Humans are master meaning generators

A hashtag in the sky above a school at dusk in southern Rhode Island.  

Was it put there intentionally? What does it mean?

For as long as we’ve been writing about exquisite Paleolithic cave paintings and carefully crafted Stone Age tools we’ve been debating their meanings.  And the debate carries on because meaning is difficult to interpret and that’s largely because “what does it mean?” is a loaded question.

“Meaning” is a hallmark of humanity and, as the thinking often goes, it is a unique aspect of Homo sapiens. No other species is discussing meaning with us. We’re alone here. So we’re supposed to be at least mildly shocked when we learn that Neanderthals decorated their bodies with eagle talons. And it’s supposed to be even harder to fathom that Neanderthals marked symbolic thinking on cave walls. But such is the implication of lines marked by Neanderthals in the shape of a hashtag at Gibraltar. 

source: "The Gibraltar Museum says scratched patterns found in the Gorham’s Cave, in Gibraltar, are believed to be more than 39,000 years old, dating back to the times of the Neanderthals. Credit: EPA/Stewart Finlayson"

This sort of meaningful behavior, combined with the fact that many of us are harboring parts of the Neanderthal genome, encourages us to stop seeing Neanderthals as separate from us. But another interpretation of the hashtag is one of mere doodling; its maker was not permanently and intentionally scarring the rock with meaning. These opposing perspectives on meaning, whether it’s there or not, clash when it comes to chimpanzee behavior as well.  

We’ve grown comfortable with the ever-lengthening list of chimpanzee tool use and tool-making skills that researchers are reporting back to us. But a newly published chimpanzee behavior has humans scratching their heads. Chimpanzees in West Africa fling stones at trees and hollow tree trunks. The stones pile up in and around the trees, looking like a human-made cairn (intentional landmark) in some cases.  Males are most often the throwers, pant-hooting as they go, which is a well-known score to various interludes of chimpanzee social behavior. 

source: "Mysterious stone piles under trees are the work of chimpanzees.© MPI-EVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation"

Until now, chimp behaviors that employ nature’s raw materials—stones, logs, branches, twigs, leaves—have been easy to peg as being “for” a reason. They’re for cracking open nutritious nuts, for stabbing tasty bushbabies (small nocturnal primates), or for termite fishing. But throwing stones at trees has nothing to do with food. If these chimps do it for a reason then it’s a little more esoteric. 

Maybe they do it for pleasure, to let off steam, or to display, or maybe they do it because someone else did it. It may be all of those things at once, and maybe so much more. Maybe you’d call that ritual. Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d say that they do it because that’s what chimps do in those groups: they walk on their knuckles; they eat certain foods; they make certain sounds; they sleep in certain terms in certain trees; and they do certain things with rocks, like fling them in certain places. Maybe we could just say that this behavior is the way of certain chimpanzees, hardly more mystifying than other behaviors that we’ve come to expect of them.

For comparison, I have certain ways. There are piles of books near my desk. They pile up on tables and shelves. I could fling books on the floor but I don’t. I’m not against flinging them on the floor; it’s just not how things are usually done. I share this behavior with many other, but not all, humans in the presence of books, tables, and shelves.  Until I wrote this paragraph, I never gave it much thought, it’s not something that factors even remotely into how I see the world or my place in it, and yet the piling of books on tables and shelves is quite a conspicuous and, therefore, large part of my daily life.

  

So, why isn’t someone setting up a camera trap in my office and writing up “human accumulative book piling” in Nature? Because this type of behavior, whatever it means, is quintessentially human. No one could claim to discover it in a prestigious publication unless they discovered it in a nonhuman. And they did.

Normally what we do when we learn something new about chimpanzee behavior is we end up crossing one more thing off our list of uniquely human traits. “Man the tool-maker” was nixed decades ago. What should we cross off the list now with this new chimp discovery? Would it be “ritual” and by extension “meaning,” or would it be “piling up stuff”? About that Neanderthal hashtag, do we cross off “art” or “symbolism” and by extension “meaning,” or would we just cross off “doodling,” which holds a quite different meaning? Rather than crossing anything off our list, do we welcome Neanderthals into our kind so we can keep our monopoly on hashtags? Whatever we decide, case by case, trait by trait, we usually interpret our shrinking list of uniquely human traits to be clear demonstration that other animals are becoming more human-like the more we learn about the world.

That’s certainly one way to see it.  But there’s another, more existential, and therefore, arguably, more human way to look at that shrinking list of uniquely human traits: Humans are becoming less human-like the more we learn about the world.

#WhatDoesThatEvenMean #PantHoot #Hashtag #ThisIsMyCaveWall 

Would you still go into the lab if you knew life on Earth was going to end tomorrow?

One of the most stubborn tenets of a strict Darwinian view of the world is that we are inherently selfish.  Thus, everything we do is to enhance our fitness, to get as many of our genes into the next generation as we possibly can, by hook, by crook, by wile and deceit.  Even if we help relatives, we are doing it only because they share our genes and, therefore, it's good for us. If we help strangers, that, too, is rationalized by the notion of reciprocity--we do it only because they'll help us later.  It's a 'theory' that can rationalize anything that seems at odds with it, a theory that can't be falsified!

Given all this, the June 29 episode of the BBC Radio 4 program Analysis, a discussion with philosopher Steven Scheffler of the idea of the collective afterlife, is an interesting one.  Scheffler recently published a book called Death and the Afterlife, drawn from a series of lectures, in which he in no sense means that we will have any kind of life after we have died.  He is concerned instead with the life that continues on without us, after our deaths.  He proposes a number of thought experiments to help elucidate how we feel about just that.

