It’s where my daughter’s naming ceremony took place (a traditional, non-Christian forerunner of the ‘Christening’ ceremony) and it’s also the site of our annual handfasting. Every year Gill and I go there to renew our mutual commitment by tying another knot in the ribbon I bought years ago for the purpose.

It must look a bit odd to the uninitiated tourists as we perform our little act of symbolism. However it might look to onlookers it’s our way of reaffirming our commitment to each other. For my part it’s a way to tell the world that Gill really is the love of my life.

The procedure involves Gill holding one end of the ribbon while I hold the other and through a process of bizarre wriggling about we tie another knot without either of us letting go. This year it was Gill’s turn to contort herself in the pursuit of tradition. All I had to do was stand there grinning. Actually it’s always Gill’s turn because she’s smaller than I am. Yes, I know – that isn’t really fair (but shhhh… don’t tell her). That’s Gill peeping out from behind the stones (she’s a bit shy).

Anyway, that’s us hitched for another year and a day. Here’s hoping for many more handfastings to come

This guy from Worcestershire County Council is newly elected for UKIP. He advocates ethnic cleansing, summary murder of Muslim women and forced repatriation of Muslims & Jews. He also supports the EDL and thinks that using nuclear weapons for ethnic cleansing would be a good idea. But there’s nothing racist about UKIP. Oh dear me, no!

“A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgements quickly and efficiently. These rule-of-thumb strategies shorten decision-making time and allow people to function without constantly stopping to think about the next course of action.”

We all use heuristics. We have to. The alternative would be ‘paralysis by analysis’. We’d be too busy thinking through our every action actually to do anything. From a smile or a handshake to how to cross the road or even boil a kettle. Without heuristics life would be exhausting and probably very short. After all – by the time you’d thought through how to respond to the speeding car hurtling toward you, you’d probably be dead. Heuristics are the psychological shortcuts that keep us going in a complex world.

Some of our heuristics are learned. That’s why experts are so good at what they do. Years of experience has taught them the heuristics of their work.

In my own field for example, I remember as a novice psychiatric nurse spending hour upon hour wondering how to approach each individual, trying to be aware of their every characteristic as though all that information, somehow would tell me what to do. With experience I learned that not every piece of information is important in every situation. I can ‘cut out the irrelevant’ and take appropriate action based upon only the important things. In a very real sense the study of ‘heuristics’ is the study of ‘the relevant’.

So I know that depressed people need motivation; I know that anxious people need a way to problem solve; and I know that psychotic people need a way to assess their perceptions and beliefs. These are the shortcuts, the heuristics that allow me to be effective. But they’re not foolproof.

In choosing to ignore irrelevant information and act according to pre-conceived patterns of need psychiatric nurses run the very real risk of ignoring ‘the individual behind the distress’. By focussing only upon the depression and working to motivate a service-user I might fail to notice their suicidal ideation. That would be a serious omission and working too hard on motivation without addressing the underlying desire to die could result in the person actually killing themselves rather than just thinking about it.

Of course experienced nurses know this and work hard not to limit their attention only to motivation without understanding what might come next but the point is clear. Mental shortcuts are useful but they are also, by definition, superficial. They make us prone to mistakes.

The good news is that we can learn to take account of these pitfalls. The bad news is that most of the time heuristics just take hold of us and we carry on in our own sweet, superficial way because that’s what we evolved to do.

Like all evolved tendencies, heuristics favoured survival of the fittest in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA). They are so embedded in our evolutionary journey that they are a universal trait among humans. We act without thinking. That’s what kept our ancestors alive. It’s also what keeps us alive today. Whether the threat was a predatory tiger in the Pleistocene or a speeding car in the present we act instantly to keep ourselves safe. Natural selection kept the gene pool viable and the evolution of heuristics was assured.

Instinct

When we talk about ‘instinct’ we often really mean heuristics. A newborn human has only two instinctive responses:

1. Suckling;
2. Fear of falling.

Everything else has to be learned. The more effective the heuristic shortcut the more likely it is that we confuse the lesson with instinct. But it’s not instinct. The tendency to develop learned heuristics is an evolutionary trait but often the heuristics themselves are the products of experience and of culture. They develop as we learn from experience and, as we have seen, they can lead us astray.

In a sense, evolutionary psychology might be thought of as the study of heuristics. It’s the study of those ingrained mental shortcuts that mould our basic drives even (although not necessarily our specific behaviours). Protection of children, for example or a general commitment to justice (at least justice so far as other people are concerned) seem more hard wired than a healthy respect for road safety. That’s because although the need to survive is hard wired the rules governing traffic have to be learned.

As already noted, one of the aims of this blog series is to understand the role of determinism in our evolutionary make up. I suspect that if we are to embrace free will (the opposite of determinism) in any meaningful way then attention to heuristics will be the way forward.

Whilst there is good evidence that our species (& its forebears) evolved ever larger brains the question of why they did so is much harder to answer. We do know that it must have resulted from selection pressures and that the process involved pre-existing traits but that’s about all. So far as I can tell there is no definitive evidence to explain the exact process. However there are a number of possibilities.

