The friendly folks behind the registration counter were efficient in processing the badges for the 450+ attendees, plus selling you a t-shirt or two of primate Darwin, denoting that this year’s HBES conference celebrates the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.

On Friday May 29 I attended the 21st annual conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) — the official organization of evolutionary psychologists and champions of applying Darwinian thinking to human psychology. The last HBES meeting I attended was at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1995, which was sparsely attended compared to this year’s 450+ attendees packed into tiny conference rooms for the simultaneous sessions — always a frustrating choice architecture when you want to attend more than one talk being presented at the same time. I only had a day to attend the three-day conference, so this will be necessarily unrepresentative of the remarkable body of research now being churched out by hundreds of professional evolutionary psychologists from all over the world.

I should note at the top that on this, the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, it is embarrassing that it is only now that the application of Darwinian principles are fully coming online in mainstream psychological research laboratories. In my book The Science of Good and Evil I include a history and explanation for the delay, but it still amazes me that only now has it become acceptable to include Darwin in discussions of human animal behavior. As one of the founders of the field, David Buss, likes to say (quoting, I think, Donald Symons), “evolutionary psychology” is a redundancy — given the fact that 99% of our history as a species has been spent as bipedal primates in an ancestral Paleolithic environment all psychology should be evolutionary. The fact that there is no such thing as “non-evolutionary psychology” speaks volumes, even though unofficially most psychology throughout the 20th century was just that — non-evolutionary. That problem is now coming to a close as we enter a new era of all psychology as evolutionary.

Two superstars of evolutionary psychology—David Buss from U.T. Austin and Martie Haselton from UCLA—both of whom study sexual attraction and relationships from an evolutionary perspective, confer on their latest data. In years to come Haselton will get to personally test her theories teasing apart nature and nurture on her own newly-born twins.

Incest is not Best

One of the most interesting talks of the day was by Elizabeth Pillsworth, a graduate student at UCLA in the lab of Martie Haselton, who studies sexual attraction, relationships, and how fertility cycles influence mate preferences and choices (e.g., women dress in a more sexually provocative manner during the high fertility phase of the month). In an interesting twist on this body of research, Pillsworth studied the effects of the fertility phase in women on the incest taboo — specifically, how often college-aged women phoned their dads (versus their moms) during the month. Wow. It never ceases to amaze me at how clever scientists can be in thinking up new research paradigms: who ever would have thought of correlating cell phone calls with estrus cycles? Pillsworth and Haselton (and their colleague Debra Lieberman) did! And the results were most revealing.

But first, some background. Kin affiliation in evolution is critical for predator avoidance, food procurement and sharing, protection from the elements, etc. I.e., being in a family group is extremely important for mammals. But there is an equally important downside: inbreeding. If you mate with people who are genetically similar to you, there are consequences: higher rates of infant mortality, deformed sperm, sterility, and genetic defects of all sorts — think hemophilia in the royal families of Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Research shows that the offspring of 1st cousins twice as likely to suffer congenital malformation and genetic disease and up to a 5% increase in mortality; the offspring of siblings show a 45% increased risk of mortality. Thus, mammals evolved numerous adaptations for inbreeding avoidance: dispersal from natal groups (usually sex-biased), kin recognition and avoidance, extra-pair/extra-group copulations rather than copulate within their group. Pillsworth cited a study on horses that found Mares only leave the group temporarily to other breeding groups. So there’s a conflict of wanting to be close to your kin and kind, but not too close.

Hypothesis on incest avoidance: near ovulation women are motivated to avoid affiliation with male kin (fathers) but not mothers, to avoid the potential costs of inbreeding. Predictions: relative to low-fertility days, on high-fertility days women will initiate fewer calls with fathers and engage in shorter conversation with fathers, compared to mothers. The researchers had 51 normally-ovulating women (mean age 19.1) who provided complete cell phone bills from one month, along with their menstrual cycle information and details about individuals on their phone bill. Results: the subjects called their fathers significantly less than their mothers during high fertility days, and when both mothers and fathers called them during high fertility days they spent less time on the phone with their dads than their moms. Conclusion: “this is the first evidence of adaptation in human females to avoid affiliation with male kin when fertility is at its highest.”

This study was of particular interest to me because I have a 17-year old daughter who will be going off to college in a little over a year, and like most parents I’m dreading the day she is gone and I’ll lose my daily contact with her and am hoping that she calls regularly. I guess now I have to make a mental note of her high fertility days and expect fewer calls from her, but being that I’m her dad, that won’t stop me from calling her and stalling on the phone just to mess with her evolved psychology!