The BBC program began with two questions for the audience -- "Do you believe that people and the earth will continue to exist after your own death?"  And the second, "If you knew that Earth would be destroyed 30 days after your death by a collision with a large asteroid, would that change how you live your life?"  Another perspective on the same sort of question is what the detective novelist P.D. James wrote about in her 1992 book, The Children of Men, about the end of fertility in the human race.  The disease didn't threaten living people, but did mean the end of the entire human race. Would knowing that no humans would follow you on Earth change how you live your life?

Artist's impression of impact from a major meteor; Wikipedia

Scheffler believes that the afterlife, knowing that generations of people will follow us, matters more to us than we suspect and that upon pondering the question of how knowing the Earth would be destroyed soon after we die might change the way we live, most of us will come to realize that we might very well lose any sense of purpose, despite the fact that it's not our own life that is threatened. And this would change the way we live.  This means, says Scheffler, that much of what we do we do not for ourselves or even our children or grandchildren, but for unknown people who will come after us, because there will be people who come after us, and not just those we love.

Most obviously, if what you do now is something that isn't going to make a difference now but might in the future, would you continue doing it?  Would it make sense to keep working on finding a cure for cancer or reversing climate change if you knew there would be no one left to benefit?  But there would be other effects, Scheffler believes.  We would stop making art, or music, or creating literature, or writing history or doing any kind of scientific research.  If the issue was the infertility scenario posited by PD James, she suggests people would stop having sex, even when, as in her book, governments keep urging people to try, just in case someone somewhere hasn't been affected.  Scheffler says that he himself is sure he would stop writing papers about political philosophy.

He says, too, that the sense of horror we have about the end of the human race is different from the relative complacency most of us feel about the fact that everyone living now will one day be dead.

Boston Review quotes from his book:

My argument has been that personal survival already does matter to us less than we tend to suppose, and that the survival of humanity matters to us more. In saying this, I am not underestimating our powerful impulses to personal survival or the deep terror that many people feel when contemplating their own deaths. Nor am I denying the importance of self-interested motivations in ordinary human behavior. My point is that despite the power of these attitudes, there is a very specific sense in which our own survival is less important to us than the survival of the human race. The prospect of the imminent disappearance of the race poses a far greater threat to our ability to treat other things as mattering to us and, in so doing, it poses a far greater threat to our continued ability to lead value-laden lives.

Well, think about this from a Darwinian perspective.  A strict Darwinian could certainly twist it to fit theory perfectly well -- caring about the welfare of those who survive is completely in keeping with the urge to perpetuate our genes while we can.  Or, perhaps, we don't really believe we're going to die, so our caring is really about the usual reasons.

But I was talking about this with a friend the other day who is on the board of a number of conservation organizations, and is very active himself in nature preservation.  He said, "I have no children, so I sometimes wonder why I care so much about conservation.  Clearly, it has nothing to do with me."

A Darwinian might argue that he's doing it for his sister's descendants, to whom he's related, or even that he's related to the whole human race, so of course he cares.  But if we're related to everyone, and anything we do perpetuates our own genes, because all humans share genes, this trivializes the whole idea of "survival of the fittest," the backbone of Darwinian determinism.  It makes the 'theory' so generic that it loses any specificity and hence becomes in that sense essentially vacuous.

I think that there are so many exceptions to the Darwinian view of life as inherently selfish and self-perpetuating by now that it's past time to stop believing that these are exceptions rather than the rule. Humans aren't mere automatons driven by our genes' need to replicate themselves. Abortion, suicide bombing, birth control and the decision to remain childless, infanticide, altruism, even much human genetic or medical lab work which is unlikely to yield results for ourselves or even our children or grandchildren, are all behaviors that make no sense in a Darwinian world of direct self-interest.  And they aren't rare.

Culture is a powerful force.  With culture, we can talk ourselves into all manner of behaviors that have nothing to do with enhancing our survival or fitness, nor that of our relatives, and in fact might do just the opposite.  We can imagine an afterlife in the 72 virgins (or raisins, depending on your translation of the Koran) sense rather than Scheffler's, we can imagine future happiness without children, we can feel good about bringing a drowning swimmer to shore without expecting he or she will do something for us in return.  Janes can avoid killing anything at all, for spiritual reasons.  We need not kludge the argument to make all this into selfishness.  Culture, what we learn and agree with others about, matters.

Why isn't anyone looking for the culture gene?

Rhododendron walks into a bar...

By Anne Buchanan and Ken Weiss

Plants may be stuck in one place, but they aren't just sitting there twiddling their thumbs.  That they respond to environmental cues has long been known, of course, and the hormonal and molecular mechanisms for responding to light, temperature, moisture and so forth are well-established.  Some responses evoked by one part of a plant, such as attack by predator, can communicate to other parts or even to nearby plants.  But it has only fairly recently been suggested that plants are also able to recognize kin, and respond differentially, and in ways that enhance reproductive fitness, to the presence of plants to which they are closely related.

Among other reported indications of kin recognition, plant roots have been found to grow more in the presence of 'strangers' than 'kin'; kin recognition is said to be via root-derived cues, though that this actually happens is not without controversy, primarily because the molecular mechanism has not been identified (from 'Shedding light on kin recognition response in plants,' New Phytologist, Bias, 26 Nov 2014).  But now a new paper ('Photoreceptor kin-recognition among plants,' New Phytologist, Crepy and Casal, 29 Sept 2014) describes a possible mechanism for kin recognition among Arabidopsis thaliana, or mustard weed, the most frequently studied model plant.

Crepy and Casal did a series of experiments growing Arabidopsis plants in pots, to eliminate the possibility of confounding cross-talk between root systems, in variations on the theme of single genotype or mixed genotype rows, with plants either surrounded by kin or non-kin.  They also included mutant plants with known responses to different light waves, and plants of different ages, all exposed to differently filtered light sources.  They were interested in whether there were effects of proximity to kin, which they measured in terms of how close leaves were to neighboring leaves, or how much light fell on each leaf.  The idea was that kin don't compete over pools of light, but instead allow their relatives equal access.

