Book Review: "I, Mammal" by Loretta Graziano Breuning

"We mammals are curiously preoccupied with social hierarchy. You may say you don’t care about status, but if you filled a room with people who said that, they’d soon form a hierarchy based on how anti-status each person claims to be." ~ Loretta Breuning

            

Despite the protestations of those who like to think human beings are not part of the animal kingdom (What are we then, plants?), we have a lot in common with our fellow furry critters. Our brains have been shaped by thousands of generations of the evolution of both genes and culture.

In this fascinating book, the author focuses on something that we inherited very strongly from our biological past: our tendency to form hierarchical societies based on status. The group, and therefore our genes, survives attacks by predators and shortages of food by allowing the strongest among us to remain strong. Weaker members of the group survive by forming alliances with, and by deferring to, the strongest members of the heard.  

In human beings, because of cultural experiences and the fact that our cortexes can anticipate future consequences more so than any other mammal, status in a particular subculture may not be defined by brute strength against predators, but by a wide variety of status markers - musical talent, scientific discoveries, or even, as illustrated by the quote at the beginning of the post, by who in a group is the least outwardly concerned with what the majority of the herd thinks of status markers.

Hierarchy challenges among primates are relatively rare since the risks are often too high. However, as the so called alphas or dominant herd members - often defined by different parameters in males and females or in different primate species - show signs of weakness, such challenges become more common. Younger members of the group may begin to assert their own dominance through oppositionalism.

The animals that are close to the top of the hierarchy but not at the top - let's call them the betas - often extensively cater to the alphas and cling to their alliance with the alphas tenaciously, often at the cost of being under great stress. They tend to be the most status conscious individuals in the group, because they have the most to lose. As the author wryly observes, they're number two, so they try harder.

The author makes the case that we concern ourselves with status in response to what she calls the "happy" brain chemicals - dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins - which are released in very short spurts under certain environmental conditions, and induce us to do more of whatever activities seemed to promote them in the past. Our impulses to do so are not based on conscious thoughts but are automatic reactions to the activities of the more primitive part of the brain, the limbic system. While the thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, can over-ride these tendencies, doing so feels extremely unpleasant is therefore most difficult.

The author admits that she is oversimplifying the roles of the "happy chemicals," and indeed is doing so drastically. These chemicals not only work together as she points out, but are involved in many different brain and bodily functions besides those to which she attributes to them. Additionally, they regulate one another in highly complicated feedback loops with input from many other chemicals such as GABA, cortisol and glutamate.

However, the simplified view is still helpful because it does provide us with an amazingly plausible understanding of some of the behavior of mammals, including ourselves, that otherwise may seem inexplicable. The author talks about how oxytocin rewards animals for sticking with the herd. Serotonin prods us to take a certain degree of risk in going out and getting our survival needs like food satisfied. 

Dopamine rewards us when we anticipate getting our needs met. Interestingly, it does not reward us after the needs have already been met, which might explain why initially thrilling experiences can suddenly "get old." Endorphins block pain, but only in situations such as when we need all of our strength to flee in order to survive.

The author emphasizes over and over again that she is describing what is happening normally within mammals, and that status behavior is often not based on conscious deliberation. The author is in favor of our endorsing our needs for status as well as being proud rather than overly humble about our accomplishments as a way of avoiding chronic dissatisfaction - which is often then blamed on members of our own status heirarchy who are higher in it than we are. However, she points out that tendency to strive for status is not right or wrong, it just is, and she is definitely not saying that it is what always should be. 

I understand why she feels the need to repeat this, as members of the habitually-offended community will miss the point the first twenty times it is made. Hower, it does make parts of the book repetitive and monotonous. But that is a minor quibble.

I learned some very interesting things from this book that I never knew. Did you know, for example, that there are 10 times more neurons connecting the brain to the eyes than the other way around? Our brain literally tells our eyes what to look for as well as what to look at among the myriad of things surrounding us in our environment.

Did you know that Gorilla fathers in the wild often search for a good family to give their daughters to - just like the people in many cultures who arrange marriages for their offspring?

The author does not discuss "schema" formation per se, but does talk about how past experiences become the dominant mode of responding automatically and without thought to the social environment between the ages of 2 and 3 - during and after the period during which the child is most dependent for survival on getting the attention of the primary caretakers. Nerve tracts formed by observing the behaviors of the parents become stronger and also develop thicker sheathes of a coating made of a substance called myelin, which greatly increases the speed of nerve conduction. 

After they are formed, these tracks then begin to function as if the individual were on autopilot. We only notice our behavior when it no longer seems to "work" on those around us. This is partly why parental behavior is so powerful in triggering our automatic repetitive behavioral responses.

Another aspect of our powerful urges to create status hierarchies is basic to the formation of neurotic (confused, conflicted, and amibivalent) behavior. This is easiest to see in dogs, but I believe it applies to kids as well. It was discussed extensively by Cesar Millan, TV's "dog whisperer."

Dogs will presume that they are the alpha animal in a household  - unless the owner acts like he or she is the alpha, and acts that way consistently. To create a neurotic dog, treat them as if they are the pack leader by catering to them, but then punish them when they act out the normal response to being a pack leader: aggression. Then follow the punishment with lots and lots of affection, which again causes the dog to feel like the alpha. Repeat over and over. The dog becomes neurotic "because it can't make sense of the social reward system" (p. 91). Readers of this blog may recognize a similar pattern that I describe when I write about problematic parenting styles.