Sexual Hypocrisy

U.T. Austin evolutionary psychologist David Buss examined “Sexual Double Standards: The Evolution of Moral Hypocrisy.” Buss began with the well-known double standard in society that “men are socially rewarded and women socially derogated for sexual activity.” Why? Most explanations are typically culturally-determined: local social constructions, gender role expectations, American males have been culturally conditioned, cultural illusions, social learning, sexual script theory. Buss wants to know if there are adaptations that might create a sexual double standard, for example:

• Mate value assessment adaptations in men: render sexually open women less valuable as Long-Term mates, but not as Short-Term mates.
• Mate value assessment adaptations in women: render sexually successful men higher in mate value.
• Intrasexual competition adaptations in women to inflict costs on women who pursue a Short-Term mating strategy, for example, the derogation of competitors (“she’s loose” “she’s a slut”).

Are sexual double standards cross-cultural or only an artifact of modern Western society? Buss presented data from a cross-cultural study across 15 different cultures (n=2,471) that examined the impact of various acts on status and reputation. Results:

• Being a virgin and effect on status and reputation: male’s reputation does down, female’s goes up.
• Being sexually experienced on status and reputation: male’s goes up, female’s varies, but is less positive.
• Reputation as an easily accessible sexual partner: negative for both males and females.
• Having sex with a date on the first night: tends to be bad for both, but worse for females than males.
• Having sex with two people in one night: negative impact of status and reputation for both sexes, but more for women than men; Women view other women more negatively than they view men who have had sex with two people in one night.
• Being unfaithful to a Long-Term mate: decreases status for both sexes, but women more than men.
• Having an unfaithful mate: loss of status for both sexes, but more status loss for men than for women.

In other words, sexual double standards exist and are robust across cultures, and the reputational consequences are ubiquitous but worse for women than for men.

Evolutionary psychologists Steven Gangestad and David Buss chat during one of the breaks between talks. Gangestad spoke on: “Men’s Facial Masculinity, but Not Their Intelligence, Predicts Changes in Their Female partners’ Sexual Interests Across the Ovulatory Cycle” (see summary in the text), while David Buss spoke on: “Sexual Double Standards: The Evolution of Moral Hypocrisy” (see summary in the text).

Brains Alone Won’t Get you Laid

In a related talk Steven Gangstad examined: “Men’s Facial Masculinity, but Not Their Intelligence, Predicts Changes in Their Female partners’ Sexual Interests Across the Ovulatory Cycle”. If you get that title, guys, it means that being super smart will not make up for lacking a masculine face when women are in their most fertile phase of the month and in search of a sexual partner. Gangestad reviewed the literature on what fertile women find sexy in men: symmetrical face, masculine face, faces of men with high testosterone, masculine voices, social dominance, etc. When women are in estrus (their most fertile phase of the month), the patterns of attractions are a function of fertility status: during estrus women do not report being more attracted to their partners, but they do report greater attractions to extra-pair men. When women are paired with men who have less preferred partners they are more likely to stray during estrus. What about intelligence?

According to Geoffrey Miller, indicators of intelligence may have been indicators of good genes, and that perhaps big brains evolved through sexual selection because women are attracted to smart guys (this is the “brain-as-peacock-tail” theory). Unfortunately (for all the eggheads in the world!), previous studies found no correlation between intelligence and women’s sexual interest during estrus. Gangestad added facial attractiveness and facial masculinity to the equation. “Results revealed predicted effects of male partners’ facial masculinity and attractiveness, but no hint of any effect of partners’ intelligence.” Sorry all you smart cookies out there; you’ll just need to man up your face more rather than memorizing Wikipedia entries.

Selfish Heroes

Because of my interest in the evolution of morality, I first attended the session on Altruism, with an opening talk entitled “The Selfish Hero: A study of the individual benefits of self-sacrificial behavior by members of small groups” by Francis T. McAndrew. He began by explaining the evolution of altruism by “costly signaling theory,” which basically argues that people are occasionally super nice and self-sacrificial toward others (seemingly un-Darwinian) because they gain social status by so doing. That is, by doing something costly you signal to your fellow group members that you have plenty of resources and good genes, and therefore such altruistic acts may have been selected for in evolutionary history.

