by Chip Walter
Facial symmetry, for example, is universally valued as healthful and therefore attractive. Faces that are symmetrical (proportions between chin and mouth, mouth and eyebrows, etc., that calculate to what the Greeks called the golden number, 1.618 …) are considered attractive in all cultures. Often women who have faces that look childlike are also considered attractive—wide eyes and small noses are examples. Another “golden” proportion is a woman’s hip ratio. In this case a waist that is 70 percent the size of a woman’s hips have become valued because women with those bodies are more likely fertile, and healthy enough to carry a fetus to full term. (All of these calculations are made unconsciously, of course.)
Some studies show that the favored shape of a woman’s breast is a three-dimensional parabola rather than a hyperbola, or even a sphere. On the other hand, the preferred shape of a buttocks in a man or a woman is a cardioid, which is the inverse of a parabola.
Long hair in women is often valued because the ability to grow long hair indicates health. The same can be said for fingernails, rosy cheeks, red lips, and clear skin. Accentuating all of these traits are the bedrock of the cosmetics industry, but valued even in countries where there are no advanced cosmetics. On the other hand, jewelry, piercings, and tattoos can also be considered enhancements.
Women have their preferences, too. They almost universally find taller men attractive, especially if they are at least a few inches taller than they are. The theory is that taller men are more dominant, and if they are, they will bring the DNA and power to the union that will help their offspring survive and flourish. For the same reasons, women generally will prefer men whose chests, shoulders, and arms are slightly larger than the average. They might also find beards or other facial hair attractive because they can make a male appear more fierce and dominant (though in the case of Native Americans this wouldn’t be true because they can grow virtually no facial hair). An erect posture is valued by both men and women. Erectness is a signal of health and dominance. People slump in defeat or when they aren’t feeling well.
In the end, however, physical attractiveness, though powerful, isn’t the only arbiter of desire. Physical attributes can be overridden by the personality traits of any particular person, and more than looks make the person. If they are confident, pleasant, and loaded with charisma, pure physical attractiveness becomes secondary.
Given the differing situations of our male and female ancestors, and the differing brain anatomies we have evolved, some evolutionary psychologists theorize that the triggers for jealousy in men and women have developed along different lines. David Buss at the University of Texas (among others) believes that a specific set of brain circuits evolved in men that makes them innately predisposed to jealousy over a mate’s sexual infidelity. In women, however, researchers have theorized that different circuits trigger jealousy when their mates are emotionally untrue.24
Christine Harris, a psychologist at the University of California at San Diego, suspects there is more to jealousy than that. She has studied the motives behind murder among couples (5,225, to be exact) across 20 different cultures, and found that there was no real difference behind why men or women did away with their lovers. And in another study, she found that both men and women said the emotional aspects of cheating were more upsetting than the sexual ones. In other words, it wasn’t just that their lover had copulated with someone else. Both sexes were driven to murder because they couldn’t stomach the idea that someone they loved may have loved someone else. This is Othello in a nutshell.
To find the evidence that jealousy is hardwired into us, we don’t have to go back any further than our own infancy. Anyone who has a brother or a sister knows this. Study after study has shown that sibling rivalry is ubiquitous. One study, at Texas Tech University, revealed that infants as young as six months did not like it even one little bit when they noticed their mothers paying more attention to a lifelike baby doll than to them. They furled their eyebrows, fidgeted, turned their lips down, and generally had their limbic systems working overtime to send messages to Mom that they were not happy. And this is among babies who didn’t even have a brother or a sister. A second study revealed that eight-month-olds will verbally and physically do whatever they can to distract their mothers so they will stop interacting with another child—whine, cry, laugh, whatever works.25,26
It’s easy to see the roots of adult jealousy and envy in these early reactions, but they didn’t evolve because dysfunctional emotional responses do us much good. They evolved because they are survival techniques, and hardwired ones at that, considering the ages of the infants in the studies.
How is this a survival technique? If you are among the most helpless of living mammals and you notice your primary source of safety is not paying attention to you, getting Mom’s attention suddenly becomes extremely important. Babies in the past who could keep their mother’s focus on them would have survived more often than infants who couldn’t, and those genes would have been passed along. Adult jealousy simply demonstrates that we took this technique and found new ways to apply it, mostly dysfunctionally, to our adult relationships. That it sometimes results in murder only illustrates how strong the drive is.
These patterns, etched in our limbic systems during our childhood, have broader effects, too, according to psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. The concentrated knowledge of our youth “whispers to a child from beneath the veil of consciousness,” they write, “telling him what relationships are, how they function, what to anticipate, how to conduct them.” Later we apply, for better or worse, these past lessons unconsciously to our current relationships. If this “limbic patterning” gets too far off kilter, we can be in for a lot of personal suffering: “boy meets girl, who (reminiscent of his mother) is needy and stifles his independence; they struggle bitterly over the years and resent each other a little more every day.”27
If this view of human interaction is accurate, it means that our limbic systems know more about what we want than our conscious minds do. It means that escaping the gravitational forces our caregivers and loved ones created in our youth is tough, lifelong work, and the imprints can never be totally eradicated. Sometimes this might be good, sometimes not. Who can say what kind of leader, husband, and father Winston Churchill would have been had he actually been raised by his politician (later insane) father and socialite mother, both of whom kept their distance during his boyhood? Perhaps it was best that his beloved nanny, Elizabeth Anne Everest, led him from infancy into adolescence.
