Things That Aren't True

One of the most serious problems with the current political climate is that large numbers of people believe things that aren't true. And, the absurdity of some of those beliefs is extreme.

Consider this example:

The outcome of the 2022 race for Governor in Colorado did not hinge on Republican Heidi Ganahl’s bizarre obsession with the ridiculous idea that public schools in Colorado were infested with children dressed up as animals (which she referred to as “furries“). . . . The final six weeks of that campaign were dominated mostly by Ganahl’s bizarre insistence on bringing up the widely-debunked conspiracy theory that public schools were catering to children who wore elaborate cat costumes in class. This is the same nonsense conspiracy theory that other Republican politicians have used to claim that schools were providing “litter boxes” for students; a Nebraska State Senator publicly apologized for the suggestion in March 2022. . . . 

Long after the 2022 gubernatorial race had ended, Ganahl was still talking about furries as she pushed to start up a “Moms for Liberty” chapter in Colorado — an idea that brought “Furry-Lago” full circle. Ganahl launched herself down this insane rabbit hole in 2022 at least in part at the suggestion of a Jefferson County woman named Lindsey Datko, who runs a Facebook page for like-minded idiots called “Jeffco Kids First.” Datko’s involvement was detailed in a story by Rylee Dunn of Colorado Community Media (publisher of the Arvada Press) that explained how “Jeffco Kids First” tried very hard to prove the existence of the invisible furry menace:

Over the summer, the members of a Facebook group called Jeffco Kids First began shifting their concern away from pandemic policies in schools to identities it deemed disruptive to learning. A leading voice in the group told parents to empower their children to find “furries,” kids who dress up in animal accessories, and to record them.

“If any of your kids would be willing to record anonymous audio of their experiences with furries hissing, barking, clawing, chasing, and how it affects their school day, please send to me or let me know ASAP!” Jeffco Kids First creator Lindsay Datko, a parent in Jefferson County Public Schools, posted.

Details like these have not been widely publicized because the Facebook group is private, meaning only members can see what is posted. After being denied entry to the group, Colorado Community Media gained access through a member who wanted the group’s content to be public.

School officials say the group’s activities can be disruptive and harmful to kids. But it has some strong backers, including Heidi Ganahl, the Republican Party’s nominee in this fall’s Colorado gubernatorial race. She’s also a member of the group.

There are other common falsities out there, some of which influence politics or are otherwise harmful:

* The false belief that election fraud is widespread and frequently impacts election results in the U.S. for the benefit of liberals. It is in fact, vanishingly rare, usually unintentional, is at least as common in benefiting conservatives as liberals, and almost never influences election outcomes before being caught. When election administration issues influence close elections voter suppression by conservatives, and unintentional bureaucratic and technological errors, are the main causes of outcome changing impacts.

* The false belief that almost everyone in the U.S. has a valid photo ID (about 11% of adults do not).

* The false belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election.

* The false belief that the United States was established as a Christian nation.

* The false belief that many or most leading Democratic politicians are involved in child sex trafficking. 

* The false belief that ritual Satanic abuse is, or was ever, common.

* The false belief that transgender identity doesn't exist.

* The false belief that male to female transgender individuals present a high or elevated risk of sexual abuse of women or girls, for example, when using a women's restroom.

* The false belief that homosexuality is merely an immoral choice.

* The false belief that immigrants (or undocumented immigrants) commit more non-immigration crimes than native born persons.

* The false belief that illegal immigration across the Mexican border is a source of people who commit acts of terrorism in the United States. 

* The false belief that immigrants are a net economic burden on taxpayers.

* The false belief that vaccines are more harmful than beneficial.

* The false belief that Young Earth Creationism is accurate.

* The false belief that everything in the Bible is literally true. 

* The false belief that evolution isn't real, or that it isn't a conclusively scientifically established scientific reality.

* The false belief that the Earth is flat.

* The false belief that literal demons are real. Of course, the "demons" in the metaphorical sense of past traumas, addictions, and anti-social impulses do exist.

* The false belief that demon possession is an important cause of physical or mental illnesses.

* The false belief that IQ and almost all other human behavioral traits have no significant genetic component and are predominantly and even overwhelmingly a product of nurture. In fact, IQ is heavily genetic and more than a third to more than a half of a great many human behavioral traits are attributable to one's genetic inheritance, while the parental nurture impact on a great many human behavioral traits is widely overestimated.

* The false belief that substance abuse lacks of strong genetic component. In fact, it is one of the most strongly genetic human behavioral traits. 

* The false belief that atheists believe in and follow a literal Satan.

* The false belief in the reality of transubstantiation.

* The false belief that meteorologists control the weather.

* The false belief that U.S. Presidents have a significant ability to influence the inflation rate.

* The false belief that U.S. Presidents have a significant ability to influence gasoline prices.

* The false belief that owning a gun reduces your risk of being a victim of a violent crime.

* The false belief that successful, legal, self-defense from crime with a gun (including by brandishing it) is common.

* The false belief that crime rates are high and rising in the year 2024.

* The false belief that personal injury and malpractice lawsuits are usually frivolous.

* The false belief that climate change isn't real.

* The false belief that climate change isn't caused by human caused pollution.

* The false belief that nuclear power is more of a threat to public health and safety than fossil fuels. There are reasons to be concerned about nuclear power (e.g., the risk that nuclear fuel will be diverted to nuclear weapons), but that is not one of them.

* The false belief that someone who has not committed any crimes more than seven years after finishing a sentence for a previous crime is at highly elevated risk of committing a crime in the future compared to a comparable person with no prior criminal record.  

* The false belief that rape can't cause a pregnancy. 

* The false belief that abortion is more dangerous for abortion patients than giving birth.

* The false belief that miscarriage is rare (something on the order of 1/4 to 1/3 of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and this is an underestimate of the total miscarriage rate because it excludes miscarriages before someone knows that they are pregnant).

* The inaccurate belief that income taxes cause people to earn less (a concept associated with the Laffer Curve) at income tax rates much lower than the rates at which this is actually true. The peak of the Laffer Curve is actually at tax rates of about 70%.

* The false belief that high tax rates are strongly correlated with low economic growth.

* The false belief that prayer itself (as distinguished from community support and knowledge of community support) influences anything.

* The false belief that astrology is valid.

* The false belief that literal ghosts are real. Of course, "ghosts" in the metaphorical sense of recollections of people who have died are real.

* The false belief that the United States has very nearly the best health care outcomes.

* The false belief that driving is safer than commercial air travel. 

Preventing Our Extinction From Extraterrestrial Impacts Is Now Possible

Humanity finally has the proven technology, not so long ago limited to science fiction movies, to defend Earth from asteroids and comets on collision courses with us. 

