Sexual Selection and the City
Art, as they say, imitates life. Sometimes it even imitates evolution. The widespread popularity of two television shows, Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, provides an interesting window into the relationship between sexual selection and population density, as both shows are devoted to female serial monogamy in urban and suburban communities.
Cities have a higher percentage of unmarried people. Even if city-dwellers get married, their resultant marriages do not last as long as rural or suburban marriages. Population density and the duration of pair-bond relationships are inversely correlated. The rate of infidelity also increases with population density.
Serial Monogamy Strategies in High Population DensitiesHumans have a peculiar fascination with pre-reproductive relationships, that is, relationships that have not yet produced offspring. They are even more fascinated by pre-sexual relationships. Pre-sexual relationship formation has a strong impact on the dopaminergic reward system, which gives us that highly aroused feeling as we are engaged in the early stages of courtship or just watching it on tv.
However, time can be very hard on sexual relationships, as most humans experience diminished dopaminergically charged arousal with their partners, and a correspondingly less "excited" or even "bored" state. When combined with high population densities, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Conservatives, Liberals, and Partner Attraction
Based on our some evidence we have gathered in some of our recent surveys, Conservatives and Liberals are, on average, not symmetric in their attractiveness to their long-term partners.
But first, let's take a look at how our population density impacts sexual arousal in our political cohorts. In one of our surveys, we asked our respondents how often they thought about sex? The options were many times a day, a few times a day, a few times a week, and very little.
In the graph below, we combined the many and few times a day together into high, and display them broken out by community size. The Very Liberals were combined into the Liberal cohort, and the Very Conservatives were combined into the Conservatives.
High Rating on Thinking About Sex by Political Cohort by Community Size ( L=Liberal, C=Conservative) (F=Female, M=Male)(Rural=Rural Areas, Suburb=Suburban Areas, Urban=Cities)In the above graph, we see an interesting relationship between conscious sexual arousal, political cohort, and community size. Both the male and female Liberals reported the highest conscious rates of sexual arousal in urban areas, second highest rates in suburban areas, and the lowest rates in rural areas. Sexual arousal in Liberals may be a function of population density.
For the Conservatives, the females reported the highest rate of conscious sexual arousal in rural areas, the next highest in urban areas, and the lowest in the suburbs. Conversely, the Conservative males reported the highest rate of arousal in the suburbs, the next highest in cities, and the lowest in rural areas.
In one of our previous surveys, the Conservatives had much lower preferences for urban lifestyles than Liberals. This shows up to some extent in their diminished sexual arousal while living in urban environments.
This leads to some interesting questions: is population density active in modulating the sexual arousal levels of Liberals and Conservatives? Are Liberals more sexually aroused in high-density urban environments? Are Conservatives more sexually aroused in lower-density suburban and and rural environments? Based on our limited evidence to date, the answer to these questions appears to be yes.
But in our Spring 2006 survey, we also asked the question: Are you as attracted to your partner as the day you met? The responses indicating less attractive and not attractive are combined together and displayed below.
Less or Not Attracted to Partner by Political Cohort (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)
Both the Liberal and Very Liberal females indicated that they were not as attracted to their partners as the day they met. This is also true of the Liberal and Very Liberal males, although the Very Conservative males reported non attractiveness at a rate comparable to the Liberals. Note that both the male and female Liberals had the lowest attraction levels to their partners. However, these numbers are not adjusted for the fact that Liberals were less likely to be in a relationship, which makes the disparity even greater.
Discussion
Diminished sexual arousal to a long-term partner can have an evolutionary advantage under certain circumstances, and also seems to have been adapted effectively into human social organization. This phenomenon tends to weaken and break up long-term pair-bonds, promoting gene mixing. The microbial war is one of the beneficiaries of this behavior, as greater gene mixing keeps better pace with the rapidly evolving microbial world.
