An ironic coincidence — on Monday, June 15, I read two articles back-to-back: Andrew Newberg’s op ed piece in USA Today entitled “This is Your Brain on Religion” and Jeff Sharlet’s cover story for the May issue of Harper’s magazine, “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military.”

Newberg is a neuroscience specializing in “neurotheology”, or the study of what happens to your brain when you do religious things, like pray, or think spiritual thoughts, or read scripture, or listen to a sermon. Newberg begins by recounting that in high school he had a Christian girlfriend (he is Jewish) whose family called themselves “born-again Christians”. Although they were always pleasant to him, “they were quite clear that in their view I had deeply sinned by not turning to Jesus. Oh, and because of this, I was going to hell.” That’s nice.

What are the consequences of hearing such negative ideas? Newberg concludes:

There seems to be little question that when people view God as loving, forgiving, compassionate and supportive, this more likely results in a very positive view of themselves, and of the world around them. But when God is viewed as dispassionate, vengeful and unforgiving, this can have deleterious effects on one’s physical and mental health. Again, the research is clear: If you ruminate on negative emotions, they activate the areas of the brain that are involved in anger, fear and stress. This can ultimately damage important parts of the brain and the body. What’s worse, negative emotions can spill over into outward behaviors that generate fear, distrust, hatred, animosity and violence toward people who hold different or opposing beliefs. Thus, it becomes more easy to believe that “I, and my religion, is right and you, and your religion, are wrong.”

Newberg goes on to explain that most Christians are not so judgmental and negative. In fact, he says, it is maybe only one percent. “Unfortunately,” he explains, “this minority often attracts the greatest amount of camera time and ink, too. But what is truly frightening is the fact that 1% translates into 3 million potentially violent citizens in our country alone. And this certainly plays out on the global stage, as beliefs conflict and terrorism fosters fear, hatred and ultimately violence.”

Indeed, in Sharlet’s investigative piece we learn that a good number of these 1% are armed and dangerous — they’re in the military. According to Sharlet, there is a movement afoot to Christianize the military, and they are truly soldiers for Christ — the title of his article comes from an inscription in large red letters painted on the side of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that reads in Arabic script: “Jesus Killed Mohammed.” Yesserie, that should endear our troops to the Muslim countries, whose own signs signaling their attitude toward Americans often feature “Death to” on them.

That is more than a little unfortunate, because the military has actually lagged behind the general population in religiosity, with 20% of the roughly 1.4 million active-duty personnel telling the Department of Defense that they have “no religious preference,” which is higher than the 16.1% of the American public who tick the same box on similar surveys conducted by Gallup and others (although among active military only .5% — one half of one percent — call themselves “atheist” or “agnostic”, whereas around 8% of the general public does). The other 80% identify with evangelical or Pentecostal (22%), Catholic (19%), another 20% as “Christian” (incorporating other Christian sects), and assorted other religions, but next to no Jews (1/300) or Muslims (1/400).

None of this would matter were it not for the fact that soldiers are sworn into the military to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the holy book of their religion. This is what it means to be a secular nation: not that the majority of its citizens are secular, but that its government favors no religion and, in fact, separates church and state. That is not a problem for most religious soldiers, but for evangelicals, by definition they are suppose to evangelize (or else they wouldn’t be evangelicals), and that means trying to convert those around them to evangelical Christianity. And those around them are either fellow soldiers or citizens of an occupied country. Enter the Officers’ Christian Fellowship (OCF), with 15,000 members in 80% of military bases, and growing 3% per annum. Sharlet quotes OCF director Lieutenant General Bruce L. Fister, who equated the “global war on terror” to “a spiritual battle of the highest magnitude.” The Muslims have their jihad and the Christians have their spiritual battle. Onward Christian Soldiers.

In researching his story, Sharlet met with Lieutenant General John Regni, who was brought into the Air Force Academy to straighten out the religious conflict brewing there between evangelicals and others. According to Sharlet:

I began our phone conversation with what I thought was a softball, an opportunity for the general to wax constitutional about First Amendment freedoms. “How do you see the balance between the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause?” I asked.

There was a long pause. Civilians might reasonably plead ignorance, but not a general who has sworn on his life to defend these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

“I have to write those things down,” Regni finally answered. “What did you say those constitutional things were again?”