We know from archaeology and astrophysics that this could lead to the extinction of our species, like the extraterrestrial impact in the Gulf of Mexico that killed the dinosaurs about 60 million years ago, or still devastating disasters that fall short of that worst case scenario, like the Younger Dryas climate event about fourteen thousand years ago (which was probably caused by an extraterrestrial impact somewhere in what is now Canada), that ended the Clovis culture of North America, led to widespread megafauna extinctions in the Americas, and postponed the Neolithic revolution globally by several thousands years.

This technology can defend us from genuinely existential threats to our species, and to life on Earth more generally.

While no known asteroid poses a threat to Earth for at least the next century, the catalog of near-Earth asteroids is incomplete for objects whose impacts would produce regional devastation. 

Several approaches have been proposed to potentially prevent an asteroid impact with Earth by deflecting or disrupting an asteroid. A test of kinetic impact technology was identified as the highest priority space mission related to asteroid mitigation. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is the first full-scale test of kinetic impact technology. The mission's target asteroid was Dimorphos, the secondary member of the S-type binary near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos. This binary asteroid system was chosen to enable ground-based telescopes to quantify the asteroid deflection caused by DART's impact. 

While past missions have utilized impactors to investigate the properties of small bodies those earlier missions were not intended to deflect their targets and did not achieve measurable deflections. Here we report the DART spacecraft's autonomous kinetic impact into Dimorphos and reconstruct the impact event, including the timeline leading to impact, the location and nature of the DART impact site, and the size and shape of Dimorphos. The successful impact of the DART spacecraft with Dimorphos and the resulting change in Dimorphos's orbit demonstrates that kinetic impactor technology is a viable technique to potentially defend Earth if necessary.

R. Terik Daly, et al., "Successful Kinetic Impact into an Asteroid for Planetary Defense" arXiv:2303.02248 (March 3, 2023) (Accepted by Nature).

The other part of planetary defense is locating threats in time to do something about them now that we are capable of taking action. 

Telescope research programs like the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) which will begin in the year 2025, are dramatically improving our database of small solar system objects that can hep us better identify objects that could be existential threats to Earth and require active intervention: 

This multi-band wide-field synoptic survey will transform our view of the solar system, with the discovery and monitoring of over 5 million small bodies. The final survey strategy chosen for LSST has direct implications on the discoverability and characterization of solar system minor planets and passing interstellar objects.

And, when an object and its trajectory are discovered once, our understanding of gravitational dynamics at the solar system scale, and our computational capacity to apply on this knowledge of the relevant laws of physics to calculate the trajectories of these objections, means that we can know almost exactly where that object will be at every moment in time for thousands of years to come.

Another effort to identify solar system objects is using that reality to mine old data in order to leverage the information we already have about these objects.

We haven't yet marshaled the resources to put a full fledge planetary defense system with the capacity to identify all potential threats and neutralize them in place yet, however. And, doing so is pointless if we can't prevent ourself from causing our own extinction with the other main existential threats to the survival of our species in the form of pollution, weapons of mass destruction, and more speculatively, catastrophic missteps in developing biotechnologies or an artificial intelligence singularity.

But, planetary defense shouldn't be controversial, aside from the not small price tag required to address this "Black Swan" risk to humanity's survival. 

Not investing in planetary defense is the species level equivalent of cancelling your health insurance to save money - a pennywise, but pound foolish choice unless you are so poor that you have no other options. 

But, in a classic tragedy of the commons problem, the world's lack of fiscally strong global governmental institutions makes it hard to finance. So far, we are just relying on wealthy nations to foot 100% of the bill to develop it, even though it benefits everyone (even non-human animals and plants) on Earth.

Previous analysis of Planetary Defense issues can be found in this post at this blog.

Another Path For Transhumanism: Design Improvements

When one thinks about the prospects of genetic engineering and other ways of improving the human body and mind, which is basically what "transhumanism" is about, cosmetic improvements and functional improvements come to mind. (The engineering challenges of actually writing and not merely reading a genome are not insubstantial but they are not entirely insurmountable either.)

But many people fail to appreciate the many design flaws in the human body from wisdom teeth, to tail bones, to the appendix, to the design flaws in the human eye, to immune system gaps that have to be addressed with vaccines. Improving these flaws is one obvious and not very ethically troubling task for genetic engineering.

The human eye is marvelous but also very poorly designed. The poor design is evidence against intelligent design and in favor of the “unguided, unplanned, messy, quirky, and historically contingent” process of evolutionary design. A short piece from 2008, Suboptimal Optics: Vision Problems as Scars of Evolutionary History, does a nice job explaining.

Most well known is that the wiring is backwards.

The most obvious design flaw of the retina is that the cellular layers are backwards. Light has to travel through multiple layers in order to get to the rods and cones that act as the photoreceptors. There is no functional reason for this arrangement—it is purely quirky and contingent.

Even in a healthy and normally functioning eye, this arrangement causes problems. Because the nerve fibers coming from the rods and cones need to come together as the optic nerve, which then has to travel back to the brain, there needs to be a hole in the retina through which the optic nerve can travel. This hole creates a blind spot in each eye. Our brains compensate for this blind spot so that we normally do not perceive it—but it is there.

From a practical point of view, this is a minor compromise to visual function, but it is completely unnecessary. If the rods and cones were simply turned around so that their cell bodies and axons were behind them (oriented to the direction of light), then there would be no need for a blind spot at all.

Cephalopod’s like octopuses took a slightly different evolutionary path and have a better design:

But the reversal of the wiring isn’t the only design flaw.

The arrangement of the extraocular muscles—the muscles that move the eyes—is also difficult to explain without appealing to evolutionary contingency. There are more muscles than are minimally necessary and yet there is no functional redundancy. In order to move a sphere in any direction, only three muscles would be necessary, evenly spaced like the legs of a tripod. The human eye has six—the superior, inferior, lateral, and medial rectus, and the superior and inferior oblique. And yet, despite the extra three muscles, the loss of function of any one muscle causes an impairment of eye movement and results in double vision or displaced vision. A more frugal design with only three muscles would be more efficient and less prone to malfunction, as there are fewer components to break down.

If the eye were to be designed with more than the minimal three muscles, then it would make sense to arrange the muscles so that the loss of one or even more would not impair eye movement.

From here via Marginal Revolution which also has some interesting comments.

Life Isn't Fair

Economic fitness corresponds to fitness in other domains as well. People who are successful tend to be well off across the board, even though we'd like to think that there was some kind of karmic balancing between people's lots in life. 