But there may be some advantages to serial monogamy that counterbalance some of the disadvantages. First, it may increase overall fertility rates in people prone to diminishing partner arousal. It may also be used to modulate mood states in those prone towards depression. That is, people may be breaking off old relationships and starting new ones to negate depressive tendencies.
The hypothesis that Liberals are more prone towards diminished attractiveness towards their partners certainly fits in well with their greater affinity to live in cities. Liberals may indeed be adapting enhanced gene mixing strategies than are Conservatives, and their greater tolerance for genetic diversity certainly conforms to this hypothesis.
We will review our hypothesis that Liberals are leading the subduction of the caucasion gene pool against our new survey evidence in an upcoming edition.
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The Altruistic Pursuit of Spiritual Rewards
Altruism is often defined as prosocial behavior towards others without the expectation of reciprocity. Humans typically expect some sort of reciprocity, even in the cases of genetic closeness. Altruistic behavior can be the simple helping of an old lady across the street, or jumping on a hand grenade to save the rest of the platoon. Suicidal altruism has been a bit of an enigma for evolutionary game theorists.
The solutions to mathematical models of suicidal altruistic behaviors typically require complementary combinations of genetic closeness factored by the number saved by the suicidal altruistic behavior. Richard Dawkins, the author of the Selfish Gene, writes:
"A gene for suicidally saving five cousins would not become more numerous in the population, but a gene for saving five brothers or ten first cousins would. The minimum requirement for a suicidal altruistic gene to be successful is that it should save more than two siblings (or children or parents), or more than four half-siblings (or uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, grandparents, grandchildren) or more than eight first cousins, etc."
Unfortunately, getting humans to follow these rules of altruistic self-sacrifice is the hard part. The proposal that a single gene exists to handle the specific case of ten first cousins or five brothers is mathematically convenient, but ignores the fact that the genes responsible for altruistic behaviors are numerous, and also impact a wide range of other behaviors.
While altruistic suicide gets much attention from both the media and the evolutionary game theorists, it has little relevance for social organizations. But non-suicidal altruism does, and many mathematical models of group behavior require a minimum level of altruistic behavior to keep a society from fissioning, that is, separating into multiple sub-groups.
So how are humans making the altruistic investment into society, without the expectation of reciprocity? We asked the 2,485 respondents of our Spring 2006 survey, if you do something good for others, will good things happen to you? In the graph below we see the percentage of respondents answering either usually or sometimes.
If you do something good for others, will good things happen to you? (Percentage responding usually or sometimes) ( VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)The females, on average, were more likely to believe in delayed rewards for altruistic behaviors. The Conservatives of both genders are more likely to believe in delayed rewards for altruistic behaviors, with an unexpected decline in this belief with the Very Conservatives.
Let's take a look at the breakdown by religious orientation below.
If you do something good for others, will good things happen to you? (Percentage responding usually or sometimes) ( NR=Atheist/Agnostic, Lit=Little Religious, Sp=Spiritual, Mod=Moderately Religious, Very=Very Religious)As we see in the above graph, those defining themselves as Spiritual were the most likely to believe in delayed, and most probably, spiritual rewards. This would occur in both males and females. The Moderately and Very Religious would also have an elevated tendency to believe in delayed, and probably religious rewards.
Altruistic behavior appears to be stimulated by the anticipation of spiritual and religious rewards in those with strong religious or spiritual beliefs. The Not Religious (Agnostics and Atheists) may indeed be performing altruistic behaviors at the same rate as the Religious and Spiritual, but are less likely to be motivated by the anticipation of metaphysical rewards.
It is also interesting to note that the Agnostics and Atheists still believe in some form of reward anticipation for altruistic behavior.
Conservatives, Liberals, and Behavioral Inhibition
A Tale of Two Moralities
On average, humans are less moral than they pretend to be. There is a good reason for this--the evolutionary value of feigned morality is quite high. Research into the evolution of morality has made one thing very clear--morality is not a reliable attribute for predicting human behavior.