If that were not embarrassing enough, Sharlet documents how copies of Pastor Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life were distributed to high ranking officers by a superior officer, who instructed them to read it and live it. Why? Because, unbelievably (given the above statistics), the evangelicals in the military believe, according to Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William McCoy, author of Under Orders: A Spiritual Handbook for Military Personnel (endorsed by General David Petraeus when he commanded our troops in Iraq), “Under the rubric of free speech and the twisted idea of separation of church and state, there has evolved more and more an anti-Christian bias in this country.”

The rest of Sharlet’s article focuses on the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, started by Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, whom the three-star General William “Jerry” Boykin called demon possessed, and who was denounced by Ted Haggard, whom Weinstein challenged to a boxing match, never accepted. If Andrew Newberg would like to investigate the brain waves of religious extremists, he need go no further than the evangelical Christians who write Weinstein letters:

“You are costing lives by dividing military personnel and undermining troops,” reads one missive. “Their blood is on your hands.” Much of it is juvenile: “you little bald-headed fag,” reads an email Mikey received after an appearance on CNN, “what the fuck are you doing with an organization of this title when the purpose of your group is not to encourage religious freedom, but to DENY religious freedom?” Quite a bit of it is anti-Semitic: “Once again, the Oy Vey! crowd whines. This jew used to be an Air Force lawyer and got the email” — a solicitation by Air Force General Jack Catton for campaign donations to put “more Christian men” in Congress, which Mikey made public — ”just one more example of why filthy, hook-nosed jews should be purged from our society.”

And that’s just the letters. Weinstein: “We’ve had dead animals on the porch. Beer bottles, feces thrown at the house. I don’t even think about it. I view it as if I was Barry Bonds about to go to bat in Dodger Stadium and people are booing. You want a piece of me? Get in line, buddy. Pack a lunch.”

Newberg is right, of course, when he says that most Christians do not behave this way, but for those who do it is the logic of their beliefs that lead them to condemn those who do not accept Christ as their savior, for according to the New Testament that is the only way into heaven and thus the only path to salvation and eternal life. If you really believe that, you also have to believe that you are right and everyone who believes differently is wrong, and being an evangelical, it is your duty — your mission — to tell them so in no uncertain terms. Now, fortunately, most people are nice and mind their own business, and many Christians also share that temperament, but that’s just the luck of the genetic draw (temperament being roughly 50% heritable). We need a higher moral and legal principle to protect all the rest of us from those who do not happen to believe in the principle of tolerance and “to each his own.”

That higher moral and legal principle is freedom. Freedom is at the core of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and it is there to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority, the deepest flaw in democracy. The freedom to believe whatever you want, and to keep government out of the religion business is, counter-intuitively, the best thing that ever happened to religion. Religions thrive in America because the secular government of these United States allows them to. Of course anyone in the majority religion would like their government to give them special privileges — that’s just human nature. But once you establish a precedent for the government to grant special privileges of the majority religion, how will you feel if, say, in 50 or 100 years from now Islam is the dominant religion of America? (It could happen. It is already happening in Europe.) Still want that special arrangement now that your religion is in the minority? I don’t think so. As Thomas Moore explained in A Man for All Seasons:

Roper: Now you give the Devil benefit of law!
Moore: Yes, what would you do? Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes. I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
Moore: And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you … where would you hide? I give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.

Amen brother!

Last week Brian Dunning blogged about his experience being filmed testing psychics for a Showtime series called “Versus,” that he strongly suspected was a set up to punk the skeptics. I waited a week to blog about my experience to confirm that this was, indeed, a set up. The verdict is in. We were punked. Or were we? You be the judge. Either way, fortunately Brian and I were both skeptical from the get go so they didn’t “catch us” in any Borat-like socially embarrassing moments.

Here’s what happened: Months ago I got a call from “Stephen Cardozo,” a “Field Producer” for “Little Duke Productions,” to do a talking-heads interview on psychics and how to test them — the usual stuff, so I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t check up on the production company because I have never been burned and there were no signals of distrust for me to notice. I drove down to “Occidental Studios” in Los Angeles, where I was greeted by Cardozo, who was polite, loquacious, and jovial, and we sat in the green room for two hours talking. I suppose I should have been skeptical by the fact that I was not allowed on the set for the ongoing taping when I found out that it was Brian Dunning (whose skeptical abilities I trust) who was performing the tests of the psychics. I wanted to observe Brian’s protocols, but I was told that no one was “allowed on the set” because it was small and the cameras might see people standing around in the background. When I got on the set I noticed that this was not true, and in fact there were people standing around all over the place. The make-up woman spent about 15 seconds on me, which was also unusual, but it was the end of a long day so I figured she was just burned out.