Bias writes:

Crepy and Casal showed that plants recognized their kin neighbors by horizontally reorienting leaf growth compared with the interactions with the nonkin members. The authors also showed that the mechanism that led to reorientation of the leaf with kin members was regulated by phytochrome B and cryptochrome 1. The work by Crepy and Casal provides the first molecular evidence of the way in which plants respond to kinship.

They also showed that plants that interacted with kin produced more seeds than plants growing among strangers, "a clear indication of mutual benefit and cooperation."

From Bias, 2014;
'Aboveground and belowground interactions in plants experiencing kin and nonkin members.'

Have Crepy and Casal demonstrated beyond doubt that plants recognize kin?  Probably not; it has been controversial, and will surely remain so.  For one thing, there needs to be a convincing mechanism for recognizing what 'kin' means, and this is a serious issue both practically and theoretically.  In animals, with their various pheromones and highly variable immune/identity systems, the latter of which can be highly variable because mutations accumulate rapidly, various receptors and detection systems, also part of the system whose function is in mating or immune defenses, recognition of close molecular similarity in these aspects of the genome would be called 'kin'.   Plants also have high-variability immune-like systems for detecting invaders but whether they monitor this for self or self-like patterns is something we, at least, don't know.

It will take much beyond this rather limited study before any serious evolutionary geneticist will be completely convinced.  This is, in part, because authors must show beyond a reasonable doubt a molecular means specific enough to detect and evaluate the degree of kinship rather than just same-species or locally same-environment, both of which could affect many aspects of plant molecular biology.  Can a plant tell a clone from a cousin, say?  Finding such evidence has proven generally to be a very tall order, but of course that doesn't mean the Crepy and Casal finding is wrong, but it does need to be viewed with circumspection until details are known, because empirical findings like theirs can have multiple explanations.  The reason is not hard to see, and it seems there are some semantics involved, with the meaning of the term 'kin'.

The basic idea and rationale of kin selection
The main underlying idea that makes this of any interest has to do with altruism.  Helping any other organism may be at your own expense, and put you at a reproductive (and hence evolutionary) disadvantage if, say, it costs energy to help the recipient gain resources that lead to its greater reproduction when you could be putting that energy toward your own reproduction.  If that's the case, the genetic variants that lead you to do this won't proliferate as much as the recipient's. The explanation offered mathematically by William Hamilton over a half-century ago was that if your aid to a relative of a given degree -- and this is where 'kin' comes in -- must lead the recipient to reproduce more by a factor at least as great as your direct kinship relationship in order for the behavior to evolve.  In animal terms, you share half your genome with your sibling.  If you lose an offspring because you helped your sib, s/he must produce more than 2 additional offspring as a result of the help -- that is, in the next generation (on average) there will be at least as many copies of the altruism-inducing variant. If the recipient is of a more distant degree of relationship, the advantage must be much greater than just 2 for 1. 

Hamilton's rule was for decades a kind of cult religion among strong evolutionary determinists looking for precise natural selection everywhere.  To be fair, it also was a response to accounting for the evolution of what seemed like self-defeating behavior, to counter a heretical argument that invoked 'group selection', that organisms could evolve behavior that was self-limiting if it was good for the group.  This was heresy in the sense that it went against the rugged individualism of arch-Darwinism -- and mathematical analysis showed that was a more problematic phenomenon to account for.

However, careful quantitative ecological genetic studies have generally not supported the idea as of much practical applicability except in unusual circumstances.  On the other hand, in general if you help another member of your species, relative to other species, or if because you drop your seeds near where you live, your neighbors are  your relatives, then such behavior is easier to understand and doesn't require great precision -- for example, you don't have to have a mechanism for genotyping your neighbor, as you effectively do under Hamilton's rule.  If your neighbors are your relatives, helping is OK, and this can be so even if it's just within species if you are (or your ancestors at the time the helping mechanism evolved were) locally reproducing.

Likewise, if you compete for soil nutrients or sunshine with other plants where you live, it can in principle at least (this needs to be shown quantitatively) mean that you're better off by helping your species members rather than some other species.  Again, in the Hamilton's rule sense they share your genes far more than other species do.  These sorts of things can in principle account for the kin-recognition in plants that this paper refers to: it does not have to be testably close kin.


In this case, we think that the Crepy and Casal idea seems to have rather misleadingly used the term 'kin', not to refer to close family relationship of known degree but to what amounts to more distant group relationship.  Distant groups should not be referred to as 'kin' in this kind of situation because its connotation can be unclear.  After some variation has accumulated, it is clearly reasonable to ask whether similar molecular physiology might induce similar responses, or cross-reactivity, in those from the same group compared to those from a distant group.  No evolutionary kin-rule selection of the precise Hamiltonian kind need be involved.  In the wild, ancestrally, neighbors are kin.  In this case, if the story holds up, one will want to know how these particular genes effect such cross-reactivity.

Is it a perfect good?
But let's say that Crepy and Casal have demonstrated that plants help their kin.  And that kin recognition is an unalloyed good, with demonstrable fitness benefits.  As they point out,

Preferential helping of relatives has been observed for a wide range of taxa. For instance, in vertebrate (bird, mammal) species, helpers preferentially aid closer relatives during breeding (Griffin and West, 2003). In the social amoebae Dictyostelium discoideum, cells cooperate preferentially with relatives and aggregate to form multicellular fruiting bodies (Hirose et al., 2011). In humans, as the cost of helping increases, the share of help given to kin increases, whereas that given to nonkin decreases (Stewart-Williams, 2007).

