Virginia Hughes

In case you had any doubt, Eliot Spitzer’s resignation now confirms that adultery is the fastest way for American politicians to lose public approval. Don’t get me wrong, the salacious details of the “Kristen” scandal—it was 10 p.m., on the night before Valentine’s Day, in a Washington hotel; she was a 5′5″ brunette; he asked her to, “do things that, like, you might not think were safe”—sicken me, too. I’m glad he’s out of Albany.

Evolutionary biologist David Barash is using the scandal as evidence that men (especially powerful men) are, like most other mammals, not meant to be monogamous. As he espoused in today’s LA Times:

But even a smidgen of evolutionary insight suggests that maleness plus money plus political power isn’t likely to add up to the kind of sexual restraint that the public expects. A concluding word, therefore, to the outraged voters of New York state: You want monogamy? Elect a swan. Or better yet, a Diplozöon paradoxum. [That's a monogamous species of worm.]

I agree: some knowledge of basic evolutionary biology would do our species a whole lotta good. As Barash explains, because sperm is so cheap, evolutionary drivers push men to be “aggressive sexual adventurers, inclined to engage in sex with multiple partners when they can.” Those same drivers push females—who will need protection and resources in order to successfully carry and raise a child—toward powerful men. (Which, he states wryly, “contributes to the apparent sex appeal of such less-than-stunning physical specimens as Kissinger, Woody Allen and Bill Clinton.”)

So, maybe Barash is right, and with a little bit of biology education the Puritanical public wouldn’t expect politicians to exhibit “sexual restraint.” I’m appalled at the weight of the scandal in media outlets throughout the world. Spitzer has been on the homepage of BBC Russia, of all places, for two days straight. OK, so the governor of New York hired prostitutes. Often. Is that really the newsiest thing Russia could come up with?

All that said, let’s back the determinism truck up for a second. Spitzer was guilty of more than infidelity. He didn’t just have a mistress, or 12. He paid women ($4,300 to Kristen, and at least $80,000 in total) for sex, thus breaking the same federal laws that he enforced so gleefully in his days as a prosecutor.

Even Barash concedes: “People have the unique capacity to act contrary to their biologically given inclinations. Maybe, in fact, it is what makes us human.” Spitzer, as not only a human, but a husband, a father of three teenaged girls, a member of the Bar Association, and governor of one of the most powerful states in the country, arguably felt much more moral (or “cultural,” if you prefer) pressure to reject these “biologically given inclinations” than the average cheatin’ man. Good riddance.

(Hat Tip: Jonah)

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A few months back I posted an amazing video from 2000 showing Ai, the then 23-year-old female chimp that had been trained to put in order numerals that appeared on a computer screen. Now her trainer—Tetsuro Matsuzawa from Kyoto University—is back in the press (on my local TV news, even!) for his new work on the amazing memories of three mother chimps (including Ai) and their babies.

The basic experimental set-up is the same as before. For months ahead of time, the six chimps learned how to order Arabic numerals 1 through 9. The experiment itself was a bit tougher. The nine numbers flashed briefly on the screen, all at once, and were then immediately replaced by white boxes. The chimps had to remember where the numbers had been and then touch the boxes in order accordingly. As published in today’s issue of Current Biology, Matsuzawa compared how well young chimps, their mothers, and university students completed the task.

The chimps beat us in every metric. Even when the numerals were only flashed for one-fifth of a second, the chimps had an 80 percent accuracy rate and the humans only 40 percent. Moreover, the young chimps completed the task faster than both their mothers and humans.

The findings still blow my mind. I will concede, however, to what a few of my readers pointed out on my last Ai post. This comparison between chimps and humans wasn’t exactly fair and square. If you gave the university students months of practice (maybe substituting chocolate for bananas) and then timed them, would the baby chimps still win?

“You’re in denial.”
“I am not.”

An article in the Health section of yesterday’s New York Times discusses the various flavors of denial. A fashionista in debt just keeps on spending, say. Or a smoker thinks she can cut back by lighting up “only when I’m drunk.” A husband, when confronted with definitive evidence of his marital infidelities, says he’s never cheated. Or the driver of a red Ferrari, when pulled over for speeding, says there’s no conceivable way he could have exceeded 60 miles per hour. Madonna, according to this week’s Life & Style, just got her latest round of Botox.

Denial ain’t just a river, baby, it’s the most ubiquitous form of dishonesty. So why did denial behavior evolve in humans? The article explains:

The capacity for denial appears to have evolved in part to offset early humans’ hypersensitivity to violations of trust. In small kin groups, identifying liars and two-faced cheats was a matter of survival. A few bad rumors could mean a loss of status or even expulsion from the group, a death sentence.