This, McAndrew argues, helps explain our fascination with heroes. Using 48 undergraduate subjects, 24 same-sex, three-person groups consisting of an experimental confederate and two naïve subjects participated in a ‘group decision making” study in which the success of the group depended upon the willingness of one of its members (the confederate) to endure pain and inconvenience. If the group successfully completed a series of tasks, it could divide $45 among its three members. The results confirmed that engaging in self-sacrificial costly behavior for the good of a group can be a profitable long-term strategy. The ordeal that individuals playing the role of the altruist had to endure was judged to be more difficult and costly than the experience of other group members, but in the end the altruists were rewarded with more money and higher status.

Cads and Dads

The next talk was by Julia Pradel, of the University of Cologne, entitled “Partner in Life or One-Night stand? How reproductive strategies might have shaped the evolution of altruism.” Pradel began by asking: “How could altruism — which by definition reduces an individual’s fitness — ever have evolved?” Like McAndrew, Pradel adopted costly signaling theory: “Only people high in genetic fitness can afford to help others.” Moral virtues, she said, have two signaling functions: 1. Good partnership and parenting characteristics; 2. Good genes. Thus, prosocial traits should be sexually attractive, and therefore sexual selection plus costly signaling theory explains altruism. If so, then why do people differ in altruistic tendencies? Pradel’s answer can be found in the theory of strategic pluralism: both sexes possess psychological adaptations for both short term relationships and long term relationships. Preferences for long-term as opposed to short-term relationships vary among individuals (e.g., women choose between “Cads” and “Dads”). Perhaps altruism was a means to compensate for weaknesses in genetic quality (e.g., lack of physical attractiveness). Mixed reproductive strategies suggest distinctive mate preferences depending on the length of sexual relationship (short-term v. long-term).

Hypothesis 1: Altruism serves as a signal of both good partnership/parenting and good genes, and thus it is perceived sexually attractive in both potential short-term and long-term. Hypothesis 2: Altruism will be a signal for long-term relationships only.

170 raters watched short video-clips of target persons with varying physical attractiveness and received additional information on the targets’ level of altruism. In a between-subjects-design, raters indicated their desire to win the targets as either (a) short-term mates or (b) long-term mates. While altruism was a significant predictor for long-term desire, it was irrelevant for rating short-term mates. The results suggest that although altruism is costly, at least for some individuals it might be a wretched necessity to obtain access to mates and to reproduce.

Smile, You’re On Candid Camera

Related to these findings, Mizuho Shinada and Toshio Yamagishi examined “Trust and Detection of Trustworthiness.” They began by noting that if altruists choose partners randomly, the average payoff to defectors will always exceed the average payoff to cooperators, therefore altruists cannot survive in evolutionary history. However, if altruists can distinguish altruists from non-altruists, altruists will choose altruists and build cooperative relationships, and thus altruists will get a higher payoff by cooperative interaction with altruists. Therefore, people should be able to distinguish altruists from non-altruists by facial expressions, such as the ability to tell the difference between a fake smile and a genuine smile (it has to do with the eyes: a genuine smile usually includes a slight squinting of the eyes whereas a fake smile does not). Thus, only altruists should have altruism-detection skills because altruists would be chosen as interaction partners if people can detect altruists from non-altruists, and non-altruists cannot be chosen by altruists even if they can detect altruists. To date, however, no study has reported that altruists are more accurate than non-altruists in detecting cheaters or altruists. Why?

One answer: the co-evolution of trust and altruism-detection. Altruists who don’t trust strangers don’t want to leave the current relationship and seek a new partner. Those who don’t trust strangers don’t have alternatives from which to choose — the ability to tell cooperators from defectors is of no use for them since they have no alternative to choose from. Those who trust strangers should have altruism-detection abilities. To these these hypotheses, Shinada and Yamagishi first had 47 males and 53 females (average age of 48) answer a questionnaire that included a trust scale consisting of five items, then showed them faces of genuine or fake smiles (20 faces total, 10 real and 10 fake smiles). Results: participant’s trust level positively correlated with the detection accuracy of genuine smile (r = 0.39, p<.0001), and high trusters are more accurate in distinguishing genuine smile from fake smiles when compared to low trusters.

Three six-foot tables were chockablock full of books on evolutionary psychology, indicate just how far this science has grown in the past decade. Monographs, textbooks, and popular trade books provide something for everyone who wants to know more about why we behave as we do from a Darwinian perspective.