Brian and I began a conversation about how science works and how to test psychics when one of the psychics he had tested earlier — improbably named “Shirley Ghostman” — burst into the studio wheeling a body bag on a cart and screaming about how he had Lee Majors in it because he predicted earlier that day that the “Six Million Dollar Man” had died, and he wanted Brian to pay up the $50,000 prize money for psychic powers. I unzipped the bag and there was this fat ugly balding guy with electronic gadgets duct-taped to his body (a calculator on his bicep, a computer keyboard on his hairy chest), about which I had a good laugh (not even close to a Lee Majors look alike!) I told him that Lee Majors had not died, at which point “Ghostman” said that Gandhi had lied to him. Right … Just before that I turned to Brian and said “we’re being punked!” But the spectacle went on for a while longer, growing more inane by the minute, so I played along waiting for everyone to break character and burst out laughing. That never happened, and as I was leaving Cardozo wanted to know if I wanted “security” to escort me to my car. I said “sure, why not?” and some little guy who was hanging around walked me out, as if he was going to protect me from a crazed psychic!

Out in the parking lot Brian told me that he thought the entire day was a set up, including phony cameramen, phony directors, phony make-up artist, etc. He was right. I initially thought that it was just Ghostman punking the Showtime people, but it turns out there is no show called “Versus,” the psychic’s real name is Marc Wootton (a British comedian and wannabe Borat character), and that Showtime has a show under production called “Untitled Marc Wootton Project.” (See the IMDB page.)

Here is Wootton’s “Shirley Ghostman” website.

Here are some other Ghostman punkings.

And here are some British skeptics catching on to Wootton’s antics fairly quickly.

Weirdly, I found this guy in real estate who had a similar experience (punking real estate brokers? — only in a housing crisis I suppose): Beware: Little Duke Productions for Showtime. Duping Realtors on camera while actors cause havoc in LA area homes.

The funniest story of all, however, was the punking of the actress and environmental activist Daryl Hannah, who explained in a Guardian article how she was punked by the same people. I have to admit that the image of a miniskirted “research scientist” in a lab coat who told Daryl how she had been fed by condors in the wild is a hellova lot funnier than Lee Majors in a body bag! Here’s the Daryl Hannah punking article.

From the story:

It turns out that, a little way off, Hannah was introduced to a “director” who looked to her to be far too Central Casting to be true. There were three cameras and 15 crew members, which she knew to be too many for a nature documentary. The “director” then took her to meet a “research scientist”, a woman in a miniskirt and lab coat who was peering from under too much blue eye shadow into the distance, supposedly looking for the perfect “condor release spot”. The scientist told Hannah that she herself had been fed by condors in the wild for three days, at which point Hannah started to laugh, and pretended she needed to use the bathroom.

She calls her manager. “I’m telling you, that was a full-on Punk’d-Borat situation,” she says. “The whole thing was a big ‘let’s make fun of celebrities’ show.” (Later, when I Google the production company named on the release forms, Little Duke Productions, all I can find is a random warning on someone’s Twitter feed: “Beware of Little Duke Productions for Showtime. May be dangerous. Please RT.”) The manager promises to look into it.

Now, here’s the other shoe falling: Brian and I figured out it was all a hoax, so I asked Cardozo in several voice mails and emails point blank: “this was a punking, right?” He didn’t return my calls and his only email answer was this generic statement:

“I did get your messages, but I’ve been in and out of the office, so I apologize for the late reply. Thank you again for participating in the show. The segment we filmed with you, the versus segment may or may not make it into the eventual show for Showtime. We obviously film more than we actually use in the series. Like you, we are interested in looking at all the methods and practices of the self-proclaimed psychics including those who participated in the versus segment. We also appreciated your participation in the segment as it goes to show how skeptics approach all types of people who claim to have psychic abilities. Feel free to contact me with any additional thoughts you may have. Best, Stephen”

So, naturally I concluded that it was the skeptics being punked, and I ranted and released the hounds (think Mr. Burns pressing the button) to go disrupt their show (since retracted!). But then the producer of the show, Misha Manson-Smith (whom I initially thought was a pseudonymic play on Sasha Baron-Cohen, the Borat actor/comedian), contacted Brian and explained: “Shirley Ghostman is a satirical dig at psychics” and “In case you and Michael are concerned about how you might appear on the show, I just wanted to let you know that I think you both came across very well and were excellent foils to Shirley’s idiotic outbursts” and that I shouldn’t be upset because “our show so clearly endorses his [the skeptics] position.”

