human behavioral biology by robert sapolasky in standford (part 4)
whenpeople act in a certain way there's
no need for extensive socialization
normalization to create the behaviours
the louder the society screams
that people are this way the more you're
looking at a shaped learned behaviour
schoolsdothis Ads I workplace
Desert dwellers us
rainforest people
More violence in the
desert folks
Pastoralists tend to be
more monotheism
historical association which continues to
this day
All theory aside, Southerners are more polite
than Northerners. Whether it's an outgrowth
of colonization, socialization, cultural beliefs
or parenting, the South trumps the North
when it comes to manners and respecting
others.
Altruistic punishing. Spend your resources to punish someone else for
cheating. Participants across cultures were similar in willingness to punish
participants for cheating. But they differed in their willingness to punish
others for being too generous. Happily, the US and UK students were the
least likely to do this (and, of course, the Scandanavians).
In between, Slav countries, Middle East plus Turkey. Worst rates went to
Greece and the Arabic Emirates. [As a side note, a theory presented in
The Wisdom of Crowds is that trust is necessary to make a market
economy work. Greece is having a lot of success with their market
economy these days.]
they didn't want to up the ante or so
they said The levels of trust in society
were lower in the societies that were
more likely to punish antisocially
The profile of a terrorist Isolated
nothing to lose young Male Right
Is this true
standfora prison
experiment
Wrong if we're describing Muslim
fundamentalist terrorists. Instead
the profile turns out to be a socially
connected, educated and middle
classy type of person.
Even worse and more confusingly,
they tend to not have actually
experienced the oppression. And
shockingly, not very high levels of
religiosity. So wtf?
One argument comes from Professor Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Study guy) - under the right
social context, virtually anybody can be convinced to act in bizarre ways. (The Lucifer Effect
details the Stanford Prison Study and goes into elaborate depth on these topics. Over
elaborate actually. Basically it's 300+ pages that state the same thing as the sentence above,
plus a chapter or two on how great his girlfriend is/was. Not recommended.)
In many
cases this
make more
sense than
the violence
arising out of
conditions of
affluence
education
Most common cause of aggression
Male vs Male agression over reproductive
to female
Males attacking females over denial of
access to reproductive activities
Another selection element comes from the nature of
international terrorism - you've got to work within the
network and be able to travel, plan and execute effectively.
This calls on different skills than a socially isolated loner
with nothing to lose may have. So you might get a natural
selection that doesn't tell us about the actual
characteristics so much as it indicates a framework.
To wit, relative to the population as a whole, there aren't
that many terrorists. So is it possible for us to find a
screwed up dude who comes from a middle class family,
has a family of his own and has significant education? Is
1/1,000 possible? 1/10,000?
After all, a dominant theme throughout hum-bio is that the expression of the genes
is typically based on gene-environment interaction.
The profile above seems to violate that theme, but that presumes that we have a full
picture and that the listed external trappings mean what we think they do. Or that
the external data is real (not that a terrorist organization would ever think to dummy
up a history for a bomber that would confound anyone that researched him as well
as get him access to the target zone.)
In chimps societies females heads out
when they hit their mating years
Thus chimps have related males
warfare cooperation genocidal behaviours
Pseudo kinship People we feel are
like ourrelatvesBnd of brothers special
living arrangement Special terms Creak
of pseudo kinship identities
Pseudospeciation Making others
seem more
differentthan you than they are So different
that killing them hardly even counts
Example Rawanda the Hutu war cry
kill the cockroaches
Prior to Congressional authorization of the Gulf War, a nurse
"refugee" from Kuwait city gave testimony about appalling
behavior she'd witnessed at her hospital.
Allegedly, Iraqi troops had raided the hospital, killing off
patients, stealing equipment, so on and so forth. Allegedly they
took neonates out of their incubators, set them on the counter
and stole the equipment.
So Congress responded to the story by authorizing the war. It
was a close vote and several Senators indicated this story was a
crucial factor in their decision. But it was a hoax. The nurse
was not a nurse; she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
to the US and she had been trained by a US government paid PR
firm to say what needed to be said.
Naturally after selling this drama to the
Public the media didn't make abig to
do of it when it turned out to be false
Put someone in an FMRI scanner
flash pictures quickly enough to get sub
conscious responses the amygdalaactivates when pictures of someone
from a different race are shown
also depending
on background
people were
more likely
to have the
amygdala
effect Growyp
with multicultural
background you'd not have the same
response
contact theory also suggest
that contact with other social groupsreduce aggression But mere contact ins n't
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Nayirah_testimony
Research by Susan Fisk provided alternate findings when the
studies were tweaked. Add dots to the pictures and tell the
subjects to look for dots and you do not see the same activity in
the amygdala.
Ask them to give their opinion on whether the person is older
than 35 (categorical thinking) and the amygdala gets even more
activated.
Finally she primes them to think of the person as an individual -
would this person like coke or pepsi? Then the amygdala doesn't
activate. The difference is in whether the subject is thinking of
people as part of a category or as individuals.