In a second study, Shinada and Yamagishi had participants (perceivers, n=99) watched 5-second video-clips. The videos were filmed while the other participants (targets, n=102) played a Trust Game. Before the experiment, they measured the perceiver’s trust level using a questionnaire. They found positive correlations between the perceiver’s trust level, “trustworthy bias” (i.e., the frequency that perceivers judged targets as trustworthy), and age: high-trusters and elderly perceivers tended to expect that most people were trustworthy. Furthermore, the perceivers trust level was positively correlated with the detection accuracy of trustworthiness when they controlled for the perceiver’s age: high-trusters were able to detect the trustworthiness of others with more accuracy than low-trusters.

Conclusions: adaptive advantages of altruism detection exists only when actors choose potential alternative partners, and high trusters who are willing to choose new partners were more accurate in detecting other’s trustworthiness via facial expressions than low-trusters were.

Imagine that you are a banker with a limited amount of money to lend. If you advance loans to people who are the poorest credit risks, you are taking a great gamble that they will default on their loans and you will go out of business. This sets up a paradox: the people who most need the money are also the worst credit risks and thus cannot get a loan, whereas the people who least need the money are also the best credit risks and thus it is that the rich get richer.

The evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides call this the Banker’s Paradox, and they apply it to a deeper evolutionary problem: to whom should we extend our friendship? The Banker’s Paradox, they suggest, “is analogous to a serious adaptive problem faced by our hominid ancestors: exactly when an ancestral hunter-gatherer is in most dire need of assistance, she becomes a bad ‘credit risk’ and, for this reason, is less attractive as a potential recipient of assistance.”

If we think of life as an economy, and if we count resources as anything we have that could help others — including and especially friendship — by the logic of the Banker’s Paradox we have to make difficult choices in assessing the credit risk of people we encounter. In evolutionary theory the larger problem to be solved here is altruism: why should I sacrifice my genes for someone else’s genes? Or, more technically, an altruistic act is one that lowers my reproductive success while simultaneously raising the reproductive success of someone else.

Standard theory suggests two evolutionary pathways to altruism: kin selection (“blood is thicker than water”) and reciprocal altruism (“I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine”). By helping my kin relations, and by extending a helping hand to those who will reciprocate my altruism, I am helping myself. Thus, there will be a selection for those who are inclined to be altruistic … to a point. With limited resources we can’t help everyone and so we must assess credit risks, and some people are better risks than others. Here again is the Banker’s Paradox: those most in need of assistance are the least likely to be given help, and so yet again the rich get richer.

But not always, because fair weather friends may be faking their signs of altruistic tendencies and later fail to come to our aid when the weather turns decidedly stormy. By contrast, true friends are those who are deeply committed to our welfare regardless of the potential for reciprocity. “It is this kind of friend that the fair weather friend is the counterfeit of,” Tooby and Cosmides continue. “If you are a hunter-gatherer with few or no individuals who are deeply engaged in your welfare, then you are extremely vulnerable to the volatility of events — a hostage to fortune.” The worse the environment the more important it is that we have true friends, and the environment of our evolutionary past was no picnic.

Evolution, it is suggested, would have selected for adaptations to work around the Banker’s Paradox dilemmas, including selecting us to:

1. seek recognition from our fellow group members for our trustworthiness and reliability,
2. cultivate those attributes most desired by others in our group,
3. participate in social activities that recognize and reinforce such pro-social attributes,
4. avoid social activities that lead to untrustworthy actions and therefore a negative reputation,
5. notice similar attributes of trustworthiness in others, and
6. develop the ability to discriminate between true and fair weather friends.

Thus, Tooby and Cosmides conclude, the Banker’s Paradox leads us to an evolved psychology where “if you are unusually or uniquely valuable to someone else — for whatever reason — then that person has an uncommonly strong interest in your survival during times of difficulty. The interest they have in your survival makes them, therefore, highly valuable to you. The fact that they have a stake in you means … that you have a stake in them. Moreover, to the extent they recognize this, the initial stake they have in you may be augmented.” Through such augmentation can the poor become rich through the evolved foundation of friendship.

If this sounds like I have reduced human relationships to nothing more than credit calculations and reciprocal relations, in my book The Science of Good and Evil, I demonstrate how kin selection and reciprocal altruism led to the evolution of deep and real moral emotions that include love, friendship, and trust, because it is not enough to fake being a good and faithful spouse, friend, or partner; you actually have to believe it yourself, and actions follow beliefs. Thus it is that morality is real and transcendent, and human relations genuine and deeply ingrained in our nature.