Some estimates place our "real" morality level as low as 50% of our "pretended" morality level. That is, on average, we adhere to about 50% of our moral pretense when we believe it will go undetected by others. Even better, we frequently avoid the conscious detection of our own personal moral violations (a.k.a. hypocrisy).
However, feigned morality will have no value without the presence of genuine morality. Like all other psychological attributes that impact behavior within social groups, evolution tends to favor new adaptive strategies. Morality varies over time, both individually and populationally, and people maintain different moralistic approaches across the different social groups they belong to.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is having difficulty locating a single neural system that handles morality, quite probably because natural selection has not been kind to singular and mechanical moralistic approaches. Rather, it has provided primates with a very contextual and variable approach to morality, which incorporates elements from many neural networks, such as those that support empathy and attitudinal reciprocity, which are themselves descendents of the grandparents of all behavioral regulation systems--reward seeking and harm avoidance.
Survey respondents believing the world is embraced in a struggle between Good and Evil. (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)It seems that deliberate reward seeking and harm avoidance behaviors made their first appearance in single-celled organisms about 3 billion years ago. But 3 billion years later, humans have acquired a very sophisticated collection of behaviors that are a far cry from the simplistic reward seeking and harm avoidance of these protozoans. But the more things change, the more things stay the same.
Reward seeking and harm avoidance pretty much encapsulate the entirety of behavioral traits in all animals, although the reward seeking and harm avoidance bias of these traits become harder to detect as the brains get bigger. The evolution of human cognition, and primate cognition in general, has been principally driven by reward seeking and harm avoidance in social groups.
The human brain is bustling with reward seeking and harm avoidance activity, so much so that it precipitated the development of arithmetic reasoning. Arithmetic reasoning would arise from the growing complexity of primate risk and reward probability systems, which evaluated the neural renderings of quantities of categorized rewards and risks.
This neural rendering of arithmetic quantities is accomplished by the dopaminergic system. As we have noted previously, the dopaminergic system is more active in the behavioral characteristics of Conservatives than it is with Liberals, and we have previously reported a probable advantage for Conservatives in the processing of simple arithmetic operations. (We have also noted a stronger tendency for Conservatives to use verbal categorizations more than do Liberals).
In the brain's categorization of small quantities, (such as 1, 2, and 3)--each has a distinct and recurrent firing pattern of dopaminergic neurons. Dopaminergic neurons support regularity in neurotransmission, which is why they are prevalent in arithmetic and semantic language neural networks.
But prior to the evolution of the neural rendering of small quantities, the developing brain was putting stimuli into more discrete categories of risk and reward, and setting something analogous to a quantifiable reward or harm value to each. These reward values are further modulated by homeostatic monitoring processes.
For example, the reward value of chocolate is higher than the reward value of cauliflower, and is modulated by a greater activation of the dopaminergic neuronal groups that are reserved for expressing the reward values for food items.
However, eat too much chocolate at one time and cauliflower may become more appealing. The brain can quickly reverse the reward value by the integration of both homeostatic and environmental influences. One of the key (but not the only) regions in the brain that manages reward valuations and their reversal is also one of the most politically hot regions of the brain--the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).
The orbitofrontal cortex incorporates both reward and harm value information, along with quantity and probability assessments, and organizes a behaviorally relevant decision. Its functions are similar to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), except that the OFC seems to handle riskier and more survivally relevant decision making. People with OFC damage have trouble recognizing reward and risk probabilities, and are frequently the victims of excessive gambling.
But what makes the OFC so politically relevant is its propensity to integrate the social ramifications of personal reward seeking behavior. Empathetic neural networks are typically more organized in the right hemisphere, and this places more of the burden of the integration of social empathy and reward seeking on the right OFC.
And this is what lesion studies of the left and right OFCs have detected. Lesions to the right OFC result in a greater probability of socially unacceptable reward seeking, and lesions to the left OFC result in the greater inhibition of socially unacceptable reward seeking, and reward seeking in general.
As we have proposed before, the Liberals are more likely to adapt neural networks in the right hemisphere to counteract socially unacceptable reward seeking, and the right orbitofrontal cortex is a principal facilitator of this inhibition.