We can modify the experiences we had as children, of course. Unlike crickets and frogs, we are not governed solely by our DNA, or even our earliest, most powerful influences. We are consummate learners, after all, and over time we can change the way we behave to get our lives and loves right. In many ways maturing is about controlling and modifying our primal drives so that we can draw power from them instead of being done in by them.
It would be an altogether different and considerably less violent world if the limbic systems of every child emerged into adulthood untrammeled. On the other hand, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Woody Allen, and Alfred Hitchcock all would have been robbed of the fascinating, conflicted, obsessed characters they created to keep us in our seats and turning the pages of their unforgettable works. All of literature and entertainment has been built on the backs of our limbic systems and the conflicts they create.
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With our bulging cerebral cortex developed and folded like an old mitt around the more ancient baseball of our limbic brains, we are in some ways back to Plato’s two horses: reason and passion. Pheromones, hormones, and dopamine, the nerve endings of lips and tongues, and the pleasure centers they activate speak exquisitely to the primal, emotional parts of us—the parts over which we have little conscious control because their workings mostly hum beneath the radar of our forebrain. Yet the prefrontal cortex is there with its higher centers trying to assess, curtail, manage, and negotiate the ol
der drives.
The combination of the two has given us our greatest art and our most heinous crimes; peace and war; our finest moments and our most deplorable. Without both, enmeshed as they are in us, serial murderers, Hitler, and the architects of the Inquisition would never have been able to justify executing the perfectly innocent people they did. Their actions required both rage and elaborate rationalization. But it is also true that Beethoven would never have conceived and written something as soaringly beautiful as his Ninth Symphony, nor Bach created his Toccata and Fugue in D Minor if our brains were incapable of melding mind and heart, emotion and intellect.
This may be the great gift that kissing gives us. It might have started as a way to share pheromones and help us find the most physically complementary mate. Perhaps it still serves that purpose. But a kiss also fuses both love and passion into one fully, and uniquely, human experience; it bonds people in ways no other human act can. It can open the door to love, the finest of human experiences. It may be true that time and again throughout our lives we will continually pull out the limbic blueprint we were handed as children, and unconsciously match our adult loves to it, but thankfully our intellects also make us great learners capable of remarkable change.
Is this why, even in today’s antiseptic world, a kiss sometimes seems so crazy and uncontrollable, so primeval, yet so warm and safe and loving? In one soulful meeting of our lips we can capture all of the colliding forces that shape the core of the human condition, and our personal lives—heart and mind, DNA and intellect, lust and love. This is the limbic system at work—primal, uncontrollable, emotional—run by a brew of pheromones that light up both the brain and the heart. Drawn this close together, our ancient chemical cocktails take the wheel and leave intellect in the dust. Maybe this explains why we sometimes seem to lose our minds when we are entangled with the one we love, and why at those moments we revel and bathe in the insanity of it. And to hell with anything that makes sense.
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What strangely amalgamated creatures we are. What mystifying pieces of evolutionary work. It’s odd to think that any creature’s future can be directed by such seemingly simple things as knobby or nimble appendages. Or that tears should reveal so much about the complexities of the human heart. From the outside they would hardly seem worth a second glance. But that is the way evolution works. The random scramblings of DNA, shifting climates, jungles in retreat, even mountains that moved, all led to the big toe that allowed our primate ancestors to stand. And that adaptation, in turn, changed how our ancestors related socially and sexually, revamped the way we were born, and created a new kind of primate brain. The same big toe made thumbs—and the tools they fashioned—possible, which led to the evolution of minds capable of language, arguably the greatest tool of all. After all, language enabled us to harness many minds together and create culture; at the same time it transformed us into the self-conscious species, beings with minds resolutely aware of ourselves as well as the world all around.
Yet there is more to us than the logic and sense of language, and the technologies forged by our toolmaking hands and brains. We are built on the genetic foundations of wild animals, and many of our primal drives remain with us right down to the core of our being. They are the wellsprings of the passions, fears, and needs that make us creative, complex, and socially bound. Words, remarkable as their emergence has been, simply are inadequate to express many of our deepest feelings. This is why we not only speak to one another, but kiss and cry and laugh, and dance and paint and make music.
In the end it is difficult to make sense of how we came to be who we are, yet we seem bound and determined to figure it out. Maybe we will never get there. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the thing we love the most is the hunt. And it is that drive that makes us apply our sharp minds to bringing mysteries to heel. If so, it seems we need both for the job—animal passion and human intellect, ancient strands of DNA combined with newly shifted versions to understand the remarkably odd and oddly remarkable beings we are. Human beings.
Epilogue
Cyber sapiens:
The Human Race, Version 2.0
Today nature has slipped, perhaps finally, beyond our field of vision.
—O. B. Hardison Jr.