In The Mind of the Market I integrate hundreds of findings from the new science of behavioral economics to demonstrate how we all make money mistakes. Armed with this knowledge the hope is that we can avoid such errors in financial judgment. Here are the top ten money mistakes that we all make and how to avoid them.

1. Be Willing to Admit Mistakes. Cognitive dissonance can be reduced by changing one of the two conflicting thoughts that are causing the uncomfortable tension. This is best done by carefully examining the logic and premises behind each thought and recognizing that one of them is wrong. Instead of rationalizing through self-justification that both positions are correct, or that your actions were somehow justified, be willing to change your mind. Instead of saying “mistakes were made,” admit “I was wrong.”
2. Look for the Gorilla. Because of inattention blindness, if you focus too much on the details you’ll miss the obvious. Think out of the box, change perspectives. Look for new patterns, be playful, relaxed, and see the bigger picture. Be curious, ask why, examine the unexpected.
3. Attend to Your Blind Spots. Because of the blind spot bias, we see the blind spots of others but we don’t see them in ourselves, including the cognitive biases presented in this chapter! There is no sure-fire prophylactic against the power of these biases, but self-awareness of your own cognitive shortcomings is the first step.
4. Losses are Twice as Painful as Gains are Pleasurable. The principle of loss aversion dictates that we will fear losses twice as much as we look forward to gains, and thus we should keep this in mind when we are thinking about selling a losing stock but hesitate because we don’t want to feel the pain of a loss. On the other hand, loss aversion can cause some investors to get out during a rough-and-tumble stretch in the stock market, instead of riding it out and cashing in on those big comeback days.
5. Don’t be Overconfident. Most of us, most of the time, in most things we do, especially when it comes to money, are overconfident. The fact is, playing the stock market by buying and selling individual stocks on a regular basis is little different from gambling at a casino, and the odds are just about as good that you’ll come out ahead, or at least do as well as the stock market does overall and in the long run. Studies show that even professional investors and market analysts rarely do as well as an indexed mutual fund does in the long run.
6. Anchor your Investments Properly. Because of the anchoring effect we tend to place values and make decisions based on subjective, arbitrary, or no longer applicable weights that we assign to something, for example the original price you paid for your car or home.

7. Watch Out for the Law of Small Numbers. When you base a decision on a single event or tiny handful of examples, make sure that they are representative of the whole class or category of that thing, keeping in mind that the fewer examples you have the greater the probability that you are basing you decision on a statistical outlier, a fluke.

   Watch Out for the Law of Large Numbers. Just as a single example may not represent the whole, remember that unusual events may not represent the norm. In fact, the larger the number the greater the likelihood that something weird will happen, so we should be cautious not to place too much emphasis on that particular example.

8. Frame Your Money Consistently. All money is the same regardless of the source. Because of the framing fallacy that generates different mental accounts for your money, we should remind ourselves that money spends the same regardless of its source (earned, gift, bonus, refund). When you do come upon some discretionary funds (“found money”), the sooner you can sock it away somewhere out of your immediate reach, the better. If you need a little walkin’ around money, even that should be designated ahead of time, setting aside, say, five percent
9. Sunk Costs are Sunk Forever. The sunk-cost fallacy causes us to consider the past in making future decisions when the past has no influence on future events. We must always recalibrate our assessments on a day-to-day basis and not stay in a losing investment, a depreciating home, a lemon of a car, a failing business, or dead-end relationship.
10. Challenge Your Most Cherished Assumptions. To combat the confirmation bias, seek peer review, constructive criticism, and feedback. Self-skepticism is the antidote for all of these cognitive biases and fallacies of thinking, and we need more of it in our personal lives, in investing, in business, in the law, and especially in economics and politics. Judges should spell out to juries that the confrontational combative nature of the law that pits lawyers against one another depends on the power of confirmation bias, and especially alert them to the fact that lawyers practice it when they mine data selectively to bolster their client’s case. CEOs should assess skeptically the enthusiastic recommendations of their VPs and demand to see contradictory evidence and alternative evaluations of the same plan. Politicians need a stronger peer-review system that goes beyond the churlish opprobrium of the campaign trail. For example, I would love to see a political debate in which the candidates were required to make the opposite case — if one candidate is for gun control, the other should take five minutes to make the opponent’s case against gun control. If nothing else, it would outline the terms of the debate for the viewing audience with greater clarity.