Wow! So it is the psychics being punked, not the skeptics!! That’s a relief. It seems funnier now, of course, because it isn’t my goose being plucked. But since we’re on the topic of punks and hoaxes, I’m really not sure what the point of these Borat-like events are, other than getting a cheap laugh at someone else’s expense. Although Daryl Hannah’s environmental politics are not mine, what was the point of tricking her out to a condor sighting? Had she fallen for the mini-skirted scientist, I suppose, it would be an indictment of her politics beclouding her critical faculties. But she didn’t. So…

In my opinion, a hoax is only interesting if those who are hoaxed should have seen it coming, if they were blinded by their prejudices and presuppositions, and who were given clues but ignored them. In James Randi’s “Alpha Project” hoax he instructed his magician charges to fess up to using magic tricks (to simulate psychic power) if anyone ever asked them; but no one ever did, despite obvious clues they left behind. Alan Sokal’s “deconstruction” hoax of the lit-crit journal was beautiful because he submitted an article that was complete nonsense and was so chockablock full of the sort of jargon that lit-crit folks love to read that the editors of the journal who accepted it just assumed that it must mean something. But if you simply lie to someone and deceive them so well that they could not possibly have known you were setting them up, it only proves that you are a clever liar.

A review of SuperSense: From Superstition to Religion—the Brain Science of Belief by Bruce M. Hood. This review was published in the Science magazine on June 12, 2009.

During a recent trip to Austin, Texas, for a debate with Old Earth creationists, I paid a visit to Lance Armstrong’s famous bike shop Mellow Johnny’s (so named because Americans butcher the pronunciation of maille jaune, French for yellow jersey). In addition to numerous yellow jerseys hanging on the walls, on the showroom floor were several of the bikes that Armstrong rode while winning seven Tours de France. “People think these are replica bikes,” the shop manager told me. “When I explain that these are the actual bikes on which Lance won the tour, they touch them like holy relics.”

Why people imbue physical artifacts with an almost mystical force that can transmit its power to the contactee is the subject of Bruce M. Hood’s marvelous new book, SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. In an account chock full of real-world examples reinforced by experimental research, Hood (a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol) builds a theoretical model to explain how the mind comes to sense that there is something beyond the natural world, something supernatural. He calls this phenomenon our “supersense.” Our supersense underlies our tendency to believe that objects, animals, and people contain an essence (something at the core of their being that makes them what they are) and that this essence may be transmitted from objects to people and from people to people. There may be evolutionary reasons for this tendency, rooted in fears about diseases and contagions that contain all-too-natural essences that can be deadly (and hence should be avoided). But we now generalize the supersense to any and all objects, seen and unseen, and assume that those seen and unseen objects have agency and intention.

The supersense is not restricted to the uneducated or unintelligent. “Many highly educated and intelligent individuals experience a powerful sense that there are patterns, forces, energies, and entities operating in the world that are denied by science because they go beyond the boundaries of natural phenomena we currently understand,” Hood notes. “More importantly, such experiences are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence, which is why they are supernatural and unscientific. The inclination or sense that they may be real is our supersense.”

In other words, even smart people believe weird things. Why? I have argued that it is because we all have to believe things—whether they are weird things or nonweird things¹. The process by which we come to believe things is called learning. We connect A to B to C, and often A really is connected to B, and B really is connected to C. But we do not have a falsepattern- detection device in our brains to help us discriminate between valid and misleading patterns, and so we make errors in our thinking: type I errors in believing patterns are real when they are not (false positives) and type II errors in not believing patterns are real when they are (false negatives). Imagine that you are a hominid on the plains of Africa and you hear a rustle in the grass. Is that the sound of a dangerous predator or just the wind? If you assume it is a dangerous predator and it is just the wind, you have made a type I error, but to no harm. But if you believe the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is actually a dangerous predator, there is a good chance you’ll be removed from your species’ gene pool. Thus, I argued, there would have been natural selection for those hominids who tended to believe that all patterns are real and potentially dangerous. I called the resulting processes patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents who may mean us harm)^{2, 3}.

