They were all my future specimens. And they died.

Without skeletal collections we'd struggle to do much evolutionary biology, especially when it comes to studying fossils.

We'd hate to let all those specimens go to waste, just languishing there in museum drawers. Sciencing them brings honor to their death. (Thanks for the new verb, Andy Weir.) But while we're learning from skeletons we can never forget that they're dead.

So although many of our samples are animals that were hunted by President Theodore Roosevelt (thanks Smithsonian!) or Major Powell-Cotton (thanks Powell-Cotton museum!), many of them, especially when it comes to human skeletons, are ones that died of "natural" causes.

You're thinking, well, duh. Well, yeah. Duh. But sometimes what's obvious still isn't so obviously important until someone goes to the trouble to very carefully consider it.

If the "osteological paradox" has already come to mind, that's probably because you're familiar with the classic paper "The Osteological Paradox" co-authored by a certain Mermaid and other former graduate school professors of mine.  Although the paper discusses issues that are more complicated and more specific than we need to hash out here, "osteological paradox" is a great term for the conundrum that scientists face when reconstructing things like health, fitness, and adaptation in past populations from the remains of the individuals who died.

Naturally, if you've been raised on "osteological paradox" thinking, it's one of the first things that comes to mind when you see a visually stunning study by my colleagues that analyzes pelvic morphology of dead individuals to reveal differing adaptive morphologies in the pelves of males vs. females.

Sexual dimorphism in the human pelvis has been known for quite some time, and it's already well-understood that the differences are largely located in the dimensions of a woman's birth canal. But this new study shows that differences are observable from birth and that women at post-reproductive ages do not retain the obstetrically-beneficial dimensions that younger women do during their fertile years. One of the arguments this new paper makes is that human female pelves are adapted to be most accommodating for childbirth during the child-bearing years. And that very well may be the case. However, these claims for adaptation, like most based on human skeletal samples, were based on women who were dead and, thus, not adapted.

In this context, the concluding paragraph of "The Osteological Paradox" is worth quoting:

"...choosing among competing interpretations of the osteological evidence requires tight control over cultural context as well as a deeper understanding of the biology of frailty and death. These problems deserve far more attention than they have received to date if we are to make sense of the biomedical consequences of the major social and environmental changes that have occurred during the course of cultural evolution."

And that could be extended to "biological evolution" as well. Maybe it has been in a later paper.

Anyway, when we're looking at dead humans with an evolutionary mindset, it's probably good to ask whether we can know if selective pressures were the same across the timespan covered by the sample. It's also probably good to ask whether environmental conditions were the same across the timespan covered by the sample. It's also probably good to sing this to ourselves as we design our evolutionary study of the human skeleton:

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.