Day 2. November 8, 2008

“Memo to all American speakers: At some point during your talk please apologize for George W. Bush and make a joke about his stupidity, then thank God for Obama (even you atheists) and mention that you voted for him.” Although no such paper memo was distributed to the speakers, by the second day I began to wonder if it was a tacit agreement nonetheless, since nearly everyone did it. Except me.

On this day the German ethologist and evolutionary psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, author of the excellent book, Gut Feelings, began with a funny story about an economics professor who was struggling to decide if he should take a new job position at another university, when a colleague told him to just compute the value and diminishing marginal utility of each option and then calculate the decision, “just like you teach your economics students to do.” The professor’s response: “Oh, come on, you don’t understand, this is serious!” His point was that when it comes to real life most of us make most of our decisions under great uncertainty. We use our gut feelings instead, and more often than not that works just as well as complex models. Gigerenzer’s most notable example was an economist (I believe it was Harry Markowitz) who received the Nobel Prize for his complex model of how best to make investments, but when it came to his own portfolio Markowitz reverted to a simple 1/n formula of the equal distribution of funds over a large number of investment tools.

Then the evolutionary biologist David Barash spoke about redirected aggression, recounting a story about how when his horse kicked his dog, his dog bit the horse. That’s directed aggression. More often than not, however, when A kicks B, B kicks C. Why? Reputation. If B does not kick C then others will start kicking him. (This assumes that if you kick A back, he’ll kick your butt for good.) Bush’s invasion of Iraq was redirected aggression from 9/11, says Barash, because there is no definitive state of Al Qaeda to kick back. Barash was followed by his wife, Judith Eve Lipton, who spoke about the myth of monogamy (take home message: just because animals are polygamous and promiscuous doesn’t mean you should be), reminding the audience that her and Barash have been faithfully married for over three decades. Some myth.

The funniest talk of the day was by Dan Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist who stumbled into happiness research after his mother told him to marry a nice Jewish girl and then make lots of babies and money. Effectively blending data and humor, Gilbert said that the research mostly confirms his mom’s intuitions: married people are happier than unmarried/divorced people, money makes you more happy until you reach a certain level (above the poverty line), after which there is diminishing marginal utility — making more money makes you happier, but less so the more you make. Bill Gates’s happiness is only marginally higher than, say, Richard Branson’s happiness. I should have such a diminishing returns problem. As for children, well, it’s a qualified yes. Anecdotally, says Gilbert, most people, retrospectively, will say that their children makes them happier, but if you employ a survey technique of daily/hourly monitoring of happiness, women report that child care is just barely above household chores on the happiness scale, but well below eating and hanging out with friends.

Later that afternoon, the “armchair economist” Steven Landsburg (who has a book by that title) gave us one of the best lessons of the weekend: “When people are shielded from the consequences of their actions, the outcomes are usually bad.” He then gave us a view of the world through an economist’s eyes. For example, how much pollution do we want, 0%? No. Without pollution we could not drive, fly, or live. But we don’t want 100% pollution, because then we’d all be dead. We need just enough pollution. How much is that? Landsburg’s answer: “Beats me!” But he explained that whenever there is a problem of too much or too little X (sex, pollution, fire departments, etc.), you consider the cost-benefit ratios, especially the ones the decision makers were shielded from, then you follow the logic wherever it leads you.

Next we heard from the Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams, who made the trip to Sweden for her work on eliminating land mines. Themes of her talk: Obama good. Bush bad. Nuclear power bad. Oil bad. Invasion of Iraq bad. American consumers bad. Experts bad. World leaders bad, especially Bush. 20% of people (bad Americans) use 80% of the world’s resources. And Bush is bad. And there weren’t even any jokes.

Williams was followed by the evolutionary psychologist David Buss, the world’s leading expert on why people fuck, technically known as “strategies of human mating.” Desire is at the foundation of the entire mating system, which shapes the tactics we employ. When thinking about evolution by natural selection we need to get past the emphasis on nature red in tooth and claw. We don’t just make war. We also make love. Darwin was troubled by mysteries that could not be explained by natural selection. “The sight of the peacock’s tail gives me nightmares,” he wrote in his notebook. The answer Darwin devised was sexual selection. There are two types. (1) Intra-sexual competition: competition between males for females (stags locking horns). Whatever qualities lead to success in these contests get passed on to offspring. In humans, males compete for status hierarchy for greater resources: mates, food, healthcare. (2) Inter-sexual selection: preferential mate choice. Female choice. As in: women control sex. This is a classic case of science confirming what every guy in the world already knows.

