I remember years ago, to be precise 14 yrs ago, I was with this girl we were both in our early 20's. I guess you could call it a date. At the time the conversation drifted from various topics, until she dropped this line
"I like the way some guys smell". It was out of the blue and I automatically thought 'did I or didn't I' put deodorant on before going out (actual I did, also with splash of Drakkar Noir). She proceeded to inform me that certain guys (me?) have a good smell. The date ended and I was perplexed what the hell she meant by all that. It was only in the years to come that aspects of psychology kinda fused with biology to create a sought of new science that studied primitive cues in behaviors animal or otherwise to determine the development of human culture and society. So you have, long behold, the unwashed t-shirt (worn by males) and the uni students (female) sniffing them. The experiment became a BBC science/biology trademark with it's rating system attached and the most 'nice' smelling t-shirt goes to the top of the scale. The whole basis of the new science called evolutionarily psychology sought to narrow down our behavior (from a primitive perspective). So it did look good on the surface as a new theory. Unfortunately for Evolutionary Psychology our culture is so intrinsically complex and diverse and unpredictable that evolutionary psychology, in my opinion, couldn't nail down a consistent test to our nature. The big blow up against the nature over nurture argument was of course the massive expansion of the internet and social network sites, dating sites and so on. We were able to replace thousands of years of cultural interaction and exchange with a digital medium literally overnight; which completely derailed evolutionary psychologists/biologists behavioral modeling (which relied on primitive mating signals) that was based on millions of years.
Anyway,
Geoffrey Miller is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of New Mexico and author of The Mating Mind is one of the main proponents on evolutionary psychology when it become semi famous ( BBC documentaries) late 90's early 2000. Wrote an article for
Seed magazine in 2006. Basically it's coming form a frustrated perspective as the whole concept of the "mating mind" had been reshaped via the internet. He makes some good points (in a sarcastic way), mainly discussing that humans simple cannot evolve with intervening aspects such as information technology that causes a form of deception in interaction, in his words a "fitness faked" world. He also indicates that a species that advances too quickly may eventually just self destruct.
But overall I don't really agree with him or his article, as I see environmental factors that have caused degrees of complacency in our culture - whether that be the reliance on the internet for interaction. Of course habit and trends in behavior change and they can change suddenly. But Miller sounds like one of these horrible interventionists such as the Keynesian type economic philosophy that has been implicated by government and pushed by certain academics. The degree of complacency (currently) in our society is unbelievable I would agree, but it is reinforced by status quo mentality influenced by government and governing bodies. We had a wealth induced (which was actually fake) environment, this lead to excess it also lead to a unbalanced aspect of power in our society. In other worlds everyone acted like they had equal power. Yes again it was faked via networking and so called social friendship sites. It is more a kinda bizarre twist on an overtly communistic type system where everyone through the internet has tried to create an equilibrium (you have in the sense a even playing field - the net) but at the same time brokering power. That's the problem. But I don't think it's the end of the world.
As I mentioned it is a
faked system supported by government (more so now than the last 10 years) and like all economic/social systems supported by a governing body they eventually collapse (note the anniversary of the collapse of communism in Europe -
The Berlin Wall coming down).
If you believe in self correcting systems which is what I what I believe, than eventually there will be a re-balancing. A natural cycle of culling excesses and reestablishing a new environment. One that we have never seen before and can only assume it will be similar to the cataclysmic changes that have occurred in our history.
In summary I have a lot of faith in human beings, our cultures, individualism and technology. We have an inherit ability to survive under stress. Yes adaption has been somewhat pushed away from us via regulation and an overly reliance on institutional control. But at the end of the day we work well together.
So the article below is a bit of a nerdy whine (and he sounds kinda depressive), still it's a fun read:
(side note - I actually think we will hear from Aliens in the next decade or so...y'know like a signal).
May 1, 2006
A radical explanation for a conundrum about extra-terrestrial life, and what it means for the future of humanity
The story goes like this: Sometime in the 1940s, Enrico Fermi was talking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence with some other physicists. They were impressed that life had evolved quickly and progressively on Earth. They figured our galaxy holds about 100 billion stars, and that an intelligent, exponentially-reproducing species could colonize the galaxy in just a few million years. They reasoned that extra-terrestrial intelligence should be common by now. Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, “So, where is everybody?” That is, if extra-terrestrial intelligence is common, why haven’t we met any bright aliens yet? This conundrum became known as Fermi’s Paradox.
Since then, the paradox has become ever more baffling. Paleontology has shown that organic life evolved quickly after the Earth’s surface cooled and became life-hospitable. Given simple life forms, evolution shows progressive trends toward larger bodies, brains and social complexity. Evolutionary psychology has revealed several credible paths from simpler social minds to human-level creative intelligence. So evolving intelligence seems likely, given a propitious habitat—and astronomers think such habitats are common. Moreover, at least 150 extrasolar planets have been identified in the last few years, suggesting that life-hospitable planets orbit most stars. Yet 40 years of intensive searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind.
It looks, then, as if we can answer Fermi in two ways. Perhaps our current science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space ships would be bright enough to make thermonuclear bombs, and would use them on each other sooner or later. Maybe extra-terrestrial intelligence always blows itself up. Indeed, Fermi’s Paradox became, for a while, a cautionary tale about Cold War geopolitics.
I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain’s ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.
The fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biologicalfitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. This was a key insight of evolutionary psychology in the early 1990s; although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.
The result is that we don’t seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it’s even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.
Fitness-faking technology tends to evolve much faster than our psychological resistance to it. With the invention of the printing press, people read more and have fewer kids. (Only a few curmudgeons lament this.) With the invention of Xbox 360, people would rather play a high-resolution virtual ape in Peter Jackson’s King Kong than be a perfect-resolution real human. Teens today must find their way through a carnival of addictively fitness-faking entertainment products: iPods, DVDs, TiVo, Sirius Satellite Radio, Motorola cellphones, the Spice channel, EverQuest, instant messaging, MDMA, BC bud. The traditional staples of physical, mental and social development—athletics, homework, dating—are neglected. The few young people with the self-control to pursue the meritocratic path often get distracted at the last minute. Take, for example, the MIT graduates who apply to do computer game design for Electronics Arts, rather than rocket science for NASA.
Around 1900, most inventions concerned physical reality: cars, airplanes, Zeppelins, electric lights, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bras, zippers. In 2005, most inventions concern virtual entertainment—the top 10 patent-recipients were IBM, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Matsushita, Samsung, Micron Technology, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu—not Boeing, Toyota or Victoria’s Secret. We have already shifted from a reality economy to a virtual economy, from physics to psychology as the value-driver and resource-allocator. We are already disappearing up our own brainstems. Our neurons over-stimulate each other, promiscuously, as our sperm and eggs decay, unused. Freud’s pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle. Today we narrow-cast human-interest stories to each other, rather than broadcasting messages of universal peace and progress to other star systems.
Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species—to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says “Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.”
Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Some individuals and families may start with an “irrational” Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratifica tion, child-rearing and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the religious right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace left. Their concerns about the Game of Life will baffle the political pollsters who only understand the rhetoric of status and power, individual and society, rights and duties, good and evil, us and them.
This, too, may be happening already. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and anti-consumerism activists already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our creative-class dreamworlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the Earth as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox.
Geoffrey Miller is an assistant professor in the department of psychology at University of New Mexico and author of The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature.
