Charles (Darwin) In Charge
My family enjoys your weekly column, but we're wondering why you can't give advice without launching into evolutionary explanations. We aren't always instinct-driven animals like elk or migrating salmon.
--Evolutionary Overkill
It isn't so bad being a salmon. Salmon just wake up one day and swim like mad upstream. There's no existential fretting, "What does it all mean? What will I do with myself after grad school? Am I a bad fish if I sometimes long to put grain alcohol in the sippy cup of that brat screaming on the beach?"
Meanwhile, back in humanland, research in cognitive neuroscience (by Michael Gazzaniga, among others) and in social science finds that we humans aren't the highly rational independent thinkers we like to believe we are.
In fact, as evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, "our modern skulls house a stone age mind" -- adapted to solve hunter-gatherer mating and survival problems. This 10-million-year-old psychology, still driving us right now, today, is often a mismatch with our modern environment.
Take our sugar lust, for example. This made sense in an ancestral environment, where eating a couple of berries might have helped prevent malnutrition. Today, however, we can drive to Costco and have some guy load a pallet of doughnuts into our SUV while we burn .0003 of a calorie watching him.
Understanding the origins of our motivation is not "evolutionary overkill" but our best shot for possibly controlling our behavior -- or at least forgiving ourselves when we fail miserably.
As my First Amendment lawyer friend Ken White (@Popehat) tweeted about S'mores Girl Scout Cookies: "I thought they were kind of meh at first but by the third box I ate in the garage they were growing on me."
"We aren't always instinct-driven animals like elk or migrating salmon."
Actually, we are. That's why a skilled magician can explain what they are going to do and still make you miss it: even you are a collection of animal limitations.
Your senses work in given ways, and you must breathe, eat, drink, defecate, urinate - and procreate. Must. How you do these things is the only part you get to choose.
Radwaste at January 9, 2018 5:20 PM
Radwaste, did you just tell all of us, including Amy, our esteemed Hostess, that we MUST procreate?
What if some of us just want to go through the motions?
L. Beau Macaroni at January 10, 2018 1:00 PM
you must breathe, eat, drink, defecate, urinate - and procreate. Must.
Not quite. You can choose not to eat or drink, even to the point that it kills you. And of course you can choose not to procreate.
Getting back to the point of the column, I have to agree that the constant barrage of evo psych is getting old.
Rex Little at January 10, 2018 1:04 PM
LW and Rex Little: You still don't get it. Amy answers questions based on science. That's her thing. This is where people come to find out how their behavior is a product of millions of years of evolution. Her column is well-researched and presented with humor. There are other columns you can read if you are not scientifically inclined. (Another Amy comes to mind.)
Fraulein Gretel at January 11, 2018 8:38 AM
Yeah, guys, you can choose to die, and to not have offspring. Go ahead.
Let me know how that works for you.
Radwaste at January 11, 2018 2:04 PM
Yeah, guys, you can choose to die, and to not have offspring. Go ahead.
Let me know how that works for you.
Radwaste at January 11, 2018 2:04 PM
I didn't procreate, and never have I had any doubts about my decision, either. What's more, as time goes by, I only grow more certain (and grateful!) that I chose the CBC (Childless By Choice) path for my life.
Nancy at January 11, 2018 7:18 PM
"we're wondering why you can't give advice without launching into evolutionary explanations"
Because that's the whole point of Amy's column. Duh
Lisa at January 13, 2018 8:19 AM
Lisa, it's only recently that evo psych became the whole point of Amy's column. I've been reading her for over a decade, and I enjoyed it more when her focus was more diverse.
Every word Nancy said applies to me as well.
Rex Little at January 13, 2018 2:05 PM
"I didn't procreate, and never have I had any doubts about my decision, either."
That's fine, and I do not second-guess your choice - but your contribution to your family line ends with that choice. If carried across a population, that population would die off. Reproduction is one of the very definitions of a survival trait.
Radwaste at January 13, 2018 6:54 PM
FWIW, with Rex and LW on this one. I enjoyed the column more before it was all Ev Psyche all the Evin time. Just FWIW in case you wanted a feedback from a long time reader. A cite every week is too repetitive, always the same lens.
smurfy at January 17, 2018 9:18 AM
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