bodhi tree swaying » evolution

The moral life of babies

bodhipaksa — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:49:27 +0000

From a fascinating article by Paul Bloom:

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

This incident occurred in one of several psychology studies that I have been involved with at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in collaboration with my colleague (and wife), Karen Wynn, who runs the lab, and a graduate student, Kiley Hamlin, who is the lead author of the studies. We are one of a handful of research teams around the world exploring the moral life of babies.

Like many scientists and humanists, I have long been fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children. The mental life of young humans not only is an interesting topic in its own right; it also raises — and can help answer — fundamental questions of philosophy and psychology, including how biological evolution and cultural experience conspire to shape human nature. In graduate school, I studied early language development and later moved on to fairly traditional topics in cognitive development, like how we come to understand the minds of other people — what they know, want and experience.

But the current work I’m involved in, on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings?

Random musings

bodhipaksa — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:23:51 +0000

I managed to get a lot of writing done yesterday. I’ve been going back over a chapter I wrote on the Water Element (for a book on the Six Elements). I think I’m going to have to fork some of the material into a new chapter either at the start or end of the book, but that’s ultimately a good thing. I find sometimes I have to print stuff to be able to get some perspective on it — otherwise it’s hard to keep track of where I am in the document. Since I have a quiet morning I’m hoping to be able to get some more work done before heading off for a 4th July family gathering.
Watched the final episode of Frasier last night What a great show! I’m going go miss those characters and the wit of the script. Even though I have all eleven seasons on DVD and can watch it any time I want, I’m sorry I won’t be able to watch any new episodes. It’s interesting how with these shows like Friends and Frasier you start to feel like the characters are part of your own circle of friends.
Here’s one of my favorite scenes:

I was puzzled by lsmith1964 saying in her Twitter profile that she was "Liberal, female version of Joe the Plumber…but not as lame." I asked her about it and she said, "I’m not a plumber, I’m inconsequential to the political landscape, I’m not a looker…just like him!" I added that they have something else in common too — neither of them is called "Joe."
Yesterday Maia came out of a reverie and said to Shrijnana, "Mommy, I spaced out."
I enjoyed this article about paleontologists visiting the Creation Museum (or as I call it, the "Museum of Lies."
First Michael Jackson, now Compuserve (my first web/email account was with them.
Read an interesting article on happiness and financial outlay, which included the following:

"Dr. Miller asked readers of the blog to list the 10 most expensive things they had ever bought, and then list the 10 purchases that had brought them the most happiness. More than 200 responded. As we expected, many people rued spending lots of money for stuff that hadn’t brought them joy. Boats seemed to have particularly low utility in delivering happiness per dollar; many cars fit that category, too, and so did many expensive weddings.

"But we were struck by how much overlap there was between the most-expensive list and the most-happy list. People repeatedly included on both lists their homes, their college education, their vacation trips, their high-priced electronics (large-screen televisions, Blu-Ray player, audio equipment, computers) and certain models of cars (BMW 325, Audi A4, Jaguar, Subaru WRX, Toyota Prius, Honda Civic)."

Relatively pricey things I’ve purchased that have brought me a lot of pleasure are: my iPhone, the iPod Touch I owned before that, and in fact my LifeDrive and Palm Pilot; my $110 Skagen watch; my Macs; and my house. The only expensive thing I’ve bought that I can remember regretting was a laptop that had an embarrassingly noisy fan.
Oh, and it’s snowing on Mars. Sounds like they get some good powder there.

First we learned to love, then we learned to be smart

bodhipaksa — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:00:02 +0000

Natalie Angier is my favorite science writer. Often I’ll be a couple of paragraphs into a science story, notice how well written it is, and realize it must be one of hers.

Her latest is a preview of a new book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April.

The thesis of the book is that we evolved cooperation and social intelligence through learning to love babies. As Angier puts it:

…human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

Unlike chimps, our closest relatives, we spend a lot of time sharing child-care, even giving and receiving help from unrelated adults.

Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling — all these traits, Dr. Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. Babies became adorable and keen to make connections with every passing adult gaze. Mothers became willing to play pass the baby. Dr. Hrdy points out that mother chimpanzees and gorillas jealously hold on to their infants for the first six months or more of life. Other females may express real interest in the newborn, but the mother does not let go: you never know when one of those females will turn infanticidal, or be unwilling or unable to defend the young ape against an infanticidal male.

By contrast, human mothers in virtually every culture studied allow others to hold their babies from birth onward, to a greater or lesser extent depending on tradition.

Hrdy believes that cooperative childrearing arose a long time before our brains exploded in size. It’s a nice idea, that we learned to trust, and this allowed us to develop as more intelligent primates:

With helpers in the nest, women could give birth to offspring with ever longer childhoods — the better to build big brains and stout immune systems — and, paradoxically, at ever shrinking intervals. The average time between births for a chimpanzee mother is about six years; for a human mother, it’s two or three years. As a result of our combined braininess and fecundity, humans have managed to colonize the planet.

This suggests that love and cooperation are an absolutely central part of what it is to be human, not just in terms of our individual experience, but in terms also of our evolutionary history.

Why Buddhists embrace evolution

bodhipaksa — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 14:17:05 +0000

I have a long-standing interest in science, and in fact I came perilously close at one point to getting into veterinary research after completing my vet degree, and I also have a passionate interest in the relationship between science and religion. So that — combined with the 200th anniversary Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origins of Species” gave me the perfect opportunity to post an article entitled, “Four reasons Buddhists can love evolution.”