And denial is no less useful today, according to a recent psychological experiment in which groups of business students watched videos of a mock job interview. In the video, the applicant was asked about some fraud he had committed at his previous job. In various versions, he either apologized or denied the accusations. The results:

If the infraction was described as a mistake and the applicant apologized, viewers gave him the benefit of the doubt and said they would trust him with job responsibilities. But if the infraction was described as fraud and the person apologized, viewers’ trust evaporated.

(Now was it the applicant who was in denial about what he had done? Or the business students who were in denial about the applicant’s integrity? Or I who am in denial about the experiment’s validity…?)

Moral of the story: Lie and you get the job. Or you save your marriage, or keep from getting kicked out of the ape clan.

Denial is so “natural,” the piece continues, and so useful, that for most of us, acts of denial don’t even register as conscious lies. In another experiment, students were given a multiple-choice test and told that they would be paid for each correct answer. After choosing their answers, they were asked to transfer the responses onto bubble sheets. For some students, the sheets had bubbles already filled in—which made it seem like the correct answers had already been filled in. The students who received those sheets changed up to 20 percent more of their answers than those who didn’t. But more surprising: a follow-up experiment showed that they had no idea how much they had cheated.

I like reading theories about the evolution of human social behaviors because it gives me (possible) explanations for why, given various circumstances, I have tendencies to behave in certain ways. But that’s what they are: tendencies. Denial is not an inevitable course of action, even if it seems, in many cases, to be our first instinct.

If you’re not interested in the article, at least check out some of the funny reader comments.

Birds are smart as hell. My fellow Seed-er and blogger Jonah Lehrer recently wrote a piece for the Boston Globe about the tiny yet surprisingly complex brains of birds. In light of the emails I received RE: my last post, about the short-term memory of chimps, I thought I’d list a few interesting tidbits from Jonah’s piece:

• The songs of starlings display a sophisticated grammar once thought the sole domain of human thinking.
• A nutcracker can remember the precise location of hundreds of different food storage spots.
• Crows in Japan have learned how to get people to crack walnuts for them: They drop them near busy intersections, then retrieve the smashed nuts when the traffic light turns red.

One researcher whom Jonah talked to, Cambridge comparative psychologist Nicola Clayton, said that even though most people think of apes as the most intelligent non-humans, “birds have achieved a sort of honorary ape status, just with a few feathers attached.” (Aww, how media-savvy of her.)

For instance, the New Caledonian crow pictured here uses a stick to dig mealworms out of a hole in a piece of wood. A few years ago, Oxford zoologists discovered that, just as humans are usually right or left-handed, the crows either hold the stick in their right or left cheek. These lateral preferences are extremely rare; only have of all chimps always use the same hand for tool use.

As for why birds (and chimps, and bees, and termites, and whales, and dolphins, and pigs) are so smart, some ecologists theorize that intelligence is a common byproduct in any socially complex animal society. In other words, it takes a lot of thinking power to understand—or manipulate—the dynamics among the many individuals within a group.

Check out more photos and movies of crows using tools.

A lot of ba-hoo-ey gets thrown around philosophy/psychology circles about what makes us different (read: smarter) than the rest of the animal kingdom. My first college course on animal behavior—where I read about the internal odometers in Saharan desert ants that allow them to pinpoint their nests after foraging for food many miles away; or the termites that cooperate over several generations to build huge mounds that keep their brood within a narrow temperature range; or the crows that, without training, use tools to modify other tools, and sometimes intentionally deceive each other—showed me how flawed that attitude is. But even if you narrow the definition of intelligence to “higher” cognitive skills, like language, object recognition, planning, or categorization, the following video will likely make you question our self-appointed seat at the top of the smartness ladder:

The star is Ai, a 30-year-old (23 in the video) female chimp who lives at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Center. As the video shows, Ai was trained to put in order, from smallest to largest, numerals that appeared on a computer screen. That she learned to do this accurately is a remarkable feat. But more incredible, in another series of experiments, white boxes appeared over the numbers almost immediately after they first flashed on screen. Even though Ai only had that split second to look at the numbers, she remembered where they were and was still able to put them in the correct order. And when humans performed the same experiment, they were much, much less accurate.

The research, conducted by Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Nobuyuki Kawai in the Aichi Prefecture, was published in the January 6, 2000 issue of Nature. The scientists say that Ai is the first nonhuman animal that understands the ordinal nature of numbers and the concept of zero.

Ai’s caretakers also taught her the concept of money. She uses 100-yen coins to purchase apples from a fake vending machines.

Chimps are equally smart or smarter than us in other ways, too: They’re better at recognizing upside-down faces; they can discriminate among 200 species of plants; and when trained to label primary colors, they’ll place them in the same area of the visual spectrum as humans.

Since chimps have the mental capacity that is arguably equivalent to that of a young child or mentally retarded adult, interesting legal questions arise regarding their exploitation by humans. A Viennese court is now considering assigning a legal guardian to a 26-year-old chimp, a privilege that has never been granted to a non-human before.