The assumption is that the more closely related organisms are, the more likely they are to cooperate.  That is, increasing the reproductive fitness of one's kin is good for one's own fitness.  The reason that kin selection has been, and continues to be a hot topic in human evolution is both that it confirms hyper-darwinian fine-tuned selection, which many hold as fervently as a religion, and that it accounts for cooperation without being culturally wishy-washy (as they'd see it), and that there should be a mechanism to account for its evolution; note of course, that mechanism needs to be quite specific to define 'kin', which cannot just be assumed (as we outlined in the previous section).  But we, at least, have plausible molecular-genetic means of detecting close kin.

But people aren't plants, or dictyostelium.  We also have culture, and it can powerfully affect our behavior, so that what makes sense evolutionarily for other organisms doesn't always apply to us.   For one thing, culture allows us to assign relationships symbolically rather than just genetically.  We can imagine what 'success' may mean (e.g., getting to heaven), which goes beyond mere Darwinian proliferation.  We can form clans or other structures based on all sorts of criteria, not just genetic relationships. We don't always optimize our own fitness.  Humans are the only organisms that abort their own fetuses, that blow themselves up in support of an ideal, that have civil wars, killing people in fact most closely related to them. But humans also rescue strangers from drowning, and grow food to be consumed by people across the world.

We can devise all the equations we want about kin and fitness, and we can calculate the heritability of this trait and that, to show that behavior is genetically determined, but our thinking brains, and the power of culture trump those rules.  Members of Homo sapiens simply are not just bags of 'selfish' genes, and meaning isn't just reproduction.  We're not nearly as hard-wired for behavior as many other 'lesser' species of animals and plants are often (correctly or incorrectly) assumed to be.

'Obstetric dilemma' skeptic has c-section and remains skeptical ... & ... Why my c-section was natural childbirth

This is a new kind of Tale for me. The rock'n'roll's turned way up, and every couple sentences I have to stop typing to twirl a blue hound dog, a bear holding an umbrella, a Flying Spaghetti Monster, and other oddities that I strung up to hypnotize this little guy into letting me type one thought at a time:

The thing that needs to be hypnotized.
Or the three wise monkeys say: The thing that makes it impossible to create or to dwell on the negative. (e.g. his birth by c-section)

That young primate's the reason I've been quiet for a while here on the MT. And he's the reason I'm a bit more emotional and I cry harder than usual at Rise of the Planet of the Apes (those poor apes!), Cujo (that poor dog!), and other tearjerkers. But he's also the reason my new favorite animal is plain old, fascinating, and dropdead adorable Homo sapiens.

In anthropological terms, he's the reason I'm overwhelmed, not just in love but in new thinking and new questions about the evolution of human life history and reproduction, and then what culture's got to do with it and with our reconstruction of it.

Some context would help, probably.

For the past few years I've been challenging the 'obstetric dilemma' hypothesis--the idea that hominin mothers' bipedal pelves have shortened our species' gestation length and caused infant helplessness, and that antagonistic selection between big-brained babies and constrained bipedal mothers' pelves explains childbirth difficulty too.

[For background see here or here or here or here.]

As part of all that, I've been arguing that the historically recent surge of c-sections and our misguided assumptions about childbirth difficulty and mortality have muddled our thinking about human evolution.

So, once I was pregnant, you might imagine how anxious I was to experience labor and childbirth for myself, to feel what the onset of labor was like, and to feel that notorious "crunch" that is our species's particular brand of childbirth. Luckily I was not anxious about much else the future might hold because modern medicine, paid for by my ample health insurance, would always be there to make it all okay. After a long pregnancy that I didn't enjoy (and am astonished by people who do) I was very much looking forward to experiencing childbirth. In the end, however, my labor was induced and I had a bleeping c-section.

But my bleeping c-section's only worth cussing over for academic reasons because the outcome has been marvelous, and the experience itself was out of this world.

We'll get to the reasons for my c-section in a second, but before that, here are the not-reasons...

First of all, I did not have a c-section because I fell out of a tree with a full bladder.

Second of all, shut your mouth... a c-section was not inevitable because of my hips.

Okay, you got me. I've never been even remotely described as built for babymaking. My hips are only eye-catching in their asymmetry. One side flares out. It might be because when I was 15 years old I walked bent-kneed for a few months pre- and post-ACL reconstruction. That leg's iliac crest may have formed differently under those abnormal forces because, at 15, it probably wasn't fused and done growing yet. If you like thinking in paleoanthropological terms like I do, then my left side is so Lucy.

Anyway. I'm not wide-hipped. However, guess how many nurses, doctors, or midwives who were involved in our baby's birth think my pelvis was a note-worthy factor in my c-section? Not one.

Hips do lie! Inside mine there's plenty of room to birth a large baby. Two independent pelvic exams from different midwives (who knew nothing of my research interests at the time) told me so, and it sounded like routine news to boot. Although one midwife asked me "do you wear size nine and a half shoes?" (no, I wear 8) which was her way of saying, "Girl, you're running a big-and-tall business. You got this."

What you probably know from being alive and knowing other people who were also born and who are alive (or what you might hear if you ask a health professional in the childbirth biz) is that most women are able to birth babies vaginally, even larger-than-average babies. And that goes for most women who have ever lived. Today, "most women" includes many who have c-sections because not all c-sections are performed because of tight fit between mother's birth canal and baby's size. As I understand it, once the kid's started down into the birth canal and gets stuck, a c-section's no longer in the cards. So performing c-sections for tight fit is a preventative measure based on a probability, not a reflection of an actual tight fit. In the mid 20th century, tight fit used to be estimated by x-raying pregnant women and their fetuses. Can you imagine? And this was right about the time the obstetric dilemma hypothesis was born. I don't think that's a coincidence.

