Category Archives: status

The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind — Melvin Konner

November 1, 2010 By in Books, Nonfiction, status Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

I want to write a long post about how impressive and detailed Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood is, but to do so I would have to read it at least a couple times more and delve deeply into the bibliography. It ranks with The Evolutionary Biology of Human Female Sexuality by Randy Thornhill and Steven Gangestad in terms of its thoroughness and the density of its information. The Evolution of Childhood discusses, among other things:

  • how the environment shapes childhood
  • how group behaviors work
  • how group dynamics work
  • how life in evolutionary times differs from the present
  • problems with the Freudian interpretation of childhood
  • sexual play or expression among children is common (“Contrary to some claims of cultural historians, anthropologists find that liberal premarital sex mores are not new for a large proportion of the cultures of the ethnological record and that liberal sexual mores and even active sexual lives among adolescents do not necessarily produce pregnancies. In fact, a great many cultures permit or at least tolerate sex play in childhood (Frayser 1994)”).
  • why parent-child conflict is effectively inherent in the relationship

I lack the time to discuss what Konner says about each topic; here’s an example of the subtlety of his thinking:

Most explanations of behavior occur at one level only. But as pointed out by Tinbergen (1963), the question ‘Why did the animal do that?’ can be answered at different levels, four of which were immediately identified in his classic paper: phylogenic, ecological, developmental, and eliciting. These can be exemplified by categories of answers to a question about a short flight of a bird—say, a jay rising from a holly bush up to a longleaf pine. It flies because it is a bird; because flight gave it an advantage […] in its environment of evolutionary adaptedness; because its ontogeny gave it light bones, wings, feathers, and a motor neuron circuit oscillator for flight, through a genetically determined maturation pattern shaped by nutrition, exercise, and practice; and because a fox is chasing it.

This goes on to his own development of how the “causation” behind any given behavior might work. Arguments about the root causes of behavior often boil down to people arguing at different levels:

Levels 1 – 3: Remote or Evolutionary Causation

  • 1. Phylogenetic constraints: “Because an organism of a certain broad taxonomic type, it is constrained to some extent in the way it can solve the problems posed by its environment [. . .]”
  • 2. Ecological/demographic causes
  • 3. Genome

Levels 4 – 6: Intermediate or Developmental causation

  • 4. Embryonic/maturation process
  • 5. Formative early-environment effects
  • 6. Ongoing environments: “These are factors such as nutrition, stress, and reinforcement contingencies [. . .]”

Levels 7 – 9

  • 7. Longer-term physiology: “Though mainly hormonal, longer-term physiology also accounts for other metabolic effects [. . .]”
  • 8. Short-term physiology.
  • 9. Elicitors or releasers: “The immediate external causes of behavior, elicitors are the events in the stimulus envelope that precipitate the behavior; ethologists call this the releasing mechanism, and to the learning psychologist it is the conditions or unconditioned stimulus.”

I’d never consciously realized how levels like this work before. And I’d never consciously realized many of the subtle arguments Konner makes. The Evolution of Childhood is almost oppressively thorough; the woman I’m dating mentioned that I complain about books that are long magazine articles or that gloss their topics, and in doing so she implied that I should be thankful for The Evolution of Childhood’s move in the opposite direction. But I also came to the end, with the 100+ pages of citations, and felt that I’d come a long way since I began. Very few books feel like an intellectual journey in the most positive sense of the word. This one does.

Signaling, status, blogging, academia, and ideas

September 27, 2010 By in Academia, Books, ideas, status, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Jeff Ely’s Cheap Talk has one of those mandatory “Why I Blog” posts, but it’s unusually good and also increasingly describes my own feeling toward the genre. Jeff says:

There is a painful non-convexity in academic research. Only really good ideas are worth pursuing but it takes a lot of investment to find out whether any given idea is going to be really good. Usually you spend a lot of time doing some preliminary thinking just to prove to yourself that this idea is not good enough to turn into a full-fledged paper.

He’s right, but it’s hard to say which of the 100 preliminary ideas one might have over a couple of months “are worth pursuing.” Usually the answer is, “not very many.” So writing blog posts becomes a way of exploring those ideas without committing to attempting to write a full paper.

But to me, the other important part is that blogs often fill in my preliminary thinking, especially in subjects outside my field. I’m starting my third year of grad school in English lit at the University of Arizona and may write my dissertation about signaling and status in novels. My interest in the issue arose partially because of Robin Hanson’s relentless focus on signaling in Overcoming Bias, which got me thinking about how this subject works now.

The “big paper” I’m working on deals with academic novels like Richard Russo’s Straight Man and Francine Prose’s Blue Angel (which I’ve written about in a preliminary fashion—for Straight Man, a very preliminary fashion). Status issues are omnipresent in academia, as every academic knows, and as a result one can trace my reading of Overcoming Bias to my attention to status to my attention to theoretical and practical aspects of status in these books (there’s some other stuff going on here too, like an interest in evolutionary biology that predates reading Overcoming Bias, but I’ll leave that out for now).