[E]xceptionally successful careers were not associated with medical frailty, psychological maladjustment, and compromised interpersonal and family relationships; if anything, overall, people with exceptionally successful careers were medically and psychologically better off.

- From  Harrison J. Kell, et al., "Wrecked by Success? Not to Worry." Perspectives On Psychological Science (June 10, 2022).

https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211055637

The paper's full abstract states:

We examined the wrecked-by-success hypothesis. Initially formalized by Sigmund Freud, this hypothesis has become pervasive throughout the humanities, popular press, and modern scientific literature. The hypothesis implies that truly outstanding occupational success often exacts a heavy toll on psychological, interpersonal, and physical well-being. Study 1 tested this hypothesis in three cohorts of 1,826 high-potential, intellectually gifted individuals. Participants with exceptionally successful careers were compared with those of their gender-equivalent intellectual peers with more typical careers on well-known measures of psychological well-being, flourishing, core self-evaluations, and medical maladies. Family relationships, comfort with aging, and life satisfaction were also assessed. Across all three cohorts, those deemed occupationally outstanding individuals were similar to or healthier than their intellectual peers across these metrics. Study 2 served as a constructive replication of Study 1 but used a different high-potential sample: 496 elite science/technology/engineering/mathematics (STEM) doctoral students identified in 1992 and longitudinally tracked for 25 years. Study 2 replicated the findings from Study 1 in all important respects. Both studies found that exceptionally successful careers were not associated with medical frailty, psychological maladjustment, and compromised interpersonal and family relationships; if anything, overall, people with exceptionally successful careers were medically and psychologically better off.

Bats Invented COVID

COVID's two original strains, A and B migrated from a particular species of bats to humans in China, in at least two separate incidents, no earlier than November of 2019. Samples from humans near the Hunan market were found by December of that year.

Understanding the circumstances that lead to pandemics is critical to their prevention. Here, we analyze the pattern and origin of genomic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 early in the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that the SARS-CoV-2 genomic diversity prior to February 2020 comprised only two distinct viral lineages—denoted A and B—with no transitional haplotypes. Novel phylodynamic rooting methods, coupled with epidemic simulations, indicate that these two lineages were the result of at least two separate cross-species transmission events into humans. The first zoonotic transmission likely involved lineage B viruses and occurred in late-November/early-December 2019 and no earlier than the beginning of November 2019, while the introduction of lineage A likely occurred within weeks of the first event. These findings define the narrow window between when SARS-CoV-2 first jumped into humans and when the first cases of COVID-19 were reported. Hence, as with SARS-CoV-1 in 2002 and 2003, SARS-CoV-2 emergence likely resulted from multiple zoonotic events.

Pekar, et al., "SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events" (February 26, 2022).

The introduction to the paper explains:

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is responsible for the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic that has caused more than 5 million confirmed deaths in the two years since its detection at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market (hereafter the ‘Huanan market’) in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. 

As the original outbreak spread to other countries, the diversity of SARS-CoV-2 quickly increased and led to the emergence and identification of multiple variants of concern, but the beginning of the pandemic was marked by two major lineages denoted ‘A’ and ‘B’. 

Lineage B has been the most common throughout the pandemic and includes all sequenced genomes from humans directly associated with the Huanan market, including the earliest sampled genome, Wuhan/IPBCAMS-WH-01/2019, and the reference genome, Wuhan/Hu-1/2019 (hereafter ‘Hu-1’), sampled on 24 and 26 December 2019, respectively. All published sequences from environmental samples taken at Huanan Market also fall in lineage B. 

The earliest lineage A viruses, Wuhan/IME-WH01/2019 and Wuhan/WH04/2020, were sampled on 30 December 2019 and 5 January 2020, respectively, and they differ from lineage B by two nucleotide substitutions: C8782T and T28144C. Notably, the nucleotides at these two positions in lineage A are identical to related viruses of Rhinolophus bats, which are presumed to represent the ultimate host reservoir. . . . 

The earliest lineage A genomes lack a direct epidemiological connection to the Huanan market, but, importantly, were sampled from individuals who lived or had recently stayed close to the market. 

Despite the availability of these data, three central questions remain: if lineage B viruses are more distantly related to sarbecoviruses from Rhinolophus bats, (i) why were they detected earlier than lineage A viruses, (ii) why were only lineage B viruses found in humans at the Huanan market, and (iii) why did lineage B predominate early in the pandemic? 

Paramount to answering these questions is determining the ancestral haplotype: the genomic sequence characteristics of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) at the root of the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny. Although the root has often been inferred with Bayesian and maximum likelihood methods to fall on the branch leading to IPBCAMS-WH-01 (Lineage B) or other early genomes, reanalysis of sequence data from the earliest sampled viruses found that three previously reported mutations in IPBCAMS-WH-01 were spurious, and the genome was, in fact, identical to the Hu-1 reference genome. Other early genomes were also found to have spurious mutations, thereby decreasing the overall genetic diversity of early SARS-CoV-2 sequence data. This decreased diversity suggests that prior studies, including our own, may have incorrectly rooted the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny. 

Alternatively, it has been suggested that multiple SARS-CoV-2 introductions from an intermediate host led to separate origins of lineages A and B and that the MRCA of SARS-CoV-2 existed in an animal reservoir, rather than in humans. 

In this study, we analyze the evolutionary and epidemiological dynamics at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. By combining genomic and epidemiological data, novel phylodynamic models, and epidemic simulations, we eliminate many of the haplotypes previously suggested as the MRCA of SARS-CoV-2 and show that the pandemic most likely began with at least two separate zoonotic transmissions starting no earlier than November 2019, with a lineage A virus jumping into humans after the introduction of a lineage B virus.

Epistemology Has Consequences

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

- Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire.

About 50 million American adults (a third of U.S. voters, this may be an under estimate because it omits non-voters who share similar beliefs) readily believe all manner of things that are deeply disconnected from reality and are simply aren't true in a provable manner.

Some of these things include the false belief that there was massive election fraud in 2020 that caused Trump to lose an election that he actually won, the belief that climate change is false, the belief that COVID-19 is a hoax or is on a par with the flu, the belief that mass gatherings without masks or social distancing or vaccines does not spread a dangerous disease, the belief that information from sources such as mainstream media sources, medical experts, and higher educational institutions is completely unreliable, the belief that evolution is bunk while Young Earth Creationism is real, belief in QAnon Conspiracy theories, etc.

People are entitled to their own opinions and have different interests, but they aren't entitled to their own facts. A world where a third of the electorate has grossly inaccurate views about reality and facts is deeply dangerous to democracy and to the future of the United States. There is plenty of room for disagreement left in a world where we are fighting about values and which true facts are most important without having to have disagreements over things that are objectively true and provable. The fact that someone says that it is raining on a sunny day, doesn't make the actual state of the weather a matter of opinion.