Here's a list of reasons for c-sections. Tight fit is included in the first bullet point. Tight fit is one of the few quantifiable childbirth risks. No wonder it's so prominent in our minds. That list excludes "elective" ones which can be done, at least in Rhode Island, if they check the box that says "fear of childbirth". And that's not even close to a list of reasons why women around the world and throughout history have died during or as a result of childbirth. For example, about a hundred years ago women were dying all over the place because of childbed fever.

Anyway, we should assume that I am like most women and expect that I could have given birth the way Mother Nature intended: through my birth canal and with the participation of other humans. Oh yeah, when it comes to humans, social behavior and received knowledge are part of natural childbirth. Even this natural childbirth (which has inspired a forthcoming reality television show featuring women giving birth in the wild!) involves the supportive and beneficial presence of other humans as well as the culture that the mother brings to the experience.

But a c-section's just culture too, so could it be part of "natural" childbirth, then?

I'm inclined to blurt out yes, of course! because I don't support calling anything that humans do "unnatural." But I know that's not something everyone agrees with. It's politics. For example, many of you out there don't flinch an inch at the subtitle of Elizabeth Kolbert's book, "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History."  And given the present energetic movement against childbirth interventions, describing c-sections as "unnatural" as climate change could help minimize unnecessary ones for those who wish to give birth vaginally.

So there we have it. These are the two enormous issues raised by my own little c-section: What can it teach us about the evolution of gestation length, infant helplessness, and childbirth difficulty? And could it be considered natural?

One way for me to get at these questions is to try to understand why I experienced "unnatural" childbirth in the first place. So here goes.

Here's why I think I had to have a c-section:

1. My pregnancy ran into overtime.

This is expected for nulliparous mothers. I visited one of my OBs on my due date. He put his finger on the calendar on the Friday that was two weeks out and joked, "Here's when we all go to jail." Then he asked me, "Who do you want to deliver your baby? I'll see when they're on call before that Friday and schedule your induction then." And I chose my favorite midwife and he scheduled the induction.

All right so I was running late compared to most women, but that's still natural, normal. But it also means risks are ever-increasing by the day. And no matter how small, that the professionals know how to mitigate the biggest risks of all, *deaths*, means that they try to do that. They're on alert already as it is, and then they're even moreso on edge when you're overdue. Especially when it's your first baby and you're a geezer, over 35 years of age.

Now, does going overdue mean the baby keeps growing? Maybe, but not necessarily and not necessarily substantially. Both of us, together, should have been reaching our maximum, metabolically. There's only so much growing a fetus can do inside a mother.

When I approached my due date, and then once I went past it, I tried to eat fewer sweets to make it less comfortable in my womb. I also went back to taking long, hard walks, five milers, even though it was hard on my bladder because I thought that might help kick him out too. I even ran the last of my five miles the day before my induction, to no avail other than the mood boost it gave me.

2. I didn't go into labor naturally by my due date or by my induction date 11 days later. 

Although my cervix was ripening, when I went in to be induced I was only dilated 0-1 cm. I had 9+ more to go before the kid could get out at 10. So a balloon catheter was inserted and filled with water, and I had to tug on the tail of it, which tugged the balloon, which put pressure on the cervix. It dilated enough that it fell out several hours into the process, and by morning I was dilated 3-4 cm. This was exactly the goal of the catheter, this many centimeters. All was going well. However, that the cervix did not open on its own is already a missing piece of going "natural," of having my own biology contribute to my childbirth experience. So starting this way is already derailing things, making it difficult for anything natural to follow, naturally.

3. The fetus's head was facing the hard way: sunnyside up.

This was assessed by the midwife and cradling my belly in a bedsheet, with me on all fours, she and I could not twist him into a better position. His head, she said, was probably why I did not dilate naturally. When I asked an OB during my postpartum check-up, "What dilates the cervix?", he said "We don't know. But I can tell you it's not with the head like it's a battering ram." Well, then... hmph. And then I asked him if women carrying breech fetuses have trouble dilating their cervixes, or going into labor naturally, and he said not necessarily. No. Hmph.

Regardless of what causes cervical dilation, if the head isn't facing the right direction, it's notoriously tough to get down into the birth canal, let alone through the birth canal. It's not impossible, not even close. But it's not looking good at this point either. Perhaps the contractions will jossle his head into a better position, they said. And the contractions should further dilate the cervix.

4. Contractions didn't get underway, naturally, after the catheter dilation, so the drug pitocin was used. 

Induction and pitocin increase the chances that a mother will ask for drugs to help with pain and that she will have interventions, like a c-section. See for example this paper. What the causes are, I'm not sure. But pointing out the correlation is useful at this point because at this point, without even getting into hard labor yet, and without finding out whether my cervix does its job, I'm more likely than ever to be going to the operating room.

5. After six hours of easy labor and five hours of intense labor, my cervix never dilated past 5 cm.  

It needs to get to 10 cm to get the baby moving into the birth canal. Just like with due dates, I think that blanketly assigning this number to all women is probably not consistent with variable biology, but it's how it's currently done. And maybe any higher resolution, like "Sally's cervix needs to hit 9.7 cm", is pointless.

After several hours pitocin-induced contractions--which at first felt like the no-big-deal Braxton-Hicks ones I'd been having numerous times daily for the whole third trimester--I only dilated 1 cm more. That's even when they upped the pitocin to make them more intense.

But after they saw I'd made essentially no progress and that I was napping to save my energy for when things got bad, they woke me up and broke my bag. It would be nice if they could have let my labor progress slowly, if that's what my body wanted to do, but remember, my personal biology went out the window as soon as induction began. And then when that amniotic fluid oozed out of me, that's when bleep got real.