In general, the ideas in the book apply somewhat more to automatic behaviors within a group than they do to automatic behavior between groups. As evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson points out, "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. All else is commentary."

Evolution has also been shaped by kin groups and ethnic groups as well as by the evolution of human culture, in which the balance between collectivism and individualism has gradually evolved to favor the latter more than in past generations, as first described by Erich Fromm. These often competing forces comprise the evolutionary theory of  so-called multilevel selection.

Once again, however, oversimplifying reality can nonetheless help us understand important ideas that might otherwise be too murky.

The Righteous Mind

In a fascinating and highly recommended book, The Righteous Mind, author Jonathan Haidt argues for a very unusual idea that is very compatible with my own viewpoint about human psychological functioning.  He provides strong evidence for the proposition that human reasoning did not evolve so we could understand the truth about the universe, but for a variety of other purposes.

One of these other reasons is that humans are both selfish and groupish. In evolutionary theory, we often think that each individual organism strives to maximize the chances of passing down its own genes to its offspring, and to a certain extent that is true. But as I have argued frequently on this blog and in my books, we are also willing under certain circumstances to sacrifice our own needs for the sake of our own group. 

We may compete with one another inside our own social groups, but we also experience joy by being a member of something much larger than our individual selves.  The military has been aware of this forever. Do you really think all that marching and drilling is done for the sake of getting into physical shape?  

No! It’s done because synchronizing ourselves with other people is a joyful experience, and leads to an amazing sense of group cohesiveness.  Soldiers don't fight so much for a cause, as much as they fight for one another. (I wonder if the joy of being synchronized with others may be the reason we seemed to have evolved a particular liking for music, which otherwise seems to have no particular evolutionary or survival advantage). 

We are team players. Even if we live in a very heterogenous society as we do in the United States, we form our own teams.  How else to explain the passionate, live-with-or-die-with-the-team loyalty to our favorite football franchise?

In my post of 1/21/11, Of Hormones and Ethnic Conflict, I pointed out how the hormone oxytocin, which helps mothers bind with their offspring, promotes love and trust “… not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood.”  Haidt mentions this as well.

Haidt argues that political and religious opinions function as badges of social membership, and are made sacred by groups.  As such, “When a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it." This explains why these kinds of opinions seem to be immune to all facts and reason.

Self interest is a actually a weak predictor of policy preferences. We do not so much ask,  “What’s in it for me?” but “What’s in it for my group?”

As it turns out, many of our beliefs are based not on facts or reason but upon either our groupishness or on our need to have a good reputation within the group.  For almost all of us, it is generally more important for us to look right than be right. We are like politicians looking for votes, not scientists looking for truth.

In fact, a lot of the arguments we use to defend our opinions are thought up after we have formed the opinion!  "Logic” is used in the service of justifying the opinion, as my colleague Gregg Henriques would say, rather than forming it. Haidt says our intuition and our position in society are like an elephant, while logic and reasoning are like the rider of an elephant.  The rider evolved to serve the elephant, not the other way around.  

It’s not that we cannot ever be swayed by logic, facts, and reasons – we certainly can.  But for the most part this will happen only if our groupishness is still being served.

We are of course both selfish and groupish, so our personal self-interest is hardly irrelevant.  But most of us are far more likely to cheat on our taxes if we don’t think anyone else will find out.  As Haidt points out, we are like both chimps and like “hivish” bees.

In evolutionary theory, group selection is the term that refers to environmental forces that tend to select for hivish behavior, while individual natural selection is the more traditional view that environments tend to favor those who are the most fit and adaptive from an individual perspective.  This is not a question of which type of selection is more important.  They both are. Haidt refers to this as multi-level selection.

It is usually the more individualistic and politically liberal members of our society (the WEIRD people: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic folks that comprise the vast majority of people who become subjects in psychology experiments) that complain that it is the conservatives who refuse to recognize established science (man-made climate change and evolution, for example), but liberals can be every bit as bad.

For quite some time, as Haidt points out, "[Many] Scientists have urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality. Nowhere was this betrayal of science more evident than in the attacks on [sociobiologist] Edward O. Wilson, who had the audacity to suggest that natural selection also influenced human behavior." 

In other words, the very concept of group selection was rejected by prominent scientists, including the otherwise reasonable Stephen J. Gould, for political reasons rather than scientific ones!  It was literally banished as heresy in the seventies. These scientists were afraid that the concept of group selection would be used for nefarious purposes by racists and ethnocentrists to justify attacks on those who don’t fit their own description as being desirables – much like the concept of eugenics was used by the Nazis.

As I mentioned earlier, once someone has established an opinion, he or she can always come up with a very coherent and logical argument for its validity.  But you can do the exact same thing to come up with logical and factual arguments to justify an opinion that is a polar opposite from the first one.

So what about finding scientific studies to justify your position?  Haidt points out: “There is no such thing as a study you must believe; it’s always possible to question the methods, find an alternative interpretation of the data, or if all else fails, question the honesty or ideology of the researchers... AND Google can always guide you to a study that’s right for you."