalitarian. Non-egalitarian hunter gatherer systems, such as the Haida, have been well documented by ethnographers. I also remember one of my anthropology professors telling me her accounts of living with outcasted Dassenach people. They were forced out of the pastoral lifestyle and into a hunting for crocodiles and fish one. But, they still retained the social structure despite the shift in subsistence.

Sergey Gavrilets, Edgar A. Duenez-Guzman, Michael D. Vose, Erik I. Svensson (2008). Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution PLoS ONE, 3 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003293

In World as Laboratory, Rebecca Lemov, an anthropologist, writes for a larger audience.

“I think it’s too bad that a lot of scholarly work never gets read, usually because it’s just plain difficult to read,” she says in an interview with Nicole Merritt of MyShelf.com. “Being difficult is sometimes necessary, but sometimes there’s deliberate obfuscation going on … ‘If you can’t understand what I’m saying, I must be exceptionally smart’.”

David Brooks reviewed it at The New York Times, an honor not always bequeathed to anthropological texts.

The paperback is published by Hill and Wang, rather than an academic press, and the book is written in a humorous, even sarcastic tone, in accessible language that feels like a leisure read full of rich philosophical implications and shocking detail.  The focus of the work is how the laboratory became the locus of power and authority, the fountain of knowledge for social scientists and governments alike, eventually contributing to an extension of the laboratory to world settings – so that the United States, as a colonial power, utilized whole peoples for experiments on the premise that human behavior could be understood, controlled, and even engineered on a massive scale.

Lemov also describes how laboratory science, with its emphasis on objectivity and distance from the subjective – as well as the subject – is built around experiments on animals as the ideal approach to studying human behavior and, yes, even the social.  Yet this practice is built on a puzzling paradox: although humans are assumed to function behaviorally in the same manner as animals, animals as nonhumans (and, in some cases, certain humans considered less than civilized) are permissible subjects of often painful and exceedingly demoralizing experiments.  Furthermore, as Lemov demonstrates, laboratory science itself was generated by personalities, men in fact caught up in a range of personal fears and anxieties – in short, subjectivities.  Yet despite these contradictions, laboratory science built on the assumed subject-object, human-nonhuman distinction is as pervasive as ever, if not more so.

Without proposing any conspiracy theories – in fact, Lemov makes it clear that a lot of these guys were wayward do-gooders and philanthropists who couldn’t possibly know the full ramifications of their brand of science – she points to the lasting effects widespread ideas about the social self have on our lives even today, even in the marketplace, in malls, in everyday politics.

With the laboratory, Lamov writes, scientists “built a stressful world that predicted our own: a world in which stress and its effects can actually be engineered, ratcheted up, and in some sense capitalized upon” (101).

Admittedly, this sounds pretty incendiary for an anthropologist, and Lemov certainly doesn’t pretend to participate in any kind of dalliance with objectivity.  There is something very brave and honest about that.  Lemov is an anthropologist – a person with a PhD – but she clearly isn’t ashamed of her own biases, nor is she interested in putting on a veil with her thinking cap.  Perhaps more importantly, she’s talking about things that sound boring and inaccessible – science studies, subject-object distinctions, intentionalities – in a way that is likely to stimulate more dialogue and participation among a wider range of people than your standard stodgy academic article.

Not that those are unimportant.  It’s just that they, too, are part of the laboratory world.