Every two minutes and then every one and a half, I grabbed Kevin's extended hand and breathed like an angry buffalo humping a locomotive. It was the worst pain of my life and I was afraid I'd never last to 10 cm, so I took the stadol when I told the nurse my pain was now at a 9 out of 10 (all previous answers to this question were no higher than 2). I was going to avoid the epidural no matter what, even at this point, because I was more afraid of the needle sticking out of my spine for hours of labor than I was afraid of these contractions. I have no idea if the stadol dulled any pain, because the pain just got worse, but it did help psychologically because it put me to sleep between contractions. There was no waiting with anxiety for the next one and time flew by. But after five hours of this, I had not dilated any more. But I had vomited plenty! And although I'd fended off the acupuncture (FFS!), I folded weakly and, for the peace of mind of a wonderfully caring nurse, I allowed a volunteer to perform reiki on me. And what a tragedy it was! Wherever she is, there's a good chance she gave up trying to help laboring women, and she may have given up reiki all-together.

The hard labor story ends at five hours because that's about when the nurse actually screamed into the intercom for the doctor. My contractions were sending the fetus into distress.

6. After five hours of intense labor, the fetus was experiencing "distress" at every contraction, as interpreted from his heart-rate monitor. 

Basically, he was bottoming out to a scary heart-rate and only very slowly coming back to a healthy heart-rate just in time to get nailed by another contraction. By the way, this is the official reason listed in my medical records for my c-section: fetal distress.

I know that a heart-rate monitor on the fetus is another one of those medical practices that increases the chances of an "unnatural" childbirth. That's probably because all fetuses are distressed during labor, but observing the horror, and then guessing whether it's safe to let it continue is seemingly impossible. So at some point, like with me and my fetus, they get alarmed and then how do you back down from that?  They gave me an oxygen mask which immediately helped the fetus a bit, but like I said, hackles were already up at this point. Soon thereafter we had a talk with the doctor about how I  could go several more hours like this and get absolutely nowhere with my cervix, and then there are those life and death matters. She never said c-section. I had to eek out between contractions, "So are you saying we need to perform a c-section?" and she said yes, and urgently. A c-section sounded like the only solution at this point both to battered, old me, to clear-minded Kevin, and clearly to the delivery team (and in hindsight, it still does to Kevin and me). Then, lickety-split, the anaesthesiologist arrived, got acquainted with our situation, and made me vomit more. And then like a whirlwind, Kevin's putting on scrubs, and we're told to kiss, and I'm jokingly protesting "I'm a doctor too!" while being wheeled into the operating room because I cannot walk through my contractions.

It's bright white, just like Monty Python said it would be. I sat on the crucifix-shaped operating table to receive all the numbing and pain killing agents through my spine. Somehow they pulled this off while I was still having massive contractions. Then I laid down, arms splayed out to the side, and they drew a curtain across my chest, a nurse told me how creepy it was about to be, and they got to work.

Although the c-section wasn't painful, I could feel everything. This was my childbirth experience. I felt the incision as if she was simply running her finger across my belly, and I felt the tugging and the pressure lifting from my back as they extracted my baby from me. After that, and after I got a short glimpse of him dangly over my left arm--"He's beautiful! He's perfect! He's got a dimple! He growled!"--I continued to feel many things, probably the birth of my placenta, etc...

But I didn't know what exactly I was feeling until I watched a video of a c-section on YouTube. Kevin helped fill in the details too. He had caught a naughty glimpse of the afterbirth scene before being chased back to his designated OR spot with the baby. Thanks to him (and that video) I know now that I was feeling my enormous muscular uterus and some of my intestines being yanked completely out of a small hole right above my pubic bones and then stuffed back in. For a few moments, it must have looked like I was getting re-inseminated by a red octopus.

I tell everyone that it was like going to outer space to give birth. And this, if you know me, is an exciting idea so my eyes are smiling and I sound dreamy when I say "it was like going to outer space to give birth!" I bet you're thinking it's the Prometheus influence, but you'd have the wrong movie. The correct one is Enemy Mine. And it's much more than that, actually. I was as jaw-dropped and awe-struck by humanity during my childbirth experience as I am by space exploration. The orchestration, the specialization, the patience, the years of study, of planning, the calculations, the dexterity. To boldly go. Wow. Like I said, humans are my new favorite animal.

I was back in our little room quicker than most pizza deliveries, where our bright red new baby was trying hard to nurse from his daddy. Then he nursed from me. And the story's all mushy weepy cuddly stuff from now on. So let's not. Let's remember what we're here for. Okay. Right.

7. The cord was wrapped twice around his neck. 

We found this out when he was cut out of me. That didn't help with moving him around in utero to a good position, nor did it help with oxygen flow during contractions! This would not have inhibited his safe vaginal birth, however, at least not necessarily.

8. He was enormous. His head was enormous too. 

He came out a whopping 9 pounds, 13 ounces, 22.25 inches long, with a head circumference of 15.5 inches. They say that's heavier than he'd be if born vaginally because he didn't get all the fluids squeezed out of him. But still, that's large. According to the CDC he was born as heavy as an average 3.5 month-old boy. His head was about the size of an average 2.5 month-old.

Red line is our baby's head circumference at birth. (source)

Way back at the mid-pregnancy ultra-sound, we knew he was going to be something. And then if you'd seen me by the end, like on my due date, you might have guessed I was carrying twins. I was so big that my mom joked she thought maybe a second fetus was hiding behind the other one, undetected.

Smiling on my due date because pregnancy was almost over. 
(By the way, I could still jog and I dressed weird while my body was weird.)