The human brain's evolution of inhibition mechanisms against anti-social reward seeking would take multiple approaches, and also serve the function of supporting hemisphericity in cognition. This was especially important as humans were shifting their cognition towards the left hemisphere, which was handling most of the burdens of semantic language and arithmetic, and therefore exerting a growing influence on behavior.
The problem with the left hemisphere is that it is more organized around reward seeking than the right, which is more organized around harm avoidance.
So how did the left hemisphere control its strong tendency for reward seeking?
The Left Hemisphere Turns Against Itself
The left hemisphere is very active in both the categorization and assignment of reward values to stimuli. It is this process that would be adapted not only into language and arithmetic, but also into a behavioral inhibition system.
Language and arithmetic networks are heavily integrated with the left hemisphere's categorization and valuation systems for rewards and risks. Much of human conversation, even idle conversation, serves both the direct and indirect functions of reward seeking and harm avoidance.
The sophisticated human reward system would also gain a measure of regulation by its own propensity to modulate the values of rewards and risks based on social controls. Social controls on reward seeking behavior are exerted in infancy, where reward seeking behaviors are regulated mainly by parental and sibling reinforcement.
The infant's expanding categorization and valuation of rewards seems to be mediated primarily by the interaction of the olfactory (smell) and gustatory (taste) systems with the temporal cortex, which coincidentally just happens to be the primary religious region in adults. The rapidly growing infant temporal cortex is heavily utilizing the chemical sensing systems of smell and taste to establish reward valuations to stimuli classes.
This also coincides with the integration of language into the expanding reward categorization system. During this period, parental usage of words such as good and bad and yes and no are frequent, and serve to influence the infant's reward valuations. The religious concepts of Good and Evil and Heaven and Hell are built from this human reward categorization and valuation system, which is distributed mainly in the left hemisphere.
It is this left temporal-centric system that strongly influences the moral behavior of the Very Religious. It is certainly not surprising that religions that are temporal-centric, such as Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, incorporate an enhanced set of reward and harm values, (Heaven and/or Hell), with an enhanced reliance on public belief reinforcement, (public prayer and worship), and a strong promotion of submissive behaviors towards a good and powerful deity.
Discussion
We have previously proposed that Conservatives and Liberals are not symmetric in their reward-seeking behaviors (see our discussion on the Ghost World of Conservatives and Liberals in our February 2006 edition).
The Conservative's cognitive style and morality are more organized around the left-hemisphere's reward categorization system, which gives them a rather interesting combination of behaviors. Their moral systems are more influenced by social cues than are the Liberals, who rely more on the right hemisphere's innate empathetic and harm-avoidant nature to interfere with their own reward seeking systems. (We must note that we have some indirect cognitive evidence of a greater empathetic response towards infants by the Conservatives, especially the religious Conservatives).
This social modulation of the reward categorization system provides an interesting adaptive advantage for this form of morality that is based heavily on social cues. This type of morality can be adjusted more quickly than empathetic morality.
As we have proposed before, the Conservatives, and especially the religious Conservatives, tend to align their beliefs more within their social groups. This is due to their reward seeking system's heavy integration of social cues to moderate the values and risks of reward seeking. A socially-controlled morality allows for a closer integration of group behaviors, along with moral variation to changes in those social cues.
Religiosity has an interesting combination of strong reward seeking behaviors mixed together with strong reward inhibition mechanisms. It seems that religiosity may be a highly active state of reward seeking. This hyperactive state has evolved into prosocial non-worldly reward seeking, where the rewards are obtained in the afterlife.
This is a remarkable evolution of primate reward seeking behavior, and it seems to reduce the competitiveness and conflict of worldly reward seeking within social groups, along with structuring and coordinating group behavior. Religiosity has done all this while promoting reproduction, which is the reason why it has maintained its strong foothold on the cognitive landscape of humanity.
