The Adoption of Altruism

The latest stop in the #PDEx tour is being hosted by Barbara J. King:

Since animals, including humans, are merely ambulatory vehicles for their selfish genes, according to the dominant framework, it would be to one's benefit to care for a niece or cousin that lost their mother but not for a stranger of which there was no genetic relation. This is because any genes that promoted such altruism towards unrelated individuals would end up losing out by using up resources that didn’t perpetuate themselves. However, these “altruistic genes” would be passed on and thrive if they were helping a kin member with similar genetic makeup. In the currency of reproductive fitness, nepotism pays.

However, a study in the journal Primates by Cristiane Cäsar and Robert John Young report on a case of adoption among a wild group of black-fronted titi monkeys (Callicebus nigrifrons) from the rainforests of Brazil.

Read the rest of the post here and stay tuned for the next entry in The Primate Diaries in Exile tour.

Reference:

Cäsar, C., & Young, R. (2007). A case of adoption in a wild group of black-fronted titi monkeys (Callicebus nigrifrons) Primates, 49 (2), 146-148 DOI: 10.1007/s10329-007-0066-x

Featured Writing from The Primate Diaries

The response to The Primate Diaries in Exile has been wonderful and many readers have contacted me having discovered my work for the first time. A common request has been for me to assemble a list of featured posts in one place. So I've collected together some of my top pieces over the years and categorized them to give you a sense of where my journey has taken me. I've also included my professional publications at the bottom. If you have any questions or comments on anything here please contact me at primatediaries[at]gmail[dot]com.

Top "Exile" Posts:

* Stressing Motherhood: A primatologist discovers the social factors responsible for maternal infanticide, Scientific American, Nov. 22, 2010.
* Reflections on the WEIRD Evolution of Human Psychology, PLoS Blogs, Sept. 23, 2010. (Editor's Selection: ResearchBlogging.org).
* Sex, Evolution, and the Case of the Missing Polygamists, Psychology Today, Oct. 1, 2010.
* For Great Apes, Addressing Inequality is Child’s Play, Neuron Culture, July 26, 2010. (Editor's Selection: ResearchBlogging.org).
* Sacrifice on the Serengeti, CarinBondar.com, Aug. 19, 2010. (Editor's Selection: ResearchBlogging.org).
* The Scientist and the Anarchist (Part I, Part II, Part III), Cocktail Party Physics, Skulls in the Stars, and Speakeasy Science, Aug. 4-20, 2010.

Featured Science Posts:

* Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play to Reaping an Unjust Reward, ScienceBlogs, April 22, 2010. (Finalist: Best Science Post of the Year, The Quark).
* Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices? ScienceBlogs, Oct. 11, 2009. (Finalist, Best Science Post of the Year, ResearchBlogging.org).
* Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion? Nature Network, April 19, 2009. (Finalist: Best Science Post of the Year, The Quark).
* Prestigious Chimps and the Emergence of Cultural Innovation. ScienceBlogs, May 27, 2009. (Editor's Selection: ResearchBlogging.org).
* Punishing Cheaters Promotes the Evolution of Cooperation. ScienceBlogs, May 18, 2009. (Featured Podcast: ResearchBlogging.org).
* Reexamining Ardipithecus ramidus in Light of Human Origins, ScienceBlogs, Oct. 19, 2009. (Editor's Selection: ResearchBlogging.org).

Featured History Posts:

* Darwin and Spencer in the Middle East, ScienceBlogs, March 10, 2010.
* Deconstructing Social Darwinism (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV) ScienceBlogs, Jan 5-15, 2010.
* Rivalry Among The Reefs: Charles Darwin and a Century of Conflict Over the Coral Reef Problem, ScienceBlogs, Aug. 26, 2009.
* Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of DNA, ScienceBlogs, July 25, 2009.
* The Grassroots of Scientific Revolution, ScienceBlogs, July 6, 2009.
* Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, ScienceBlogs, Nov. 2, 2009.