If I hadn't had the means to eat so much like I did during pregnancy, perhaps he wouldn't have grown so large inside me. If I hadn't lived such a relaxed lifestyle while pregnant, maybe he wouldn't have grown so large inside me. If I didn't have a medical safety net waiting for us at the end, perhaps I would have been scared into curbing my appetite from the get go. I gained 40 pounds. With this body, but in a different life, a different place, a different time, maybe I wouldn't have. Probably I wouldn't have.

His size has got to have influenced a few of those other contributors to my c-section. But clearly it's more complicated than his size. And this brings us back to the obstetric dilemma. Let's say he was too big or that his large size screwed everything up, even if he could technically fit through the birth canal. Well then, why didn't I go into labor? Labor triggers are, to me, a significant problem when it comes to explaining the evolution of gestation length in humans, and whether we have a unique problem at the end.

If our pregnancy length is determined by available energy, energy use, and metabolism (here and here) then women like me who go overdue, who are clearly not killing our babies inside us either, are just ... able to do that. But doing that clearly leads to problems in our species (one of the few known) that has such a tight fit to begin with.

If our pregnancy length is determined by our birth canal size, and any anatomical correlates, then why didn't I go into labor before my fetus got so big? What went wrong? What's frustrating too is, for my n of 1, we'll never know if I could have given birth vaginally because I never got the chance to try.

These seem like simple questions but they are deceptively complex. And I think there will be some exciting discoveries to come from medicine and anthropology in the coming decades to explain just how our reproduction works which will in turn help us reconstruct how it evolved.

What's my birth experience got to do with evolution? Why, everything. It's got everything to do with evolution, because if it's not evolution, it's magic.  And that's kind of where I'm coming from when I say that my c-section was still natural childbirth. It wasn't unnatural and it certainly wasn't supernatural. Sure, it's politics. I'm invested in the perspective that humans are part of the evolving, natural world and want others to see it that way or, simply, to understand how so many of us see it that way. But it's not just evolution that's got me enveloping culture into nature and that's got me all soft on the folks who drive fancy cars who cut my baby out of me.

Who knows what could have happened to my son or to me if we didn't have these people who know how to minimize the chances of our death? It's absolutely human to accumulate knowledge, like my nurses, midwives and doctors have about childbirth. Once learned, it's difficult for that knowledge to be unseen, unheard, unspoken, unknown. Why should we expect them to throw all that away so that we can experience some form of human being prior to that knowledge?

Nature vs. Culture? That's the wrong battle.
What matters is which one can fight hardest on my behalf against the unthinkable.

Maybe childbirth is so difficult because it can be. We've got all this culture to help out when things get dicey, with or without surgeons. On that note, maybe babies are so helpless because they can be. We've got all the anatomy and cognition to care for them and although the experiment would be impossible, it's doubtful any other species but ours could keep a human baby alive for very long. It could just be our dexterous hands and arms, but it could be so much more, like awareness of their vulnerability and their mortality,and (my favorite pet idea) awareness that they're related to us. Culture births and keeps human children alive with or without obstetricians. It's in our nature. Maybe it's time we let all this culture, our fundamental nature, extend into the operating room.

You know porn when you see it, don't you?

The other day we wrote a post reacting to a NYTimes article that said that we really don’t know what ‘life’ actually is, that life is only a ‘concept’ we have, not something we can rigorously define.  But one thing about life, whatever life is, is that reproduction is essential.  Successful reproduction proliferates viable genetic variation via both chance and natural selection.  Sex is the way that happens for many species, like us.  That makes sex very interesting to scientists (for purely abstract theoretical reasons, naturally), and to the general public who are the participants in the reproductive circus.

There are various theories about how sex is or how it should be done successfully, not so much in regard to positions, but as to who does it with whom.  As humans, we each have a vested interest in this, and this is at least in part why homosexuality as well as heterosexuality attract attention.  Many studies are done to see how sex works, that is, how the intense and selective competition takes place and all of that.  Because we’re all in this competitive arena together, we naturally are curious to keep an eye on what our fellow competitors are up to.  So, besides the titter, that makes sexual behavior newsworthy.

Of course, the intense scrutiny of behavioral evolutionists centers on the strategies by which males purportedly want to inseminate as many females as possible, to spread their genes, but females want to ‘catch’ their man since they have to care for the few children they can bear, and want a steady breadwinner to help out.  Since this is so fundamental to success, and has been that way so intensely for so long, sexual patterns are often said to have been inscribed deeply in our genes ages ago, to ensure that the genes’ bearers don’t just bear all, so to speak, indiscriminately, but bear fruit in the process. 

Impersonal sex

Thus, for completely scientific and detached intellectual reasons, the news media are curious about sexual behavior.  So a recent newsworthy description grabbed our attention (as scientists). 

The story relates to one aspect of contemporary sexual activity or, one might call it, ‘performing’.  Attractive young people having sex with many different partners, sometimes different from day to day.  The pairings are arranged at the last minute, more or less as a planned business matter.  The performers often don’t know the person they’re doing the very most intimate acts with, or afterwards wonder who s/he was.  They cannot be sure that they were protected from disease or pregnancy, partly because they may be under the influence at the time they’re engaged in their romp with these strangers.  You may see a record of their activity on posted videos showing the various sexual positions, devices, and activities that are involved.  Those activities may include serial sex or group sex—you name it! 

Of course, we must be talking about the porn industry, because there the evolutionary rules are apparently suspended for some reason.  Perhaps society seems to frown on the activity because its random impersonality leads to licentiousness that might upset the evolutionary apple cart.  Fortunately (you breath a sigh of relief!), at least this is a somewhat underground aberrant activity on the fringe of society.