But the Non-Religious cling tightly to their proportion of the population, despite their lower reproductive rates. So how did humans get into this unusual state of multiple approaches to morality, all integrated within the same community? Has evolution secretly retained multiple approaches to morality because it provides some adaptive advantage?
One thing is becoming very clear from our current survey--the Religious and Non-Religious do not have very good opinions about each other's morals (or each other). While economics is the principal reason for the Religious and Non-Religious to inhabit the same communities, it has created an interesting dynamic of moral evolution.
This dynamic of two morality systems is seen in the case of the anti-slavery movement in the United States in the early 1800's. The abolitionists at this time consisted of a few liberal reformers, along with the support of a few religious groups, such as the Quakers. However, support from religious groups was very minimal at the beginning of the movement.
One of the successful abolitionist strategies was to incorporate religious groups by appealing primarily to religious leaders to oppose slavery. Once support from the religious leadership was obtained, the congregational responses were strong, and provided the electoral clout that was punctuated by Lincoln's election in 1860.
But the religious groups were certainly not consistent in their anti-slavery morality, which is indicative of how important social cues are to the moral systems of the Religious. Religious groups such as the southern Methodists and Baptists broke away from their abolitionist northern wings. A practicing Christian's opinion on slavery was dictated primarily by the congregation's opinion.
This interaction between left-brained socially-cued religious morality and right-brained liberalistic empathy would be seen a number of times in US social reform movements, something analogous to an atomic chain reaction of behavior, starting slowly with liberalistic empathy and expanding rapidly via religious socially-cued morality.
When liberalistic empathy is combined with socially-cued religious morality, rapid social change is eminent, as happened during the U.S. Civil War. But is this moral chain reaction between empathetic Liberals and socially-cued religious Conservatives still functional in the United States? Or has their growing segregation and animosity caused it to be no longer operational?
People consciously and subconsciously look for behavioral cues that have moralistic overtones, and are more likely to maintain associations with others with similar moralistic approaches. We will discuss this in our next edition, when we begin to break down the results of our Ethnic and Religious Attitudes Survey, and see how the Religious and Non-Religious are handling this not-so-secret dislike for each other's moral systems.
Who Weighs More, Conservatives or Liberals?
Do Conservatives and Liberals Weigh the Same?If it turns out that Conservatives and Liberals have, on average, different Body Mass Indexes, it would be a spectacular result. We don't have enough evidence to make this claim, but the little evidence we do have is certainly pointing in that direction. And this picture may vary depending on gender.
The Body Mass Index map of the United States below is color coded based on the percentage of people with body mass indexes (BMI) of 30 or greater. The red states indicate that 25% or more people have BMIs of 30 or more. Orange indicates 20-24%, and blue indicates 15-19%.
2004 Body Mass Index (30 or More)
Weighted for population, the states that supported Bush in 2004 have higher average BMIs than those that voted for Kerry. Since these numbers were collected by the Center for Disease Control, they were not categorized by political affiliation, so we cannot say with any certainty that the Conservatives in these respective Bush states are primarily responsible for these elevated BMI percentages. Also, we don't have ethnic or age breakdowns, further complicating the picture.
But in an earlier 2005 survey, we gathered one piece of indirect evidence that political phenotypes may indeed be gravitationally asymmetric. We asked our 1,390 respondents how many pounds they needed to lose. The results can be seen in the graph below.
How Many Pounds Overweight? (Green=0-5, Blue=6-20, Yellow=21-40, Red=41+) (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)The above graph shows some interesting trends. First, the Very Liberal males reported the highest percent in the relatively trim 0-5 pounds range, (46%), and the highest rate, among males, in the obese 41+ range (16.8%). The regular Liberal males were second in the 0-5 range, at (38.3%). The Conservative and Very Conservative males had the lowest rates in the 0-5 range, at (29.6 and 34.9%).
Conversely, the Very Conservative females reported the highest rate in 0-5 range (38.2%). The regular Conservative females were next at (31.2%). The Very Liberal and Liberal females had the lowest rates in the 0-5 range, at (26 and 31%). They also had the highest rates in the obese 41+ range (17.7 and 19.4%).