Featured Political Posts:

* The Unseen and Unknowable Has No Place in Science, The Huffington Post, March 16, 2010. (HuffPo Front Page).
* How Can Haiti Be Sustainable?, ScienceBlogs, Jan. 28, 2010.
* Haiti's Political and Economic Earthquake "Made in the USA", The Huffington Post, Jan. 27, 2010. (Reported on by Inter Press News Service and subject of an interview with WZBC of Boston).
* Intelligent Design Creationists Abuse Science and Victims of the Holocaust, The Huffington Post, July 6, 2010.
* The Father of Proliferation: Edward Teller's Nuclear Legacy, ScienceBlogs, April 9, 2010.

Professional Publications:

* Johnson, E.M. (2010). "Sexy Beasts." SEED, June 29, 2010. Link.
* Johnson, E.M. (2009). "Survival of the Kindest." SEED, Sept. 24, 2009. Link.
* Johnson, E.M. (2009). "Male Chauvinist Chimps or the Meat Market of Public Opinion?" in Zivcovik, B. (ed.) The Open Laboratory: Year's Best Science Writing On Blogs, Lulu Press.
* Johnson, E.M. (2007). "The Sacrifice of Admetus: How the Evolution of Altruism Reveals Our Noblest Qualities" in Zivcovik, B. (ed.) The Open Laboratory: Year's Best Science Writing On Blogs, Lulu Press.
* Johnson, E.M. (2005). "Behind Enemy Lines." Wildlife Conservation, 108(6):26-31. Link.
* Johnson, E.M. (2002). "The Biology of Humor: In Search of the Cerebral Funny Bone." Discover, 23(5):24-25. Link.

Academic Publications:

* Johnson, E.M. (2010). "Nature of Leviathan: Biology and Physics in Hobbes' Political Science." History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (accepted).
* MacLean, E.L, Barrickman, N.L, Johnson, E.M., and Wall, C.E. (2009). "Sociality, Ecology, and Relative Brain Size in Lemurs." Journal of Human Evolution 56(5):471-478.
* Johnson, E.M. (2008). "Career or Family?: Maternal Style and Status-Seeking Behavior in Captive Bonobos (Pan paniscus)." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 135(S46):126.
* Johnson, E.M. (2007). "Lack of Inbreeding Avoidance and Reduction of Alliance formation in Matrilineally-Housed Bonobos (Pan paniscus)." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 132(S44):137.

Defending the Sensible: Charles Darwin and the Anti-Vivisection Controversy

The latest stop in the #PDEx tour is being hosted at The Dispersal of Darwin:


According to the British Medical Journal it resembled a crucifixion. The dogs were strapped to boards, backs down, and with their legs cinched outwards. In the stifling August heat their heavy panting was made only more intense by a suffocating fear. The accused was described as wearing a white apron “that was afterwards covered with blood” as he approached one of the struggling animals. His mouth was tied shut but when the blade entered the thin, pink flesh of his inner thigh the animal’s cries of agony were too much to bear.

Experienced medical men in attendance, including some of the nineteenth century’s top surgeons, were outraged and demanded that the animal’s torture cease. Thomas Joliffe Tufnell, President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, denounced the demonstration as a “cruel proceeding” and stormed to the operating table to cut the animal loose. Other physiologists objected to the interruption with one insisting, “That dog is insensible; he is not suffering anything.” But Tufnell held firm, “The dog is struggling hard to get free. I am a sportsman as well as a surgeon, and I will never see a dog bullied.” However, a vote was taken among the assembled members of the British Medical Association and the demonstration was allowed to continue.

A tube was then forced into the conscious animal’s femoral artery, the white hair of his belly stained red as the arterial pressure caused blood to spurt from the incision. Into the tube the accused injected pure alcohol. The result, continued the Journal, “was an immediate struggle, which almost immediately subsided. The animal became dead drunk.”

“Now, you see he’s insensible,” a physician snidely remarked to Tufnell.
“Yes,” Tufnell replied, “and he’ll never be sensible again, for he will die.”

Read the rest of the post here and stay tuned for the next entry in The Primate Diaries in Exile tour.