Others have contributed too: I think I learned about Codes of the Underworld from an econ blog. It offers an obvious way to help interpret novels like those by Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, and other crime / caper writers who deal with characters who need to convincingly signal to others that they’re available for crime but also need not to be caught by police, and so forth.

In the meantime, from what I can discern from following some journals on the novel and American lit, virtually no English professors I’ve found are using these kinds of methods. They’re mostly wrapped up in the standard forms of English criticism, literary theory, and debate. Those forms are very good, of course, but I’d like to go in other directions as well, and one way I’ve learned about alternative directions is through reading blogs. To my knowledge no one else has developed a complete theory of how signaling and status work in fiction, even though you could call novels long prose works in which characters signal their status to other characters, themselves, and the reader.

So I’m working on that. I’ve got some leads, like William Flesch’s Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction and Jonathan Gottschall’s Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, but the field looks mostly open at the moment. Part of the reason I’ve been able to conceptualize the field is because I’ve started many threads through this blog and frequently read the blogs of others. If Steven Berlin Johnson is right about where good ideas come from, then I’ve been doing the right kinds of things without consciously realizing it until now. And I only have thanks to Jeff Ely’s Cheap Talk—it took a blog to create the nascent idea about why blogging is valuable, how different fields contribute to my own major interests, and how ideas form.

Even nuns work towards status: an example from Danielle Trussoni's Angelology

July 4, 2010 By in Books, status Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

In recent years Evangeline had been assigned to work in the St. Rose library as assistant to her prayer partner, Sister Philomena. It was an unglamorous position to be sure, not at all as high-profile as working in the Mission Office or assisting in Recruitment, and it had none of the rewards of charity work. As if to emphasize the lowly nature of the position, Evangeline’s office was located in the most decrepit part of the convent, a drafty section of the first floor down the hall from the library itself, with leaky pipes and Civil War-era windows, a combination that led to dampness, mold, and an abundance of head colds each winter.

That’s from page nine of Angelology (which isn’t very good overall). Even nuns have hierarchies, which might not involve money, but they nonetheless involve what the organization is designed to optimize—in this case, conspicuous charitability. But Evangeline doesn’t have that option: she has an “unglamorous position” that she appears to know is unglamorous, and the position doesn’t even have “the rewards of charity work,” which presumably include the recognition on the part of those being helped that you are helping them, or, if those being helped feel resentful or ashamed, the sense that one is able to rise above the circumstances. But books aren’t people and can’t provide the recognition that people can.

And the office itself is “located in the most decrepit part of the convent,” yet Evangeline doesn’t gain recognition from other nuns for the hardship that entails—including “dampness” and “mold,” although the “abundance of head colds” is a mistake on the part of either Evangeline, through free indirect speech, or Trussoni, since colds come from viruses, not from temperature drops. Still, the overall effect of privation without the recognition that would make up for the privation is apparent, as is the fact that money isn’t the primary mover of status in the nuns’ economy or society: it’s something else, something more vital to the organization’s purpose.

Even nuns work towards status: an example from Danielle Trussoni’s Angelology

July 4, 2010 By in Books, status Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

In recent years Evangeline had been assigned to work in the St. Rose library as assistant to her prayer partner, Sister Philomena. It was an unglamorous position to be sure, not at all as high-profile as working in the Mission Office or assisting in Recruitment, and it had none of the rewards of charity work. As if to emphasize the lowly nature of the position, Evangeline’s office was located in the most decrepit part of the convent, a drafty section of the first floor down the hall from the library itself, with leaky pipes and Civil War-era windows, a combination that led to dampness, mold, and an abundance of head colds each winter.

That’s from page nine of Angelology (which isn’t very good overall). Even nuns have hierarchies, which might not involve money, but they nonetheless involve what the organization is designed to optimize—in this case, conspicuous charitability. But Evangeline doesn’t have that option: she has an “unglamorous position” that she appears to know is unglamorous, and the position doesn’t even have “the rewards of charity work,” which presumably include the recognition on the part of those being helped that you are helping them, or, if those being helped feel resentful or ashamed, the sense that one is able to rise above the circumstances. But books aren’t people and can’t provide the recognition that people can.

And the office itself is “located in the most decrepit part of the convent,” yet Evangeline doesn’t gain recognition from other nuns for the hardship that entails—including “dampness” and “mold,” although the “abundance of head colds” is a mistake on the part of either Evangeline, through free indirect speech, or Trussoni, since colds come from viruses, not from temperature drops. Still, the overall effect of privation without the recognition that would make up for the privation is apparent, as is the fact that money isn’t the primary mover of status in the nuns’ economy or society: it’s something else, something more vital to the organization’s purpose.