Sufficient Spatial characteristics matter
Get just enough of one group to the
battle another instead of getting
cooperation you are more likely to
get conflict
maybe it's not
about water rights
or land Maybe
it's more about
respecting each
other as people as
evidence through
respect for valued
symbols
Reciprocal altruism game theory
better results Repetition number of
rounds unknown open book play
people know your reputation punishment
especially second party altruistic punishment
Opt out clauses also select for cooperate
Robert Axelrod of the U of Michigan and the
importance of symbols in peacemaking. Respect
others' symbols, get respect and cooperation that
goes beyond expected issues (such as resources).
Nelson Mandela and Invictus. Conflict in the
Middle East and issues of Hamas folks that
represent the Palestinians making statements
along the lines of "If they'd just acknowledge we
got screwed in 1948 [when the UN created Israel
on top of Palestine] we could get serious about
peace" and Israeli hawks saying they could
consider it if the anti-semitic talk would stop in
Palestinian schools - taking the emotions, symbols
and feelings of the so called opponent seriously
as opposed to material elements or only your own
concerns.
Trench warfare and intentional misses
as a way to negotiate peace
Revise it
3 times
21
genes are reductionism
Jumping genestranscription
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Today's lecture focuses on Chaos theory. The
assigned book is Chaos by James Gleick. Part of
what's analyzed is reductive science,
which is basically the concept that we can dig
deeper and to ever smaller portions of a thing and
ultimately gain knowledge about that thing.
So we can go from saying people have feelings, to
people have limbic systems to people have
neurotransmitters and on down the line and at each
level we come closer to the fundamental building
blocks.
These blocks are then believed to be consistent -
figure them out scientifically and you can
reproduce the results. Part of chaos theory is
that there is no end to the potential for reducing
(think quarks) and that at a certain point we hit
the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and end up
with randomness.
As he goes through the lecture, prior themes will
come to mind, such as the earlier points about the
frontal cortex, the most complex part of humans,
being the least constrained by genes.
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are chaos like that
fundamental patterns are
altered in unpredictable
ways or at least in
ways that aren't
controlled determined bifricationgraph
in traditional sense
bi frication diagram
Thomas Aquinas
3 things god cannot
science over religion The do
Universe as ordered with Sinabsolutes we have the
Make a copy ofintroduction of reductionism
Understand a complex himself
system by breaking it down make a triangle with
into it's parts more than 180
understand it those you get the whol
This is core to science
if nty Z 143 4 57.827867
htt 7 2 1 x 3 on
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the closer we look to anything the closer
you will get you will realise noise in
the pattern
Linearity Additivity add
component parts together
you can produce the
end result if you know
the starting state
you can figure out
what the end result
will be
if it's reductive
then there's a
blue print that system towards what
it should end up looking like
g
In Humbio think back to the heritability
segment science reduces down to
one controllable variable in the lab
gets result then calls those scient
truth
A lot of room for innaccuracy
there since real system are much
more likely to be variable
Lorenz's waterwheel
The Human body thus goes down levels
Body organs cells etc
But it doesn't work this way
for everything Hubel Weisel theory
of individual grandmother neurons dot
Significantly, the variability that emerges
in data is viewed as junk, noise,
instrument error something to be gotten rid
of. And the thinking is that the way to get
rid of it is to be more reductive; the closer
you get, the less variability there should be.
Eventually you should be able to measure
the true, iconic norm.In Chaos, Gleick
points out that hard to measure systems
were basically ignored and considered to be
unscientific.
line curves The thinking being
that one neuron stores one thing
from simple to complex
But the cortex seems to work
in systems networks
chance
Just like with neurons, there
aren't enough genes to code
for the bifurcating system gene
by gene. It cannot be a
reductive, point for point
solution.
Bifurcating systems. Scale free. All the
branch points on neurons are
bifurcating (dendritic trees). The
circulatory system is also bifurcating.
As is the pulmonary system.
Brownian Motion Cellular material differs
from the first division
The takeway is that the most
interesting stuff can't be regulated in a
simple reductive way
Determinist Periodic
Determinist Aperiodic This is where
our waterwheel comes in It's not
ostensibly linear but it is periodic
the pattern is simply complicated
Non determinist random elements
chaotic a pattern that never repeats
when the amount of force
added crosses a threshold it goes from
aperiodic or aperiodic pattern to one
that no longer has a
repeating observabl
structure the magic number seems to
be 3 have 3 distinct patterns on a
repetitive structure you're closing
in a chaotic system
butterfly effect
Fractal Information that codes for a
Pattern has similar feature
to the prior elements with
the same type of complex i
variability Think
bifuractions
fractals
Thus science encounters the problem
that variability is the system only
way to produce accurate true data
is to include noise Reductive
approaches can still be very effective
the data just won't reflect an absolute
reality
With these strange attractors, the pattern doesn't
really repeat - somewhere at that millionth decimal
mark, there's a minor change which in turn leads to
a slightly different next value. These differences
amplify with each new value; this is the so called
butterfly effect (marginal impact of the wings
changes the environment slightly...)