The following is a ‘just so’ story. It’s not even the only such story that has been proposed. It is, however the one that seems most plausible to me. It’s a speculative explanation for the currently known facts. Those facts undoubtedly will be added to as time goes on. As our understanding increases our explanations will improve. That’s the scientific process. We haven’t reached the end of our journey of discovery. After all, it is only 2013.

What is culture?

In this context ‘culture’ means shared beliefs, rituals, understandings and explanations. That’s not rocket science. It would be hard to imagine any sizeable human group that didn’t have at least some cultural traits. The real question isn’t why humans developed culture but why (and how) our ancestors evolved the ability to do so in the first place. It seems that many changes were necessary to make human culture possible:

Selection pressures and adaptations

Habitat changed (our ancestors became increasingly well adapted for life in the open and less well adapted for life among the trees;
Brain volume increased significantly;
Technology developed and changed (from basic ‘processed’ tools such as flint spear points and arrowheads to axes, jewellery and even boats);
Hunting changed (there is evidence of much larger game animals being butchered as the species evolved).

These things must have resulted from selection pressures favouring individuals best suited to cope with change. Collectively they represented significant advantages to those individuals who possessed even some, if not all of the necessary adaptations. The gene pool was changing.

It seems to me (at least at this early stage of my studies) that the most important selection pressures were:

Group size;
Communication and language needs;
Need for larger amounts of food;
Need for cooperation to sustain large groups;
Need for co-operation to ensure the survival of larger groups;
Need to develop shared ‘memes’ to facilitate cooperation;
Need to develop explanations to foster group cohesion (and ‘out-group’ alienation);

Many of the ‘mental modules’ we’ll discuss later in the series are refined versions of adaptations resulting from these very pressures.

Existing traits available for natural selection via directional and sexual adaptative pressures seem likely to have included…

Rudimentary communication via mating ‘songs’ & dance

Studies of our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos show a tendency to communicate via a range of sounds and gestures – especially during courtship. Gibbons which pair for life advertise their relationships to others via song and studies have shown that they also have different calls (rudimentary language) representing different kinds of threat.

All these things represent viable precursors of language. Assuming, as seems likely, that similair abilities were present in our early hominim ancestors, we have the raw material for natural selection to work with.

But there’s a problem. For sophisticated language to develop the animal would need a big brain. However to build a big brain the animal needs plentiful protein. Obtaining plentiful protein requires effective, co-operative hunting of big game. Co-operative hunting of big game requires communication which requires a big brain. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Catch 22!

This was a major quandary for evolutionists for many years. It seemed as though big brain development was impossible and yet it happened. We have the fossils to prove it. What we didn’t have was an explanation. But now we have….

Theory of mind

Cooperation requires ‘Theory of mind’. That means an awareness of self and of others. It also requires an understanding that others may see things differently from ourselves. Without these two insights teamwork (and effective, cooperative big game hunting) would’ve been impossible for humans. And yet for years it was believed that no other primate species exhibited even rudimentary theory of mind. Until…..

Co-operation and empathy

Another set of primate studies
revealed not only significant theory of mind but also remarkable co-operation, especially related to aggression, dominant coalition and access to ‘mating rights’. Not only that, studies involving bonobos demonstrate significant empathy  – another major requirement for the development of culture as we humans would recognise it. Once again we see the rudiments of another of the elements needed for big brain and cultural development. We can assume that our pre-human ancestors possessed the same rudimentary characteristics before the big brain developed.

So how might these elements come together? The process isn’t quite so complicated as it first appears.

As our ancestors left the forests and ventured out into the grasslands the need for effective warning systems became pressing. Natural selection (predation) favoured the best communicators creating a directional pressure toward more and more sophisticated language.

Improved language facilitates cooperation (largely based upon shared ‘memes’ or ‘explanations of the world’) which in turn facilitates more effective hunting.

More effective hunting meant more protein which allowed better brain development leading to even better communication.

Dependency and parental investment

The mechanics of childbirth provided a new problem for the evolving apes. Bipedalism (walking upright) was necessary for survival out of the woodlands but it meant a narrow birth canal. That means that bipedal hominims need to be born before their brains are fully developed. Otherwise their heads will be too large for the birthing process. This results in extended periods of helplessness for newborns (a characteristic that exists in humans to this day). This creates a serious selection pressure. Only those babies that are well looked after survive.

This explains why, compared with most other primates, human males invest far more of their time, energy and resources in providing for and nurturing their young. Chimpanzee males, our closest relatives typically don’t even know which offspring are theirs. Human males generally do – and they participate. We are a ‘High Male Parental Investment’ (MPI) species.

The extended helplessness of

human infants created a significant selection pressure. Empathic and co-operative males provided the best nutrition and protection. Females that selected effective providers and nurturers as mates were most likely to see their young make it to maturity and produce offspring of their own. Their genes will survive.

Consequently males and females are subject to directional and sexual selective pressure favouring empathy, high parental investment and cooperation. This selection pressure (over many generations) imbued our ancestors with the ingredients for social culture and the means to fuel a big brain. The big brain in turn built upon these qualities to facilitate even greater technologies, communication and social interaction. This remarkable combination of selection pressures and adaptations allowed our species to develop, step by step from small bands of hunter gatherers into the large societies with sophisticated cultures that we know today.