Wrong!  What we describe is today’s ‘hookup’ culture.  This is what many college students (and hence educated and privileged and should-know-better, not just desperate deviant addicts) are doing.  They write and boast about it in their college newspapers.  Campuses are ringed with bars where the ‘auditions’ for partners take place.  The sex that results is no less real, varied, graphic, and impersonal than porn.

Hookup, or porn?
Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/11/15/does-hookup-culture-hurt-women.html

But there’s a difference

Actually, there is a difference between hookup culture and porn.  Porn performers work openly in daytime, with formal contracts, under at least partly regulated conditions.  They are clear in advance about what will be performed, and there is at least some protection related to medical health and contraception.  Their activities take place under controlled conditions, with witnesses.  No waking up afterwards and wondering what went down, with whom (or how many).  It’s completely voluntary, partners not chosen in a stupor.  And they are paid in money, not just beer and vodka.

If you think of it in this way, porn could be seen as a more savory kind of activity than hookup culture.  College students do often voice regrets about their hookup experiences with its drug or alcohol connections, its anonymity, its nocturnal furtiveness (porn is daytime work).  But they still do it regularly, even if they sometimes report feeling ‘used’.  One main difference is that porn is at least always planned for posting on the net, but hookup adventures less often so.

We aren't defending the porn industry which has both its advocates and its critics.  But we write because of a recent news frenzy that concerned a student at a prominent university whose porn activities were outed by a classmate.  This hit the headlines, and the performer (a women’s studies major) became an overnight media interview sensation (interviewed on Piers Morgan/CNN for instance).   She is unapologetic about the fact that she does this to help pay her way through college (here's one of countless stories).  By contrast, hookup culture, if anything, may reduce the performers' chances of getting through college successfully.

If hookup culture is so widespread--and even if we avoid asking why this doesn’t give pause to the evolutionary theorists (one can always find after-the-fact explanations of why this doesn’t really violate the assumed genetic mandates, even though it obviously seems to)--we can ask whether the porn industry is any sleazier, rarer, or more deviant than what’s happening right now in the local bars in your town. 

Why is a college student, doing what she does in what seems a responsible way compared to what her friends are doing in their seemingly less responsible way, considered a sort of shocking misbehavior sensation?  Why is she being scorned or even threatened, as she says, by frat boys and other classmates--who may be watching or up to similar acts?  Why isn't the question not about the porn industry and its exploitation, but rather about the turn of our society in recent years towards amateur porn under the name ‘hookup’?  (See this link from which we got our figure.)

There are a lot of things one can think about the meaning of this state of affairs, knowing that it is transitory and that sexual behavior varies greatly among countries and over time within country (and here we don’t even need to consider the current rise of acceptance for homosexual and transgender/transsexual aspects).  There’s a big nature-nurture difference of opinion about this**, but our own view is that evolution has indisputably given us the drives for sex, either because of its immediate pleasure and/or for whatever other cognitive reasons.  But when it comes to it, like so much in human affairs, culture rules.

One might almost wish that bars would impose similar standards as at least some of the porn industry apparently does, but that the hookup culture apparently doesn’t.

----------------------------

**We will be screening any comments on this post to avoid it being mired in that divisive often polemical area.

Blown out of proportion, or culture rules!

So, to 'celebrate' the holiday of peace, some guy tried to blow up a passenger plane on Christmas. That's religion for you!

Martyrdom is self-willed unfitness from an evolutionary point of view, unless misguided Islamic martyrdom-seekers think that screwing the promised 72 virgins will increase their fitness (if that's what they think, too bad for their misguided souls, because the text apparently promises raisins, not virgins....but that's another tale). So how does hard martyrdom, and its softer versions such as the self-imposed chastity of priests (sorry to be disappointing, but little boys don't count towards evolutionary fitness) come about?

After 4 billion years of evolution, how can these various forms of self-willed non-fitness be possible? How can the genomes of any species, much less the most 'advanced' one on earth, still allow it? This has been a driving question in sociobiology, and many answers have been given. Religion is an illusion due to a 'God' gene, that evolved because it leads to group cohesion. Altruistic self-sacrifice perpetuates your relatives' genes. And other post hoc excuses.

Before the field went off the deep end, anthropologists did their duty to point out that culture, the characteristic human way of life, is a phenomenon of its own that  basically does not depend on specific genotypes. What's in the human genome in some senses that we don't yet understand is the ability to have culture, not the details of any given culture.

Individual humans can behave in all sorts of ways, and clearly some of them are affected by specific genotypes (like the famous inability to digest milk in adults, or various psychiatric disorders that clearly have a genetic component). But overall, any humans can have any culture. Culture is a phenomenon that evolves in its own way, basically independent of the specific genomes of its bearers.

One can be the most promiscuous or the most martyrial in the same culture. Harems and jihad, prostitutes and priests. The possible states range across the entire spectrum, within any given culture. Clearly too much self-sacrifice would doom a group, but even that has occurred (as in the Spartans defending Thermopylae). But on the scale of human evolution, and given the pre-human billions of years, these things are not specifically tied to specific individuals' genotypes (the two Spartans who passed on Thermopylae later committed suicide, one at home and the other in his next battle).

That we are affected by our genotypes in both our physical traits and our behavior certainly seems true. But that we are pre-determined by them is not an accurate way to view human life. What we are pre-determined 'for' is the ability not to be predetermined for specifics, but to be able to absorb our societal environment (our culture), to assess our specific circumstances in that context, and to act upon it. But the range of action, and the accuracy of our assessment are wide and not, by and large, due to our specific genotype. Or, if they are, as we noted in a recent post on randomness, there is so much individuality that we are largely unpredictable in terms of individual genotypes.

It is the determinism of our nondeterminism that we think should be the object of neuroscience research. How material forces can follow natural law yet, in aggregate, evolve to be unpredictable is as philosophically and scientifically profound a question as any that humans have to think about.