Computational behavior theory and cultural evolution
(Basic proportions based on recipe from here)
Gianduia is chocolate with about 30% hazelnut paste, originally devised as a cheaper alternative to pure chocolate as Napoleon restricted British imports. Today, its most popular incarnation worldwide is Nutella, but in Italy it is still the gianduiotto, a chocolate perfected around 1865 (Italian Wikipedia).
I had gianduia granita at Stefino’s in Bologna, as one of their never-to-be-repeated experiments (they call them meteroites). This is my attempt at reproducing it.
Put the hazelnuts in a blender with 2 cups water and blend until the hazelnuts have been crushed to almost a powder.
Heat up 1 cup water in a pan and add the glucose, sucrose, and salt. When the sugar has dissolved, add the chocolate powder, straining it to avoid clumping. Add then the chopped chocolate (you can melt it carefully in the microwave if you don’t feel like chopping) and stir until it is dissolved. Add to the hazelnut mix and put in your ice cream maker. If you have time, let cool first.
Do animals have emotions? This is tough philosophical question – how would we ever know? How do you even know I have emotions? Traditionally, we have recognized emotions by their outward manifestations alone. We see someone laugh and we assume they must be happy because we laugh when we are happy. In the case of animals, relying on such inferences means that it is easier for us to attribute emotions to animals that are similar to ourselves, such as apes and monkeys, than to animals such as chickens, who show no facial expressions and whose behavior can be interpreted reliably only by experts.
There are other ways to infer emotions, for sure. When we see someone offering help, we usually assume they care for others. A recent report shows that chickens care for others, too. Hens react with distress calls and accelerated heart rate to their chickens being distressed by puffs of air. Is mother hen feeling bad for the chicks? We cannot know, but we should not just assume they can or cannot based on what we see and how we like them. We need to understand what emotions are and what a brain needs to generate feelings and consciousness. Today, we simply don’t know.
We should not be surprised however, that mothers in species with parental care show outward signs of emotions. The mother is there to nurture offspring, and she must react to potentially threatening situations. The outward signs of emotions we can measure are simply these defense mechanisms: the mother’s call tells both the chicks and potential predators that she is there, and her increased heart rate is a sign that she is getting ready to defend the chicks.
If we were to take these behaviors at face value as signs of feelings such as empathy for others, we would conclude that ants and bees are more empathic than chickens, than apes, than humans. Ants and bees do no hesitate to get killed to defend their nests, for example, and they do so with unerring resolution unknown to us, apes, or chickens. These behaviors are probably just genetically programmed reactions and we do not routinely assume that ants and bees feel bad for the eggs and larvae that are in danger when the nest is attacked. Konrad Lorenz pointed out in 1935 that the situation is quite complex:
“The Jackdaw (Coloeus monedula) possesses a very interesting reaction of defending any fellow-member of the species in the grip of some bird or animal of prey. For a long time I have been familiar with the fact that my tame but free-living Jackdaws would furiously attack me if I gripped one of them in my hand, but I was very much astonished when I inadvertently elicited exactly the same response by carrying a wet, black bathing-suit in my hand. Subsequent experiments showed that anything glistening black and dangling, carried by any living creature would release the very same reaction in the Jackdaws. Even Jackdaws themselves were subject to attack from their fellows when they happened to carry nesting material possessing the characteristics just mentioned.”
To summarize: We cannot know what a hen, a bee, or any other organism feels because we do not understand how brains can produce feelings, and any appearance of feeling can be mimicked by the notorious mindless zombie of consciousness philosophy.
Put 1/2 cup water, the lemon rind and the sugar in a pan, dissolve the sugar and let the mixture warm up and boil for 2-3 min. In the meanwhile, whisk the egg whites in a bowl until firm. Pour all the ingredients in the ice-cream maker bowl and, if you have time, let cool. The egg whites will float on top but will get mixed in eventually.
Note: There are recipes around with as much as 6 times more sugar than I use. Besides the general inflation of sugar content in food, one reason is that people try to balance the sourness of the lemon with more sugar. That does not really work, however, and you end up with something that is both very sour and very sweet. Adding salt neutralizes some on the sourness. In fact, you can experiment with even more salt than indicated above.
(This recipe is derived from here, with less sugar, less heavy cream, more egg yolk, and shorter preparation time)
Ingredients:
Warm up milk with the sugar, salt, and 1 tbsp vanilla extract in a saucepan, until they dissolve. Mix the egg yolks in a bowl and pour the warm milk over them while whisking (pour slowly, so that the egg does not cook). Pour back into the saucepan and warm on low heat mixing constantly with a spatula until – the books say – the mixture start to coat the spatula (you quickly learn to recognize this). Remove from heat, let cool for how long you have patience, add the heavy cream and 1 tbsp vanilla extract, mix, and put in the ice cream maker.