The roots of our current predicament are buried in the Second Great Awakening in U.S. history, in the early 19th century, and associated concepts like Christian Fundamentalism and Biblical Literalism. These religious movements and concepts put the Bible at the apex of authority in determining the truth about the world.

One of the first places that the implications of this manifested in the U.S. political and legal system was in the First Amendment freedom of religion court battles over teaching evolution in schools, for example, in the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, since this well established scientific concept was at odds with a literal reading of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

Creationism isn't a product of lack of information. One might have reasonably suspect that this was the source at some point, but the ubiquity of the Internet and progress in K-12 science instruction over the last few decades has pretty much definitively ruled that out as a cause.

Every middle school and high school biology class discusses evolution and other forms of science which are inconsistent with creationism, and even if they didn't, ideas inconsistent with creationism (in its less sophisticated young Earth variety that is the naive interpretation of the Book of Genesis in the Bible) are deeply embedded in mainstream popular culture and unavoidable.

Instead, Young Earth Creationism is the product of a deliberate decision to prioritize Biblical Literalism as a source of accurate knowledge about the world over science, the K-PhD educational establishment, mainstream media, and so on.

The philosophical choices that adherence to creationism (and other aspects of Biblical literalism) requires someone to make in their epistemology is the gateway and lynch pin to all of the other things that a large segment of Americans on the right, especially Evangelical Christians, believe that are grossly at odds with science and observational evidence.

Once you make a choice that science, educators, the mainstream media, the government and should be disregarded because they contradict a literal reading of the Bible, the constraints that prevent the rest of us (including hard core European political conservatives who adhere to non-literalist forms of Christianity) are gone. Therefore, pseudo-science, actual fake news, and mood affiliation can swoop in to fill the vacuum when some highly authoritative figure within the movement (like a televangelist or former President Trump) who is a source of knowledge below the Bible but above reliable mainstream sources, endorses these ideas.

This is why this subset of perhaps 50 million Americans are profoundly more vulnerable to the "Big Lie" than the rest of us.

When I say "deprogramming" in my previous post at this blog, that prompted some active commentary, something which I view as a top priority in the post-Trump era, the main issue I am getting at is trying to get these folks to recognize that the way that their epistemology priorities the reliability of sources of information is broken.

There is more than one way to do that, which basically boil down to various strategies for coping with cognitive dissonance. 

Devout mainstream Christians often decide that there are domains in which Biblical and religious authority is paramount, and there are other domains in which secular sources are paramount (evolutionary scientist Stephen Jay Gould called these domains "magisteria"). 

Some people deconvert or change religions, which is one of the reasons for mass secularization in Europe and the United States in the last century or so (sooner in Europe by a couple of generations, at least, than in the United States, in part, due to the division between church and state in the United States that left people discontented with the established religions in European countries with more choices and left the church with less pressure to avoid tensions with secular authorities).

Some people convince themselves there secular sources are fake as descriptions of reality but that pretending they are real to be able to function in the world is a bit like honoring the rules of nature that apply in a video game or to understand a fantasy novel, knowing full well that video games and fantasy novels don't describe reality. 

But the prospects for American if a large share of those 50 million people don't do something to address the fact that they are participating in making decisions for all of us in a democratic society based upon a worldview that is deeply disconnected from reality are dire.

Reverse Mind Reading

In real life, novel mutations are more often bad than good, because the status quo is tightly selected for being reasonable close to optimal.

The same ought to apply to the kind of psychic or supernatural mutations featured in comic book series like the X-Men and speculative fiction works like the TV series "Heroes." But, we rarely seek the dark sides.

One more negative than not psychic mutation might be "reverse mind reading." Instead of being able to read someone's mind, everyone else would be able to know exactly what someone with "reverse mind reading" is thinking.

One might be able to use it in a useful or positive fashion, but I've never seen it portrayed for good or ill.

Finding A Mate Is Hard. Why?

Do lots of people suck at dating because historically arranged marriage was the norm?

"A considerable proportion of the population in post-industrial societies experiences substantial difficulties in the domain of mating. The current research attempted to estimate the prevalence rate of poor mating performance and to identify some of its predictors. Two independent studies, which employed a total of 1,358 Greek-speaking men and women, found that about 40% of the participants experienced poor performance in either starting or keeping an intimate relationship, or in both areas." 

It has been proposed that one reason behind the high prevalence of poor mating performance is the mismatch between ancestral and modern conditions (Apostolou, 2015a). More specifically, selection forces have adjusted the adaptations involved in mating to function optimally in a specific environment. When the environment changes, selection forces will adjust these adaptations to work optimally in the new setting (Lynch, 2010; Nielsen & Slatkin, 2013). Nevertheless, this process takes several generations, and in the meantime, there would be many individuals who have adaptations that are not well adapted to the demands of the novel environment, a problem known as evolutionary mismatch (Crawford, 1998; Li, van Vugt, & Colarelli, 2018; Maner & Kenrick, 2010). How many people are affected depends on how drastic and how recent the change in the domain of mating has been. If the change has been small, it is expected that most adaptations would interact with the novel environment reasonably well, so few people would be affected. On the other hand, if the change in the environment has been substantial, several adaptions may not be able to interact effectively with the very different environment, resulting in many people experiencing poor mating performance. 

More specifically, anthropological evidence from contemporary preindustrial societies, along with historical evidence from ancestral preindustrial societies, suggests that the contemporary environment associated with mating is very different from the ancestral environment. In more detail, anthropological evidence indicates that in a preindustrial context, mate choice is typically regulated and individuals are not free to choose their mates, who are chosen by their parents (Apostolou, 2007, 2010). Evidence from a sample of 190 contemporary foraging societies indicated that the most frequent mode of long-term mating in about 70% of cases was arranged marriage, while free courtship marriage was a practice in about 4% of the societies (Apostolou, 2007). Evidence from contemporary preindustrial societies that are based on subsistence agriculture indicated that free courtship marriage was practised in 7% of societies for women and 23% of societies for men, while arranged marriage was the most frequent form of marriage for both sexes (Apostolou, 2010).

From here (emphasis added).

The paper is:

A considerable proportion of the population in post-industrial societies experiences substantial difficulties in the domain of mating. The current research attempted to estimate the prevalence rate of poor ma. .ting performance and to identify some of its predictors. Two independent studies, which employed a total of 1,358 Greek-speaking men and women, found that about 40% of the participants experienced poor performance in either starting or keeping an intimate relationship, or in both areas. Furthermore, emotional intelligence, Dark Triad traits, jealousy, and attachment style were found to be significant predictors of mating performance. In particular, higher emotional intelligence and narcissism were associated with higher performance in mating, while higher psychopathy, jealousy and an avoidant attachment style were associated with lower mating performance.

