Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (56 page)

ii
. It’s a long story, but briefly, ants are “haplodiploid,” as a result of which workers are exceptionally close, genetically, to each other. This appears to contribute significantly to their self-sacrificial behaviors.

iii
. It has been suggested, however, that the human protein thereby made available may have constituted a genuine nutritional payoff.

iv
. There is, after all, a large population of Christian Arabs.

v
. There are counterexamples, however. In the 1980s, for example, millions of Iraqis chose their nationalist, Iraqi identity over their Shiite religious connection, making war against Shiite Iran in the name of the Iraqi state.

vi
. It is sometimes said that the two necessities for a happy life are duct tape and WD-40: the former for keeping things together that would otherwise move when they shouldn’t, and the latter for helping things move when they need to and otherwise wouldn’t.

vii
. Its author is outside the traditional scientific/academic establishment, which probably explains much.

i
. In a sense, Bierce is still correct, in that even with the aid of such powerful prosthetic devices, we are still limited—and presumably always will be—by the fact that in the end, we have nothing but our own minds and brains to know ourselves with.

ii
. A phenomenon that poses its own evolutionary mystery, while also likely contributing to the role of tools: By becoming bipedal, a species frees its forelimbs for possible use of tools. At the same time, there are other possible evolutionary drivers for bipedalism, including enhanced line of sight, ability to appear larger and thus intimidate predators as well as other humans, even presenting a diminished target for the tropical sun’s potentially dangerous rays.

iii
. This leads to the paradoxical possibility that when it comes to deciding upon the adaptive basis of our intelligence, intelligence itself may be an impediment, insofar as it induces us to come up with too damned many hypotheses, as well as counterarguments for each, followed by counter-counterarguments, ad infinitum.

iv
. And I must concede, regretfully, that such psychologists still exist. My hope is that eventually the term “evolutionary psychology” will disappear, with the recognition that all psychology has to be evolutionary. Not yet, however.

v
. After all, if they had, then presumably we would be intelligent kangaroos or codfish or penguins, basking in our cleverness all the while tasking that cleverness to try to figure out how it arose!