Hood’s supersense is a superstructure that incorporates both of these processes. It is the basis of superstition and magical thinking. “If essences are thought to be transferable, we will not consider ourselves isolated individuals but rather members of a tribe potentially joined to each other through beliefs in supernatural connectedness,” Hood explains. “We will see others in terms of the properties that make them essentially different from us. Such an idea suggests that some essential qualities are more likely to be transmitted than others.” He includes among these qualities “youth, energy, beauty, temperament, strength, and even sexual preference.” Many transplant patients suspect that certain aspects of the personality of the donor will be incorporated into their own essence. Along with hoping that some object will convey the force of good, we fear the transmission of evil. Studies discussed by Hood show, for example, that most people say that they would never wear the sweater of a murderer. The possibility fills them with disgust, probably an evolved emotion selected to avoid rotting food and disease-carrying substances. They would, however, happily wear the cardigan sweater of the children’s television host Mr. Rogers, which they believe makes them better persons.

The supersense is so powerful, in fact, that it can influence even the most rational of skeptics. At Mellow Johnny’s, I purchased an array of Lance Armstrong cycling gear (I ride bikes regularly). During my debate with the creationists that night, I was secretly wearing a pair of Lance Armstrong yellow-rimmed black socks and a “Livestrong” T-shirt underneath my suit. My rational brain does not for a moment believe that the essence of Armstrong’s celebrated strength and endurance powered me through the three-hour event. Yet, for some odd reason I felt more confident, and perhaps—given the influence of belief and the power of placebo—I was a better debater that night. I don’t know. But Hood knows that the supersense is all pervasive. For that reason, his book is an important contribution to the psychological literature that is revealing the actuality of our very irrational human nature.

ORDER the book from skeptic.com

On Thursday June 4, I attended the Cato Institute half-day conference in Century City, California, which started out with a lecture by U.C. Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides, one of the founders of that science along with her husband John Tooby. Cosmides’ talk was on the evolution of cooperation, but for this audience she tailored her lecture toward politics and economics (Cato is a libertarian think tank in D.C.), by asking “Why do free societies arise so rarely and with such difficulty?”

Unfortunately, Leda tried to squeeze about two hours of material and powerpoint slides into a 35-minute talk, and so she was necessarily brief as she blasted through slide after slide, each up on the screen for only seconds, making note taking impossible. That’s too bad because there was a lot of data slides that I think the audience would have liked to absorb (I know I would have). Nevertheless, Leda’s central point was this: our brains evolved for solving specific problems in the EEA (the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation — the Paleolithic), and so we have domain specific programs that help organize our experiences. The problem is that the modern world is so different from the EEA that it causes conflicts. For example, most hunter-gatherer societies are egalitarian because they live in relatively resource-poor environments and are often unsure about their safety and nourishment, and so we evolved many cognitive instincts for cooperation, food sharing, and group cohesiveness, because everyone in the group was either related to you or you know very well, so as the political saying goes, we must hang together so that we don’t hang separately. But the modern world is nothing like this.

I’ve written about this problem in my book The Mind of the Market, which focuses on evolutionary economics, whereby the world in which we evolved of small bands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers is radically different from today’s world that is resource rich and with vast disparities of wealth between the richest and the poorest. Thus, we have a natural tendency to resent wealthy people, distrust free markets, and misunderstand the bottom-up process of modern economies and try to control them from the top down, usually with disastrous consequences (e.g., Alan Greenspan and the Fed’s constant manipulation of interest rates sent false signals into the market for the price of money, leading to artificially large bubbles that then burst).

Leda noted the difference between hunting and gathering in terms of risk and uncertainty: Hunting meat is highly variable, success is as much due to luck as it is skill, and 4/10 times the hunter comes home empty-handed. Thus, hunter-gatherers must pool risk to deal with frequent reversals of fortune through food sharing. By contrast, gathering foods is a low risk process that depends on effort, not luck, and the results are mostly shared only within the family and trusted partners, but not to the group at large. Cosmides explained that this evolved psychology can be seen today in which we make distinctions between people in need of our help because they were unlucky (as with the hunters who return empty-handed) versus the gatherers who don’t bring home the vegetables because they were lazy and were loafing on the job. We are inclined psychologically to want to help the former but not the latter.