Menelaos Apostolou, et al., "Mating Performance: Exploring Emotional Intelligence, the Dark Triad, Jealousy and Attachment Effects" 10 J. of Relationship Research e1 (January 11, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1017/jrr.2018.22

It would be interesting to compare relationship aptitude in places where free courtship marriage is more v. less recent and what circumstances may have favored free courtship marriage in places where it was an earlier outlier.

My intuition is that this doesn't actually matter and that spouse choice styles are driven more by economics than long run cultural legacies. In particular, I think that it is likely that the historic success of arranged marriage and marriage stability in general was driven by economic realities leading to mutual dependence upon a spouse driven by technology that has changed which made it not very hard for even not very well matched couples to stay together and function. While, in contrast, today, technology has created a world where there is much weaker economic glue binding couples together, so only the most compatible couples can manage to weather differences and issues pulling them apart. Thus, free courtship marriage, a more accurate way of determining compatibility is needed to increase the odds of producing couples capable of sticking together in the absence of the historical levels of economic pressures serving as relationship glue.

The shift away from arrange marriage is quite recent. I have relatives I've met in previous generations who had arranged marriages and so has my wife.

Also, there is a continuum between an arranged marriage to someone that a prospective spouse has never met or even actively dislikes with little notice and no meaningful opportunity to say no, to active parental support and guidance in courtship, to strong parental capacity to disapprove of a child's potential mate, to spouse selection with no parental involvement at all. And, when there is parental involvement there is a continuum between involvement intended to achieve the parent's objectives and involvement in which a parent is trying to optimize a child's well being in a society where the competence of people at making the best decision for themselves is doubted.

There are also possibilities off this continuum, for example, where a woman has no say, e.g. since she is abducted or a POW or a slave or community or religious leaders decide, but there is no parental or family involvement in the choice.

The Domestication Syndrome

NPR's "Skunk Bear" program does a fine job of explaining the connection between neural crest cells, which, among other things, fuel the fight or flight response in mammals which is not advantageous to developing a strong relationship with humans, and the "domestication syndrome" which emerges when this cells are fewer or less well functioning, which are variety of phenotypic side effects of having fewer or less well functioning neural crest cells.

Stranger Things As Evolutionary Psychology Realized

Humanity spend hundreds of thousands of years of its evolutionary history fighting and defeating large, creepy, dangerous animals that threatened our very existence with small groups using rocks, spears, clubs, fire and in the last 70,000 years or so, bows and arrows.

We won that never ending war many thousands of years ago. Animals, wild and domestic, kill a tiny, tiny share of all humans today. It isn't quite zero, but out of 7,600,000,000 people on the planet, the number of people killed by animals in on the order of one in ten million worldwide per year and certainly less than one in a million worldwide per year.

The only living things that are dangerous to us in any significant numbers are microbiological threats like viruses and bacteria and single cell organisms, fungi and plant poisons. Even tiny parasites are mostly a concern in only some regions of the world like tropical rain forests. For the most part we should fear germs and toxins, not lions and tigers and bears and wolves and sharks.

In Europe, we were so thorough that even almost all of the seriously poisonous snakes, frogs and spiders are gone.

The only megafauna, or for that matter non-microscopic fauna, that poses a serious threat to us anymore is man.

But, we still have innate fears that served us well for well over 90% of our evolutionary history. We are built to fear snakes and spiders and killer animals lurking in the dark and falling. We are built to battle monsters. If there are none, we are compelled to invent them mythologically so we can fulfill our already achieved destiny vicariously. It is terrifying, but it is also exhilarating and an embrace of our humanity.

Stranger Things and a thousand other manifestations of our culture stokes those ancient atrophied instincts. Until ten thousand years ago, we were all hunters and gatherers, some on land and some in the sea. It took thousands of additional years until most of us were farmers and herders. Even Europe had hunters and gatherers as recently as a thousand years ago or so.

Now, hunters and gatherers in any meaningful sense, number in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands globally. The other 99.99%+ of us rely on farming for food and in the developed world, more than 95% of us don't produce food or other natural resources at all. Well over two-thirds of us don't even directly manufacture or build anything from natural resources, except as a minor, economically irrelevant hobby. Increasingly few of us even hunt as a hobby.

Reconciling hundreds of years of evolution with modern life is one of the most fundamental big picture issues for humanity as we build a new civilization and society. And, it only gets worse going forward. 

Planes and automobiles are starting to drive themselves, leaving us one visceral experience using hand-eye-foot coordination and our spatial sensations in our lives.

As we learn the hidden medical dangers of contact sports, like the epidemic of concussions in football, we will back away from that outlet as well.

Bit by bit we are engineering our society so that violent crime is suppressed, and with it the usefulness of self-defense training. And, the violent crime that remains is often committed with guns, which are instincts aren't terribly well honed to respond to in optimal ways.

Video games remain one of the few outlets for these natural instincts. Is it any wonder that some many people are utterly absorbed by them?

As a species, we are trying to learn how to domestic ourselves, because the world isn't wild anymore. But, these instincts run so deeply into who were are as people, that the task is not a trivial one.

This is particularly challenging in a democracy. Democracy is relatively new under the sun. And, to the extent it works, it leaves us with a government run people masses of people not designed to face modern challenges, not rigorously trained to overcome circumstances where instinct and good policy are at odds. Large cities and massive empires aren't unprecedented in history, but they are themselves recent inventions. We were not built to operate such huge social collectives. We have social instincts built for hunting bands and chiefdoms, not empires and metropolises. Why should we think then, that the public will of the masses is going to provide wise insight into running these institutions?

Quote Of The Day

[T]he brain accounts for about 2–3% of total body weight, but it consumes 25% of the body’s energy [at rest].

 - Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari.

Thinking burns calories.

What Do Baby Mamas See In Ex-Cons?

The Typical Colorado Former Inmate

Consider a typical Colorado former prison inmate.

Like 90% of Colorado prison inmates, he is male. Like a plurality of Colorado prison inmates, he is white. All three racial/ethnic categories are common in Colorado prisons. "Colorado's inmates are 45% Anglo, 32% Hispanic, 20% African American, 3% Native American and 1% Asian. Colorado as a whole is 71% Anglo, 20% Hispanic, 4% African American, 1% Native American and 3% Asian." But, he is a United States citizen who was born in the United States.