Using the interval midpoints, we computed the average number of pounds overweight reported by the political cohorts and displayed them in the table below.
Very Liberal Liberal Conservative Very Conservative Very Liberal Liberal Conservative Very Conservative
According to our survey respondents, the Liberal males are thinner than the Conservative males, and the Conservative females are thinner than the Liberal females. However, this is self-reported, not controlled for age, and not clinically confirmed. So for now, the hypothesis that political-gender cohorts have different average Body Mass Indexes is still very speculative.
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The Self-Confident Conservative
We asked the 2,162 respondents of our Winter 2005 survey to rate their level of self-confidence. We gave them four options to select from: not confident, some confidence, pretty confident, and very confident. The pretty and very confident responses were combined together and displayed in the chart below.
Self Confidence Rates (Pretty + Very) by Political Cohort (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative)The Conservatives reported the highest levels of self-confidence of any of the political cohorts in both genders. The Very Conservatives reported the highest self-confidence levels among the males (79% described themselves as pretty or very confident). This was followed closely by the Conservative males at (78.8%). The Very Liberal and Liberal males had the lowest confidence ratings (60.2% and 66.2%), and the Moderate males fell in the middle at 72.2%.
On the female side, the Conservative females reported the highest rate of self confidence at (79.9%), followed by the Very Conservative females (72.7%). The Very Liberal, Liberal, and Moderate females had very similar ratings, at 60.7%, 63.2%, and 62.2% respectively.
If we look at the two extremes of our self-confidence ratings, the not confident and the very confident options, we see some interesting trends in our political cohorts. The not confident (in blue) and very confident (in red) responses are shown in the graph below.
Not Confident (in Blue) and Very Confident (in Red) Responses by Political Cohort (VL=Very Liberal, L=Liberal, M=Moderate, C=Conservative, VC=Very Conservative) (F=Female, M=Male)While all political cohorts are more likely to report that they are very confident rather than not confident, the Very Conservative males and females reported the highest very confident levels (35.2% ad 30.9%, respectively). The Very Liberal females have an interesting and statistically significant elevation in their very confident rating (20%). But they also had the highest not confident rating among the females (10.4%).
The Very Liberals had the highest not confident rating among the males at 11.5%, which is not far beneath their very confident rating.
Discussion
All roads seem to be leading to Rome, as this is more cognitive evidence of the elevated dopaminergic influence on Conservative behavior, and a marker of the stronger influence of the left hemisphere on Conservative cognition.
Human "self-confidence" correlates with reward seeking, approach, and exploratory behaviors, which are all moderated by the brain's dopaminergic system in mammals. The dopaminergic system is asymmetrically distributed in the left hemisphere in humans.
Overall, males reported higher confidence ratings than females (74.3 to 68.4%), and the cross-correlation analysis with the other survey variables has produced some interesting results.
First, those reporting less self-confidence were 56% more likely to report the symptoms of psoriasis than were the confident. Although we did not control for the specific type of psoriasis, certain types are aggravated by high stress, which is also inversely correlated with the self-assessment of confidence levels.
Those indicating higher levels of self-confidence also indicated that their political beliefs were becoming more conservative than those with lower self-assessments of confidence. The confident were also more likely to prefer beef over other meats than did the less confident.
The less confident were more likely to indicate that at least one of their parents had depressive or anxious symptoms. The less confident were also less likely to be involved in a pair-bond relationship than were the confident.
The confident are more likely to be religious than the less confident. The confident also live in larger homes. And interestingly, the people that live in the southern states of the United States rate themselves are more self-confident than the northerners. See our discussion on the influence of sunlight on political behavior in our September 2005 edition.
Brack and Zhang - July 2006
If you have any indirect or direct information sources for body mass indexes by political cohort, please email us at:
Brack@neuropolitics.org or Zhang@neuropolitics.org
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