Feller, D. (2009). Dog fight: Darwin as animal advocate in the antivivisection controversy of 1875 Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 40 (4), 265-271 DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2009.09.004

Sex, Evolution, and the Case of the Missing Polygamists

The latest stop in the #PDEx tour is being hosted at Psychology Today by Sex at Dawn:


There is no greater mystery in human evolution than the origins of our sexuality. Following the trail of clues available researchers have independently concluded that humans evolved through systems of monogamy, polygyny, as well as polyamory. However only one can be the culprit and, like a detective interrogating multiple suspects, the solution ultimately depends on which account you're willing to believe. Last year Owen Lovejoy made the case for monogamy based on the fossil remains of the early human ancestor Ardipithecus ramidus. Meanwhile, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá have argued that polyamory (or, more precisely, a multimale-multifemale mating system) is the most likely scenario from an analysis that emphasized anthropology, behavioral biology, and physiology. To further complicate matters the third suspect in this mystery, polygyny, has been the conclusion from scientists conducting DNA analyses. These conflicting accounts therefore require careful detective work in order to determine which story is the most convincing.


Read the rest of the post here and stay tuned for the next entry in The Primate Diaries in Exile tour.


Hammer, M., Mendez, F., Cox, M., Woerner, A., & Wall, J. (2008). Sex-Biased Evolutionary Forces Shape Genomic Patterns of Human Diversity PLoS Genetics, 4 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000202

Reflections on the WEIRD Evolution of Human Psychology

The latest stop in the #PDEx tour is being hosted by PLoS Blogs:


What happens if researchers inadvertently fall prey to confirmation bias at a societal level?

Addressing this question Canadian psychologists Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia (where I am also located) recently published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Their research documents how most of the studies that psychologists claim show human universals are really just extrapolations from a single social group, the cultural equivalent of the psychopaths in my example. As The New York Times wrote in their review:

According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner.

The subpopulation that Henrich and colleagues found to be overrepresented are entirely WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. While it’s bad enough that WEIRD American undergraduates are serving as our model for human behavior, what their paper goes on to document should be of concern to all behavioral and cognitive researchers (particularly those whose work focuses on human evolutionary explanations).

Henrich, J., Heine, S., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33 (2-3), 61-83 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X0999152X


Read the rest of the post here and stay tuned for the next entry in The Primate Diaries in Exile tour.

White Flight in Social Networks? A Story of Another Digital Divide

The latest stop in the #PDEx tour is being hosted by Anthropology in Practice.

The internet offers the opportunity to study the anthropology of social group formation and chronicle its development in real time. This has been shown recently with Danah Boyd's fascinating study of white flight in online social networks (recently reviewed by Christopher Mims). In an article scheduled to appear in the edited volume Digital Race Anthropology (pdf here), Boyd interviewed a group of teens between 2006-2007 to gauge how they were using social media sites such as Myspace and Facebook as part of her PhD dissertation at UC Berkeley. What she found through her interviews was a distinction that teenagers had made through their use of the sites that was heavily infused with notions of race and class. In a telling quote from one of her interview subjects, a white, middle-class 14-year-old named Kat stated:

It's not really racist, but I guess you could say that. I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever.

Read the rest of the post here.

The Scientist and the Anarchist - Part III

The latest stop in the #PDEx tour is being hosted by Deborah Blum at her website Speakeasy Science.

When an estimated 1,400 match-girls went on strike in July, 1888 to protest for better working conditions, it started a fire that became known as New Unionism. Soon after came the London dock workers’ strike, and within twelve months the UK’s Trade Union Congress had increased its membership from 670,000 to 1,593,000. [1]

For Thomas Henry Huxley and Peter Kropotkin these labor developments were interpreted very differently, and yet both saw in them important connections with their work in evolutionary biology. Huxley, who had pulled himself out of East London poverty through a combination of sheer brilliance and stubborn determination, was greatly concerned about what the workers democracy movement meant for social stability. Now the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences and a living legend in the recently established field of evolutionary biology, Huxley had come to identify with the aristocracy he’d worked so hard to be accepted by. Kropotkin, however, had rejected the silver spoon he had once been fed with as a Russian prince after coming face to face with the exploitation that made such ostentatious luxury possible. For him, the growing workers movement was the only path by which the poor could achieve any justice in a world that was undergoing radical change. Both saw in these developments a force of nature — one ominous, the other hopeful — and these conflicting visions would ultimately collide on the pages of the Nineteenth Century.

Read the rest of the post here (also Part I and Part II) and stay tuned for next week's post at Anthropology in Practice.

Peter Kropotkin (1902). Mutual Aide: A Factor of Evolution New York: McClure, Philips & Co.