Most Colorado prison inmates aren't just people who committed a crime, they are actually criminals. Like most male Colorado prison inmates, he was convicted of some sort of crime of violence or sex offense. He pleaded guilty to the offense and has probably spent at least five years of his adult life in prison. He has been incarcerated more than once, although some of his prior periods of incarceration were as a juvenile and in a local jail for a misdemeanor. And, he has spent some time on probation and parole. 

Like 40% of Colorado prison inmates (and a larger percentage of male inmates) he is associated with a criminal gang and like many "marginal" gang members first joined it while incarcerated when he needed the protection from other inmates that it offered.

His anti-social behavior isn't new. It has a lot to do with why he didn't graduate from high school and was already discernible when he was in middle school. 

Like 82% of Colorado prison inmates of both genders, he has a moderate to severe substance abuse problem (i.e. he is an alcoholic and/or a drug abuser). He was probably under the influence of marijuana or cocaine when he was arrested. He experienced a traumatic brain injury that has had a negative impact on his behavior at some point. 

His family wasn't affluent or well educated. His parents were briefly married, but they aren't married now. He's never been married himself.

Like the median Colorado inmate, he has a few minor job skills but they are inadequate in the current job market. He did not graduate from high school but did earn his GED while in prison. He was a below average IQ but not low enough to count as developmentally disabled. He isn't registered to vote, even though he's now eligible to register to vote because he completed his most recent parole. He is not a military veteran. He is frequently and intermittently unemployed, in part due to poor behavior on the job, and he doesn't get paid much when he does work. Economically, as men in Colorado go, he is one of the worst providers there is.

What Is Remarkable About The Typical Colorado Former Inmate?

The point of all of this is not to beat an old drum. The point of this is to highly something that is remarkable.

What is it? 

This typical Colorado inmate will have, on average, as many children over the course of his lifetime as the average man in Colorado with no criminal record, although he will have his children either too early to be socially acceptable, or in middle age, after he has "aged out" of the criminal justice system, or both. Demographers talk about "make up fertility" on the part of released felons.

In all likelihood he won't marry the mother of his children, and if he does, he will in all likelihood end up divorced in fairly short order. But, despite the fact that about 15% of men never have children, he isn't any more likely to be one of them than anyone else.

It is hard to imagine a less attractive mate for a woman than a typical, middle aged ex-con, yet these men nonetheless manage to find women who are willing to bear their children on a very consistent basis. And, there is no reason to think that this is anything other than an at least tacit choice of a mother who chose to bear a child when she get pregnant in an era when a variety of birth control methods are available, there is a "day after pill" that can prevent conception if there is an "accident" and abortion is also available. The instantly observable social and interpersonal tells of social class are also strong enough that few women are going to deeply mismeasure the fact that they are entering into a relationship with a "bad boy" even if they don't know all of the details of his sordid past and all of his personal idiosyncratic flaws.

There are a few saints who go to prison based upon wrongful convictions or who make a horrible, uncharacteristic, once in a lifetime mistake for understandable but unjustified reasons. But, for the most part, the path to prison is paved with a lot of personal baggage that also makes a typical ex-con both a criminal and a pretty undesirable partner in many other respects. 

Not only is he not the model partner and likely to leave her, in addition he often puts his baby mama or her children at risk of becoming victims of domestic violence, of being collateral damage inflicted by others against his loved ones as a result of his criminal activity, and may drag her into criminal liability herself from actions that flow mostly from the fact that she is in a relationship with him. If you want to absorb those risks in a presentation unclouded by racial confounds, go see the movie Baby Driver.

Yet, nonetheless, these men find girlfriends and those girlfriends have their children, although usually in a fairly short relationship (perhaps because that makes it less likely that she will discover the less desirable aspects of his character). The young male protagonist in Baby Driver in involved in a lot of violent criminal activity and gets a deserved (but mild as a result of his youth and virtues) punishment, but he still manages to win over a down on her luck young woman anyway.

In my mind, the fact that this happens anyway is a pretty remarkable mystery that doesn't have an adequate answer yet in the social science. 

There is a cad v. dad debate in the social sciences, which suggests some reasons that those baby mamas tend to be young. And, some researchers blame it on irrational hormonal motivations (also here). But, those debates hinge on assuming that the cad is sexy and exciting, and while some "original Gs" may be able to pull that off, there are also many typical former Colorado inmates for whom you'd be putting lipstick on a pig to call sexy and exciting. As one paper in the field summarized the hypothesis:

Recent studies indicate that for long-term relationships, women seek partners with the ability and willingness to sustain paternal investment in extended relationships. For short-term relationships, women choose partners whose features indicate high genetic quality.

It is hard to characterize the typical former inmate described above as someone of "high genetic quality" in the modern world where brains, self-discipline and an ability to play well with others is everything. Yet, somehow, women don't steer clear of these men and trust them to be fathers of their children anyway. Somehow, hormones steer a significant number of women towards bad boys even when they aren't of high genetic quality by modern standards.

Perhaps the best answer may be the evolutionary psychology hypothesis that today's brutes, while highly dysfunctional in modern society, are the kind of men who were selectively fit in the less civilized past when our instincts and hard wired predispositions were established. In our dim evolutionary pre-history, violent and ruthless men survived, while wimps, no matter how smart and well socialized, died.

But, it is hard to know if this is a real reason or merely a "just so story."

An alternative possibility is that assortive mating is a powerful social force and that in a highly stratified market for partners and prospective co-parents, for women at the bottom of the heap themselves who have only everyone else's left overs to pick from, a bottom of the heap man who manages to stay out of prison may not be all that much more desirable as a partner than one who goes to prison, so the marginal comparison she faces may not be as steep as the profile above, implicitly comparing the typical former prison inmate to the "average" man in the community would suggest.

The trouble with this hypothesis is that it is somewhat implausible to think that even if men are picky in choosing their primary partner, that it is so much harder to a low status woman to be a mistress of a much higher status man than to be the abandoned lover of a very low status former inmate. And, why should it matter to her if she will probably end up as a single mother either way? But, perhaps a perceived greater possibility that she might win permanent status as the primary partner of the lower status man makes it worthwhile for her to settle for him, even if often doesn't work out with him either, and perhaps she might feel she has more in common with him as a fellow inhabitant of the lowest social stratum.

An Aside For Another Day

It is also worth noting, as an aside for another day, that the people who end up becoming criminals are overwhelmingly the least economically fit members of our society, and that in the lion's share of cases, the motivations for crime are economic ones.