The political and economic consequences of this evolved psychology can be seen today in debates about healthcare, welfare, social security, etc., which are all attempts to pool risk among everyone in society, but without any distinction between those who suffer because of bad luck versus those who suffer because of laziness or lack of ambition. Modern political states are in the business of redistributing wealth from those who have it to those who do not, and since there is no attempt to discriminate between those who were unlucky from those who were just lazy, the people who earn that money through hard work and talent who then have it confiscated by the government and given to people they do not even know, naturally feel resentful, even though statistically the wealthy are extremely generous in giving to private charities that they voluntarily choose.

Cosmides also noted the psychological difference between working land that you own versus working land that the government owns: the agricultural policy of the USSR allowed 3% of land on collective farms to be private, and it turned out that between 45% and 75% of all food in the USSR was the product of that 3% of private farms.

So, in conclusion, Cosmides noted that there is a mismatch between the ancestral and modern worlds, our minds evolved to navigate family and friends and small groups, certain laws and institutions satisfy the moral intuitions these programs generate whereas other laws and institutions regularly fail in the modern world. Cosmides concluded: “Liberty provides the solution to most social problems, but few appreciate it because of our evolved minds.”

The second talk of the day was by Dan Mitchell, the Cato Institute expert on tax reform, supply-side tax policy, the flat tax, and tax competition. His talk was titled: “America’s Looming Fiscal Meltdown.” We are shifting to a European size welfare state, he noted, dolling out blame to both Democrats and Republicans, starting with George W. Bush, who Mitchell noted in his eight year term increased the Federal budget from $1.8 trillion to $3.5 trillion budget, and then noted Obama says he wants change to even more government, adding another trillion dollars to the budget in his first term, if not more. Mitchell also busted the myth that Bush increased the budget for natural security after 9/11. Not true, he said: most of it was for pork projects for his political cronies.

Mitchell then noted that Keynesianism is bad theory: borrow money and then give it to people so they will spend it — but moving money from the right pocket into the left pocket does not produce more wealth; it’s just redistribution. It does not increase wealth. Only free markets can do that. And in any case, where does the government get the money to redistribute? From us! But they take their cut as the middleman, and therein lies the problem. Bigger government did not work for Hoover or Roosevelt, and all that federal spending to get us out of the depression did not work: we did not get back to 1929 GDP levels until WWII. Neither did federal stimulus plans work for Presidents Ford or Bush I during their recessions, and Keynesianism failed utterly in Japan during the 1990s, when its national debt went from 60% of GDP to 150% of GDP. I.e., Keynesianism does not work, and yet politicians on both the right and the left insist that the only reason it doesn’t work is because: “government isn’t spending enough.” Wrong!

We are on the road to serfdom, says Mitchell, as our federal spending is projected to jump from 22% of GDP today to 45%–55% of GDP in the coming years (mostly because of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). Unless our GDP doubles along with federal spending (it won’t) the collapse is coming. Well, not a collapse, per sey: America will not become Argentina or Zimbabwe. But we will become France: instead of growing 2.5–3% a year, we’ll grow 1–1.5%, a difference that has enormous long-run implications, lowering per capita GDP 30–40% below what it otherwise would be. More spending means more taxes: more income taxes, payroll taxes, death taxes, double taxation of dividends and capital gains. And this doesn’t work. In 1980 Ronald Reagan cut the top tax rate from 72% to 28%, and between 1980 and 1988 the number of rich people (millionaires) rose from 116,800 to 723,700, and their share of paying for the federal government rose from $19 billion in income taxes to $99.7 billion in income taxes. In other words, lowering taxes on the rich generates more revenue for the federal government, which is counterintuitive.

In the end, however, there are moral consequences to such economic decisions. Mitchell: “Today there are over 2 million people in America who completely depend on welfare: prisoners; well, the welfare state is a prison for the human soul.”

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

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

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

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

Incest is not Best

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

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

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

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

Sexual Hypocrisy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brains Alone Won’t Get you Laid

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

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

Selfish Heroes

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

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

Cads and Dads

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

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

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

Smile, You’re On Candid Camera

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

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

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

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

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