So now, After six million years of evolution, where do we go next? How will evolution, our newly arrived intellect, our primal drives, and the powerful technologies we continually create, change us in the future?
Our current situation is unlike anything nature has seen before because we are not simply a by-product of evolution, we are ourselves now an agent of evolution. We are this animal, filled with ancient emotions and needs, amplified by our intellects and a conscious mind, embarking on a new century where we are creating fresh tools and technologies so rapidly that we are struggling to keep pace with the very changes we are bringing to the table.
Where will this lead? Will we develop still newer clusters of neurons, new appendages, revamped capabilities just as we have over the past six million years? Absolutely, but probably not in the way you might suspect. It appears, if we look closely, that the DNA that has been such a perfect ally to the changes evolution has brought to us, may itself be in for a revamping. Evolution may be prowling for a new partner. And the partner may be us, or at least the technologies we make possible.
The irony is that evolution requires a being like us, a human being, to bring about changes this fundamental. The job requires an amalgamation of high intelligence and emotion, conscious intent, primal drives, and great quantities of knowledge made possible by minds that can communicate in highly complex ways. If you pulled any one of these out, the future, at least one involving intelligent, conscious creatures like us, would fall apart. It takes not just cleverness, but passion, sometimes fear, fired by focused intention to create and invent. Without this combination there would be no technologies, no wheels or steam engines or nuclear bombs or computers. And there would be nothing like the world we live in today. At best we would still be huddled in the black African night, eking out whatever existence the predators waiting in the darkness around us would allow. Not even fire would be our friend.
But the traits that have shaped us into the human beings we are have endowed us with strange abilities, and they are hurtling us into a future radically unlike the past out of which we have emerged. That future will be profoundly different from anything most of us can imagine.
Take the thinking of Hans Moravec as an object lesson. Moravec is a highly respected robotics scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. In the late 1980s, he quietly passed his spare time writing a book that predicted the end of the human race. The book, titled Mind Children, didn’t predict that we would destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or rampant, self-inflicted diseases, or undo the species with self-replicating nanotechnology. Instead, Moravec, who had an abiding and life-long fascination with intelligent machines, predicted that we would invent ourselves out of existence, and robots would be the technology of choice.
In a subsequent book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Moravec explained that this transformation would unfold one technological generation at a time, and because of the blistering rate of change today, would pretty much run its course by the middle of the twenty-first century. We would manage this by boosting robots up the evolutionary ladder, roughly in decade-long increments, making them smarter, more mobile, more like us. First they would be as intelligent as insects or a simple guppy (we are about there right now), then lab rats, then monkeys and chimps until finally one day the machines would become more adept and adaptive than their makers. That, of course, would quickly raise the question “Now who is in charge?” Would Homo sapiens, after some two hundred thousand years of living on top of the planet’s food chain, no longer rule the roost? Would we, in the cramped space of this evolutionary ellipsis, find ourselves playing Neanderthal to technologies that had become, like us, self-aware—the first conscious tools built by a conscious toolmaking creature?
The unavoidable answer would be yes. Evolution will have found, through us, a new way to make a new creature, one that could forsake its ladders of DNA and the fragile, carbon-based biology that nature had been using for nearly four million millennia to manage the job.
The “end” would not come in the form of a Terminator-style invasion; it would simply unfold in the natural course of evolutionary events where one species, better adapted to its environment, replaces another that is no longer very fit to continue. Except the new species wouldn’t be cobbled out of DNA, it would be fashioned from silicon and alloy, invented by us, and once successfully brought into the world, our species would no longer be required.
Whether events will play out like this or not remains to be seen. But Moravec’s scenario makes a point: The world and the life upon it changes, and simply because we are the agents of change doesn’t mean we won’t be affected by it.
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It is strange to think of the invention of machines, even robotic ones, as having anything to do with Darwin’s natural selection. We usually regard evolution as biological—a world of cells, DNA, and “living” creatures. And we think of our machines as unalive, unintelligent, and shifted by economic forces more than natural ones. But it isn’t written anywhere that evolution has to be constrained by what we traditionally think of as biology. In fact, each day the lines between biology and technology, humans and the machines we create, are blurring. We are already part and parcel of our technology.
Since the day Homo habilis three-jaw-chucked his first flint knife, it has been difficult to know whether we invented our tools or our tools invented us. The world economy would crash if its computer systems failed. We can’t live without laptops, palmtops, cell phones, or iPods, which grow continually smaller and more powerful. We regularly engineer genes, despite the raging debates over stem cell therapy. A human being will very likely be cloned within the next five years. We now have computer processors working at the nano (molecular) level and microelectromechanical machines (MEMS) that operate at cellular dimensions. Already electronic prosthetics make direct connections with human nerves, and electronic brain implants for Parkinson’s disease and weak hearts are commonplace. Scientists are even experimenting with electronic, implantable eyes. New clothing weaves digital technologies into their fiber and brings them a step closer to being a part of us. The military is working on a “battlesuit,” a kind of second skin that will amplify a soldier’s senses, strength, and ability to communicate, even triangulate the direction of a bullet headed his or her way.