Criminal gangs exist and are so common among criminals, in addition to serving as a means of mutual self-defense in under-regulated prison environments, because they act as firms that make most of their money these days selling vice in unsavory black markets (usually illegal drugs and prostitution), as alternatives like theft and extortion has grown less profitable, gambling has been legalized, and loan sharking is less attractive because there are legitimate alternatives.

Americans Doubt Evolution Far More Than Comparably Wealthy Nations

From here.

The United States is the clear outlier. But why?

Rather than simply being ill informed, lots of Americans are actively anti-evolution because that is part of the doctrine of Biblical literalist Christianity to which they adhere. 

This branch of Christianity is largely absent from the other countries listed, many of which have or did have in recent history, established Roman Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Lutheran, Anglican, Calvinist or Shinto state religious denominations, none of which emphasized this particular aspect of Biblical literalism.

The only Islamic country on the chart, Turkey, is even less evolution believing than the United States, and while that could be a product of national income, if it had been excluded from the fit as an outlier as the United States was in the fit, because it is religiously confounded (many branches of Islam also have issues with evolution theory), the relationship between evolution belief and GDP per capita would be far more linear and far less extreme.

Similarly, including poorer East Asian countries than Japan, where there is not a strong anti-evolution sentiment, would also probably blow the curve.

The Politics of Truth

From Pew Research. Note that this is a survey of people in the U.S.  Within the U.S., Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus in the U.S. include a disproportionate share of people who migrated to the U.S. with H1-B visa and/or work in the tech industry and investor visas. They are not necessarily representative of people in the countries from which they migrated.

Yesterday was Darwin Day.

Sometimes I'm am ambivalent about it. Too many people, in my opinion, try to elevate Charles Darwin to a position akin to Moses or Jesus or Muhammed or Buddha for the non-religious, or to that of Marx for Marxists. But, Darwin was just one more scientist, a giant upon whose shoulders we stand who himself stood upon the shoulders of giants to make some important insights about evolution. Just as Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday is the same day, was an important politician, but ultimately just that, an exceptional man among many, and not a god or infallible Pope.

But, I absolutely do agree that a Darwin Day is as good an occasion as any to celebrate the intellectual power of the idea of evolution which Darwin receives as much credit as anyone for developing, and to express dismay at how many people adhere, mostly for religious reasons, to utterly discredited alternatives.

You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own "alternative facts". But, in a democracy, no distinction is made between facts and opinions.

Would it be possible to devise a political system in which truthful facts would have a preferred position?

A system that would be deliberately biased against vaxers and climate change deniers and flouride conspiracy theorists and supply side economists and Holocaust deniers and homeopaths and the outright lies on issues from crowd side to the murder rate to the "Bowling Green Massacre" that are spewed daily from the Trump Administration.

Republicans, by virtue of having Evangelical Christians are particularly vulnerable to this, because a large part of its base, merely in order to maintain their religious faith, must routinely have psychological systems in place to reject science and reality.

This isn't to say that there isn't room in politics for conservatives. Despite the common left wing slogan that reality has a liberal basis, one can be reality based and still favor many conservative policy positions. But, if a large share of our leaders are not just conservative, but anti-reality, in the long run, our society has a real problem.

To be clear, this also doesn't mean that all issues have scientifically mandated or determined answers. The usual state of affairs in science is that there are some issues that are settled and other that are the subject of ongoing research. For example, while there are multiple proposals out there which are not inconsistent with the evidence to modify Einstein's theory of general relativity in ways that are not inconsistent with the reality (including the problem of "quantum gravity"), all legitimate physicists admit that Einstein's theory of general relativity explains reality more accurately than Newtonian gravity in a wide variety of circumstances.

Likewise, in politics, there are often many solutions that aren't clearly wrong, but a multitude of proposals that clearly are wrong. Simply eliminating the proposals that are clearly wrong would be progress.

Of course, the devil is in the details. How do you implement something like this? Do you change the culture of the political elite, and if so how? If not, how do you change this institutionally in a manner that doesn't repress minority but viable factual positions, but that still heavily burdens flatly disproven factual positions?

Short Takes About Organs In Organisms

* As long suspected, there are distinct patterns of methylation in the epigenome for tissues for each of the major kinds of organs in a person.  And, we have reached a point where scientists can now read those methylation patterns.

* It turns out that taste buds are a subclass of a larger category of organs in the body that analyze the chemical content of molecules presented to them, which appear throughout the body.  The results of the taste and smell organs reach our conscious brain, but, for example, something very like taste buds in our kidneys are used to determine if it is correctly filtering our blood so that only stuff that should be removed from the body ends up in urine.

* Scientists suspected that they had discovered a previously undetected human organ in the 1990s. This discovery was put to use in clinical applications that in 2013 were published and shows a new treatment for high blood pressure.

Removing one of the tiniest organs in the body has shown to provide effective treatment for high blood pressure. . . . The carotid body -- a small nodule (no larger than a rice grain) found on the side of each carotid artery -- appears to be a major culprit in the development and regulation of high blood pressure. . . . Normally, the carotid body acts to regulate the amount of oxygen and carbon-dioxide in the blood. They are stimulated when oxygen levels fall in your blood as occurs when you hold your breath. This causes a dramatic increase in breathing and blood pressure until blood oxygen levels are restored. This response comes about through a nervous connection between the carotid body and the brain. . . . "Despite its small size the carotid body has the highest blood flow of any organ in the body. Its influence on blood pressure likely reflects the priority of protecting the brain with enough blood flow."

The journal article reference is: McBryde, et al., "The carotid body as a putative therapeutic target for the treatment of neurogenic hypertension.", Nature Communications (2013); 4 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms3395

* In mammals, the vomeronasal organ is the one popularly associated with receiving chemical communications from other individuals, particularly chemicals known as pheromones.  While there is some dispute regarding the issue, it appears that the weight of the evidence indicates that adult humans generally have at least one vomeronasal organ, in the form a a "pit" partway down at least one side of your nose (there is no disagreement that the organ is found in the same location in embryos).

Numerous reports of a structure identified as the VNO in the nasal septum in adult humans agree that it is a blind ending diverticulum in the septal mucosa opening via a depression (the VNO pit) into the nasal cavity ∼2 cm in from the nostril.

The connection between the VNO pit and chemical communication among humans isn't firmly established empirically, but there is very good circumstantial evidence to suggest that this is the mechanism.

There is fairly clear evidence for chemical communication among humans. The most notable example is a trend towards synchronization of menstrual cycles in women who live together (McClintock, 1971). Stern and McClintock have recently deduced the presence of two substances that can mediate this response when extracts of skin secretions are placed on the upper lip (Stern and McClintock, 1998). Thus, the signals are most likely to be airborne chemicals. The trend towards synchronization arises from either shortening or lengthening of the cycle by secretions produced at different phases of the donor’s cycle [but see the comment by Whitten (Whitten, 1999)]. The substances involved are unknown and although the effect does appear to be chemosensory, there is no evidence that it is due to vomeronasal sensory input.