The Internet Sex Survey Initiative (ISSI) has a new website. ISSI, of which I have been part since its inception in 2006, uses the Internet as a data source to understand sexual preferences and sexual development. So far, we have published the results of three surveys on sexual preferences, finding evidence for a critical age window during which preferences appear to develop, as well as for the influence of mother and father on sexual preferences.
Part of the Cultural Evolution Seminar Series at Brooklyn College
Abstract: Kinship and marriage systems represent the ways in which humans organize relatedness and reproduction. The work presented in this talk extends the philosophical, theoretical, and methodological foundations of evolutionary biology to the study of these aspects of human social behavior. Specifically, I use game theory to show that the evolution of monogamous marriage can be understood based on inclusive fitness theory. Results show that where resources are transferred across generations, monogamous marriage can be advantageous if partitioning of resources among the offspring of multiple wives causes a depletion of their fitness value, and/or if females grant husbands higher fidelity in exchange for exclusive investment of resources in their offspring. I evaluate the results of the model using evidence about the history and cross-cultural distribution of marriage and inheritance strategies. This suggests that monogamous marriage may have emerged in Eurasia following the adoption of intensive agriculture, as ownership of land became critical to productive and reproductive success.
Laura Fortunato is Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research investigates theevolution of human social organization, focusing on the social norms regulating kinship and marriage. This involves understanding (i) why societies differ withrespect to these norms – for example, why some prescribe monogamous marriage, while the majority allow polygyny; and (ii) how this variation came about – forexample, whether the prevalence of monogamous marriage among European societies is simply an artefact of history, or whether itreflects ecological and/or social determinants.
The debate about corporate personhood—the legal recognition of corporations as persons—rose again to prominence in the U.S.A. when, in 2010, the United States Supreme Court ruled that corporations can fund political parties under the same rules as people (they were formerly severely restricted from doing so).
If corporations are persons, they may also have health problems. Corporations themselves take all possible steps to care about their own physical health, such as having enough food (money, supplies, etc.) and keeping internal organs (administration, production, logistics, etc.) in good shape. This is what people usually mean when they say that a corporation’s health is good or poor. Corporations as people, however, may also have mental health issues. As many psychiatric patients, they may need significant external intervention to get better.
Consider, for instance, antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), or the “pervasive disregard of, and violation of, the rights of others” (this definition and most of the following on ASPD is from Wikipedia). According to the American Psychiatric Association, three or more of these symptoms indicate antisocial personality:
How many corporations can be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder? And what would be the treatment?
Part of the Cultural Evolution Seminar Series at Brooklyn College
Abstract: Much human cultural evolution stems from the creative innovations of individual persons, whose novel ideas or productions are valued and propagated by society. In this talk, I first describe the nature of the creative process as it is understood by psychologists. Next, to understand how the creative process impacts cultural evolution, I examine the possibility that the creative process itself is not historically invariant, but rather that it evolves over time. In elaborating this idea, I apply two biological frameworks: the ‘evolution of evolvability,’ whereby the evolutionary process itself becomes better at evolving over time, and ‘ontogenetic heterochrony,’ whereby small changes in the timing of developmental events can lead to profound morphological novelty. The application of these frameworks to human creativity provides a unified framework for understanding creativity, as well as informing cultural evolution – past, present, and future.
Aaron Kozbelt is Professor of Psychology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His research program, focusing on creativity and cognition in the arts, derives largely from his outside interests. In addition to his training in psychology, he has spent more than 20 years as a practicing visual artist, and his initial research forays grew directly out of his experiences as an artist. Kozbelt has also incorporated his long-standing interest in classical music into a line of archival research examining patterns of creativity over the lifespan of classical composers. More recently, he has started research on creative cognition, humor production and sexual selection, and metacognition and evaluation in creative problem solving.
Part of the Cultural Evolution Seminar Series at Brooklyn College
Abstract: Human decision models often begin with individual, cost-benefit analyses as the basic behavior, with any social influence as a secondary add-on. Thisoften underestimates social influence among humans, whose brains have actually evolved to handle social relations. In fact, a better starting point in many casesmay be to assume that people base their choices (consciously or not) primarily on the decisions of those around them. As captured by experiments and simpleevolutionary drift models, undirected social influence introduces an irrationality and unpredictability to collective behavior, with implications for anthropology,psychology and economics.
Alex Bentley is Reader in Anthropology at Durham University, where he is co-founder of the Centre for the Coevolution of Biologyand Culture, and Deputy Director of a 5 year project on ‘Tipping Points: Mathematics, Metaphors and Meanings”, funded by theLeverhulme Trust.
An ad in the New York subway for a whiskey says “Say it without saying it,” suggesting that it is better to gift someone a bottle of strong liquor than to express your feelings for them. Presumably, you would then proceed to drink said bottle together, in an awkward silence.
The things that you are supposed to “say without saying” are those males in some (many?) cultures feel uncomfortable with (coherently with the traditional target of strong liquor ads). That is: expression of affection for each other. It’s clearly more manly to drink half a bottle of whiskey with your pal than to tell him you care.
drghirlanda 