Sexual selection leads to a menu of mating strategies: long-term mating, short-term mating, extra-pair copulation, serial mating, mixed mating. In his research Buss discovered that across 37 different cultures, there were 32 different characteristics that very nearly all people desires. These include: love, exciting personality, good health, kindness, intelligence, sociable, easy going. Of course, there is cultural variability. For example, the desire for virginity and chastity is indispensable in China, but in Sweden the Virgin Mary would have a hard time getting a date. What do men want? A fertile mate. What does fertility look like? Cues that are statistically associated with certain underlying qualities. Cues to youth and health, for example, may be found in a symmetrical face, clear complexion, an hourglass figure, and a waist-to-hip ratio of .70. Get your measuring calibers out boys! What do women want? Resources. Women have a heavy metabolic investment in children and so need a partner with good resources. Cues: ambition, industriousness … and a Bentley Continental.

The geneticist Dean Hamer, discoverer of the gay gene, the god gene, and the men-don’t-ask-for-directions gene, asked “What Makes People Gay?” Historically, theories have included: Religion (bad person), Freud (bad family), Skinner (bad role models), choice (bad decision), and social constructionism (bad environment). That’s the wrong question, says Hamer. The right question: what makes people straight? Why are people heterosexual? Everyone answers: it’s biological, natural, because that’s how we pass on our genes. We have a strong genetic program to desire people of the opposite sex. But if it is genetic, there is variation, which means that there will be variation in our sexual orientation genes, and thus there will a range of sexual preferences. He used Kinsey’s 0-6 scale from straight to gay, with bisexual at 3 (and, what, Richard Simmons at 6?). But there are male-female differences in sexual orientation, with men either completely gay or straight and women showing a wider range of choices. Why? No one knows. But twin studies show that about 50 percent of the variance in sexual orientation is accounted for by genes. Which genes? Gays are more likely to have gay relatives on the mother’s side than the father’s side. This implies that the genes are on the X chromosome. In a study on gay brothers there is a gene on one chromosome called Xq28, which gay brothers share but straight brothers do not share. But that’s just one example. It is more likely that there are at least 50 genes, on a variety of chromosomes, involved in sexual orientation, so there is no “the” gay gene.

Since gays don’t have children, how would these gay genes get passed down through the generations? According to Hamer (if I got this right), a gene that makes men sexually attractive may also occasionally make men gay, but it will make females want to have sex with these super sexually attractive males (some of whom are gay). This suggests a simple sexual selection model that keeps the gene complex for homosexuality in the population. If I’m understanding this correctly, I think this refutes my unscientific theory for why we should embrace gay marriage: that more gay guys means more straight sex for straight guys. Apparently not.

Lame jokes aside, why in the world did Proposition 8 — banning gay marriage — pass in my hyper-liberal state of California? I put the question to Hamer. His answer: a lot of liberals, especially in the African-American community, consider marriage to be a separate issue from other civil rights, and thus we’ve got a ways to go for gays to achieve equal standing under the law. Hamer cited one study in which people were asked “Do you think homosexuality is a choice or are people born that way?” Americans were split 50/50. But when asked “Should gays be allowed to marry?” the answer was an overwhelming “No” for those who think homosexuality is a choice, and “Yes” for those who think gays are born that way. Since the science shows that homosexuality is not a choice, one solution to the political civil liberties issue is more science research and better science education.

I’ll close out this entry with a few snaps from my iPhone of an afternoon at the Great Pyramid of Cholula and a smallish but ornate Church of Santa Maria de Tonantzintla, both in the nearby town of Cholula, which I snuck away to during an afternoon break.