Another data point which has been attributed to chemical communication through pheromones, but could instead be due to subconscious awareness of subtle visual cues, comes from studies which have found that men at strip clubs consistent prefer performers and tip them better, when performers are not on hormonal contraceptives and at the most fertile stage of their menstrual cycle, over other performers.

There is likewise suggestive evidence that VNO input should be largely a subconscious one.

Whether any of these findings are evidence for human pheromones is a different question. None of them meet the test for pheromone communication proposed below, i.e. evidence that the communication is beneficial (in the evolutionary sense) to both sender and receiver. The subjects in these studies had no conscious perception of odor stimulation, which could be a feature of vomeronasal input although not a sine qua non for pheromonal communication. The suggestion that vomeronasal input might be unconscious (Lloyd-Thomas and Keverne, 1982) comes in part from observations of vomeronasal system connections in the rodent brain. There are close connections with the amygdala and limbic system (Halpern, 1987; Meredith, 1991), the seat of emotional, hormonal and autonomic control, but there are only indirect connections with the cerebral cortex, generally considered to be the site of consciousness. The main olfactory system in general has good connections with cerebral cortex, but also has connections to the amygdala.

It is also worth noting that pheromones (a term that has more strict and less strict definitions, but at a minimum facilitate chemical communication between animals of the same type) need not always involve the VNO, even though they often do.

Whatever the definition of pheromone, there is no evidence that pheromones are necessarily detected by the VNO. Several recent examples in animals with well-developed VNOs make this clear. The response of newborn rabbits to the mother’s nipple (Hudson and Distel, 1986), referred to above, and the standing response of a receptive female pig to the male’s pheromone (Dorries et al., 1997) both depend on the main olfactory system. The recognition of newborn lambs by ewes also appears to depend on the main olfactory system (Levy et al., 1995), although a vomeronasal contribution has also been reported (Booth and Katz, 2000). Thus, even if an authentic pheromone response were to be documented in humans, that would not be evidence for a functional VNO.

The attraction of the VNO is the synthetic (or naturally harvested and purified) pheromones present an attractive and quite straightforward and non-invasive way to unconsciously influence people's behavior, and alternatively, at least a way of better understanding a possibly rich medium of unconscious communication (although the adult human VNO does clearly seem to be less developed than in many other kinds of mammals, like our olfactory system generally).

* There are some organs found in other kinds of animals that are not found in humans.  Some of the most interesting include spinnerets in spiders, and "the ampullae of lorenzini." These are found "in many fish and sharks, it allows them to sense electrical signals in the water emitted (usually) by other living organisms. This gives them a 'sixth sense' which allows them to find prey that is hiding underground or in the dark. It also is what prevents them from constantly running into the transparent glass of an aquarium."

Frogs have a third eyelid and can use their skin to breathe. We are also learning a lot about regeneration in amphibians, although the fact that this ability seems to be an ancestral state that was lost in less basal vertebrate species suggests that we proceed with caution as this ability apparently came with serious evolutionary costs.

* Some of the more interesting questions about the future of biotechnology come under the heading of "transhumanism", basically, redesigning the human body so that it can do something better or differently than ordinary humans.  This could involve adding a new organ not found in ordinary humans, or perhaps simply a new localized area or organ within the brain that confers some new mental capacity.

We increasingly understand how our complex human anatomy works in great detail at every level from gross anatomy to the chemical level, and can increasingly read the DNA and epigenetic codes that cause the human body to form itself in this way.  For example, while we've know the letters of the genetic code and some of its overall structure for decades, we are starting to now understand the "grammar" of the genetic code.  While in some respects, DNA is harder to understand than we might have naively hoped, many aspects of DNA seem to be uniform across all living things, so like most languages and sciences, once mastered, our knowledge may have broad applicability to unanticipated situations.

With new tools for DNA modification like CRISPR, and even less invasive tools the can modify epigenetic signals, it isn't unthinkable that we could start to write the codes that make our bodies in some way that would create a "transhuman" deliberately, although overconfidence of a type demonstrated in centuries of neuromedical missteps and fads, suggests strongly that hubris will produce unexpected consequences on more than one occasion, as well as raising serious professional ethical issues.  But, in the end, professional ethics never seems to be sufficient to prevent scientific breakthroughs in the long run.

Do We Have Too Few Car Chases?

Modern humans evolved about 250,000 years ago.  Until the Upper Paleolithic revolution, about 50,000 years ago, we weren't even the unquestionably dominant species on the planet.  We were largely absent from the Europe, Siberia, Tibet, the Americas, Australia, Melanesia and Oceania.  We had clearly made permanent ventures out of Africa by then, although the extent of our settlement of India and Iran and Southeast Asia and East Asia at that point is still modestly disputed.  Megafauna extinctions hadn't yet occurred in most of the world.

Our maritime activities were primitive and it isn't clear that we ever engaged in deep sea fishing until then (near coastal fishing, shell fish gathering and harpooning of river fish date back at least to 70,000 years or more ago) and there is no evidence even of sedentary fishing villages.  Until about 10,000 years ago, when farming was invented (an event called the Neolithic revolution), almost everybody lived in smallish "hunter-gatherer" band that foraged for food, although sedentary fishing villages started to appear around 20,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Even once we adopted farming, full fledged cities didn't arise until about 4,000 years ago, and there were significant hunter-gather cultures in Europe (such as the Pit-Ware Ceramic people of Northeastern Europe) until about 3,000 years ago or perhaps later.

Raids on "civilized" farming communities by foreigner "barbarians" were common in almost every era until about six hundred years ago.

A century ago, when the first automobiles were being invented, America's "Western Frontier" had closed and life had started to get positively boring by comparison.  The industrial revolution had chained us to factories and offices indoors after eons as a species living lives only loosely guided by daily clocks and mostly outdoors if you weren't a miner or a monk.

With cars, came, at a very early point, car chases, a rare modern circumstance that feeds into our natural instincts since we have engineered a risk free, excitement free world for ourselves as much as we can (Sweden or Denmark is targeting zero traffic deaths each year as a realistic goal).

We have relentlessly used technology and law to try to make us safer and reduce risk and uncertainty. But, have we gone too far? Is some risk worth it, and even enjoyable?  Why else would TV and movies so glorify car chases.  If not that, how can we build a world that better acknowledges that humans have instincts that need to be appeased in addition to the a desire to simply survive?