Seth's Blog

A Chinese teacher in Los Angeles named Yang Yang, whom you can see in this video, wrote this on her website:

I believe that we all have our own niche – something so unique and innate to us that we enjoy every second of it and can naturally do better than others. Teaching Chinese is my niche.

I think this is the beginning of wisdom about human diversity — a big improvement over judging people by how “smart” they are, as so often happens. (To a college professor, smart = able to imitate a college professor.) My theory of human evolution emphasizes the need for diversity of occupations. In ancient times, occupational diversity arose because different people enjoyed doing different things.

But I also think Yang Yang is wrong in two ways. First, I don’t think your niche is innate. I think it can be changed. I think we can come to enjoy and excel at many jobs that we do not enjoy at first. This is the other side of procrastination. Just as we dislike doing things simply because we haven’t done them in a long time, we like doing things simply because we did them yesterday. Habits are pleasant.

I also think that where you fall on a pro-status-quo/anti-status-quo (conformist/rebel) dimension is not innate. I think it has a lot to do with your birth order (first-borns are more pro-status-quo), as Frank Sulloway says in Born to Rebel. I didn’t read Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother expecting to think about birth order and rebelliousness but that’s what I ended up thinking about.

A nativity scene in Barcelona:

He is known in Catalan as the caganer. That translates most politely as ‘the defecator’ – and there he is, squatting under a tree with his trousers down.

At the nearby Christmas market amid the sprigs of holly and Santa hats rows of miniature, crouching country boys are lined up for sale.

Innocuous-looking from the front, their buttocks are bare and each one has a small, brown deposit beneath.

“It’s typical of Catalonia. Each house buys one for Christmas,” explains Natxo with a smile and a shrug as he shops. “I don’t know why (we do it), it’s just a tradition.”

Without Christmas, there would be much less demand for these intricate items. I believe the evolutionary reason for festivals and ceremonies is that they create demand for hard-to-make goods. This helps the most skilled artisans (good sources of innovation) make a living and hone their skills.

Via Marginal Revolution. Christmas: an evolutionary explanation.

The first Ancestral Health Symposium will be August 5th and 6th at UCLA. Tickets for sale here.

According to my theory of human evolution, a liking for ceremonies evolved because ceremonies increased innovation. Ceremonies increase demand for hard-to-make stuff, which helps the most skilled artisans make a living.

Stephanie Laursen, a letterpress printer, is an example. Letterpress printing is difficult. Larsen is a skilled artisan. She makes a living from wedding invitations. Without wedding ceremonies, she would probably be doing something else.

A week ago I went to a cognitive science conference in Chongqing, where I gave a talk called “A Theory of Human Evolution and Application to Education” (a theme of the conference was education). A sponsor of the conference, a magazine called Scientific Chinese, will publish short versions of the talks. Here is the short version of my talk, only a little different than what I’ve said before but far more compact.
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Waiting in line at Tokyo immigration control, I met a woman from North Carolina who’d come to Japan for an organized tour of Japanese baseball parks (17 of them). She learned about the tour from a friend. In America, she’s visited 117.

I told her I was a psychology professor and had a theory of evolution in which connoisseurship played a big role. She was a baseball-park connoisseur, I said.

The evolutionary role of connoisseurs and collectors was to provide demand for finely-made stuff — things made by state-of-their-art artisans. Connoisseurs and collectors would pay more for features that had no clear value otherwise. By trading for these things, the connoisseurs and collectors helped the artisans make a living and thereby push their technology further.

From The Story of Science, a great new BBC TV series, I learned that in 1856 William Perkin, a British chemist, while trying to synthesize quinine (to cure malaria), created the first aniline dye, called mauveine. It could be used to dye cloth mauve. (more…)

The dates of the Ancestral Health Symposium have been set:　August 5-6, 2011 at UCLA.

Speaking of good-luck charms, a study at the University of Cologne found in four different experiments with four different tasks that people did better when they believed that they somehow had Lady Luck on their side. For example, they did better when they had their lucky charm with them than when they didn’t.

If lucky charms work then it’s reasonable to buy them. I explained why it’s helpful in an evolutionary (i.e., long-term) sense to buy them: long ago, the resources paid for them supported technological innovation.
Via Bad Science.

In a museum about the history of Tokyo, I saw an exhibit that showed a typical Tokyo home from hundreds of years ago. It contained an elaborate good-luck charm next to the shrine. I realized that good-luck charms can be explained by my theory of human evolution as another example of behavior — along with art, ceremonies, and gift-giving norms – that long ago supported technical progress. This particular good-luck charm was hard to make. Because people wanted them, they bought them. This helped support skilled craftsmen, who were the ones who made technical progress. Along the same lines, ceremonies usually involve lots of high-end hard-to-make stuff, such as fine clothes.

Visiting distant big cities has taught me a lot about human nature. The big examples are the Shangri-La Diet (Paris) and the umami hypothesis (a earlier Tokyo visit led me to make a lot of miso soup, which had surprising effects). Trips to Antigua (single words make it easy to trade), Toronto (gifts support technical progress), and now Tokyo (again) helped me think about human evolution.