This prosaic schedule is occasionally interrupted by lecture trips at various locals, mostly colleges and universities, a few scientific conferences and, once in awhile, corporate events and so-called “big idea” conferences, such as TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design — www.ted.com). A TED clone I am at today, from which I am writing this first chronicle entry is called “La Ciudad de las Ideas” — The City of Ideas (the city is Puebla, Mexico) — “a festival celebrating the creativity of humankind.” It is the brain child of Andrés Roemer, a Harvard trained public policy analyst with a passion for bringing big ideas to the general public, especially young students. Although the price of admission would have made Sarah Palin’s wardrobe director blanch (around $2,000 a head), hundreds of students were granted scholarships to attend, and all told nearly 3,000 people were packed into the Puebla convention center. The theme was “Don’t Believe Everything You Think,” and it was plastered on everything from coffee mugs to stair steps (see photo below)

on the steps of the Puebla convention center

The hotel we’re staying at, Camino Royal, is reasonably nice but not quite up to the images available on its webpage, which through careful lighting turns this 3-star hotel into a 5-star resort. I might have given it four stars were it not for the showers, out of which the water barely dribbles, forcing you to have to lean in under the showerhead to get wet, and then after soaping up it takes quite a few California Minutes (the slow-paced version of the New York Minute) to rinse it all off. But at least it’s hot dribbling water.

On our way over to the convention center, Lawrence Krauss, Steve Pinker, and I quietly slipped into the city’s largest cathedral in search of our inner saints. I dubbed us “the three amigos” (see photo below), but the interior of this church was no laughing matter as it rivals any of the grand European cathedrals from the late Middle Ages. (There are supposedly 365 churches here, one for every day of the year — now that’s serious religion.) One cannot help being awed by the power and majesty of its aspiring domes and shear size. To the 17th century minds who frequented this place it must have elicited the same sense of awe and transcendence we moderns receive from the visual products of our grand telescopic domes.

Lawrence Krauss, Me and Steve Pinker — “the three amigos” — in front of the Puebla Cathedral

The roster of speakers was nothing if not diverse, and nearly everyone brought their A game to the stage. Appropriately, we began at the beginning with cosmologist Lawrence Krauss delivering a tour de force of a tour of the universe, from the big bang to the heat death, and how we know it. A British philosopher named Eric Olson explained his theory of personal ontology, or how we know who we are, through a series of thought experiments (do philosophers run any other kind?) involving the transplantation of organs. If I get a new liver, I’m still me, but the liver gets a new body. If I get a new brain, I’m history and someone else gets a new body because personhood is located in the brain, not the liver (or other organs). After 20 minutes of stick-figure diagrams (just in case we couldn’t follow the logic), Olson ended by asking us to consider if Terry Schiavo was a person or a body. (Recall that Schiavo was the women in the persistent vegetative state whose feeding tube was pulled, causing Congress to call an emergency session to answer the ontology question for her husband.) I thought that maybe I had spaced out and missed something deeper because it seemed to me that the answer depends entirely on how you define a person, but the philosopher Dan Dennett, sitting next to me, confirmed that I hadn’t missed anything.

Puebla Cathedral (interior)

My favorite talk of the day was by the evolutionary psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, who packed his 21 minutes with copious data showing that when it comes to objective measures of crime, violence, aggression, and war, these are the good ol’ days. Despite what we hear on the news (the recency effect and availability heuristic apply here), all such measures show that as a percentage of the population fewer people die today by crime, violence, aggression, and war than any time in history. Why? My answer, in The Mind of the Market, is Bastiat’s principle: “Where goods do not cross frontiers, armies will.” That is, free trade across open economic borders obsoletes political borders and decreases the likelihood of two nations going to war. Pinker confirmed this and added to it the liberalizing effect of democracy, with its attendant institutions of law and order, equal justice, civil liberties, etc. Later, over a beer, Pinker cited research that identified the big three deterents to war: liberal democracy, free trade, membership in international organizations (e.g., U.N., E.U.).

The first day ended in a debate on whether religion is a force for good or evil in the world, with Dan Dennett and I on one side and conservative social commentator Dinesh D’Souza and Islam scholar John Esposito on the other. It turned out to be quite a lively show, starting with the stage set up as a boxing ring in the middle and the theme from Rocky playing during our introductions. Hokey, yeah, but it sure woke the audience up after a late lunch (lunch in Mexico is around 4pm). I thought Dennett and I made good tag-team wrestling partners, but Esposito held fast to an academic analysis of the question (“on the one hand … on the other hand…”). After the debate we were inundated with students who wanted us to autograph their programs and snap cell-phone photographs, which sort of surprised me because when I had earlier asked for a show of hands of how many believers were there, almost every hand went up. Puebla, you see, is the most Catholic city of this most Catholic country, where something like 99% of everyone is a believer and 98% are Catholic, so I was surprised to hear so many students tell Dennett and I how much they agreed with our position.

I’ll continue the conference summary in my next blog post…

[webmaster broke this post into two parts. Some comments below are relevant to part 2]