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Ten Things We Still Don't Understand About Humans
ParticleGirl writes "New Scientist has an article examining 10 human features (bugs?) that we still don't understand, like blushing, laughing, and nose-picking. There are some interesting, speculative evolutionary explanations listed for each. '[Psychologist Robert R. Provine] thinks laughing began in our pre-human ancestors as a physiological response to tickling. Modern apes maintain the ancestral 'pant-pant' laugh when they are tickled during play, and this evolved into the human 'ha-ha.' Then, he argues, as our brains got bigger, laughter acquired a powerful social function — to bond people. Indeed, Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has found that laughing increases levels of endorphins, our body's natural opiates, which he believes helps to strengthen social relationships.'"
What's not to understand? It clears the nose!
The desire to be first
And the crushing despair that follows when one fails.
Women.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
... the New Sensationalist seriously as a science magazine.
(Fine, mod this flamebait. I've got Karma to burn and I really dislike that rag.)
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
... smell my finger!
(explain that one)
Memes could explain some of them. Some could be pure cultural (i.e. kissing, superstition, altruism) and others could had helped that we evolved this way (your odds of mating could had been increased if you had the ability to do some of those things).
Teenagers are not a biological issue at all, but a societal one. And one pretty easy to understand. Actually allow a smooth transition between childhood and adulthood, rather than making laws to restrict and "protect" teens until they hit that magic age of 18 or 21 or whatever, and while the problems won't go away, they'll become no worse than those of other young primates.
Why does your nose run, but your feet smell? That's what *I* have been wondering.
[ irc.p2p-network.net -> #zomgwtfbbq ][ http://zomgwtfbbq.info ]
Example: Altruism.
It actually seems pretty obvious -- a community which was altruistic would, in the long run, have a higher chance of survival than a community which wasn't.
Another example: Superstition. I love this bit:
Religion offers another possible evolutionary benefit of superstition.
So... how is religion not superstition? Now you've got two mysteries, instead of one. And the same explanation still holds:
Our ancestors would not have lasted long if they had assumed that a rustle in the grass was caused by wind when there was even a small chance it was a lion. And it is worth making false-positive mistakes to get these relationships right.
Basically, religion and other superstitions are maladaptions of our ability to recognize patterns -- and an acceptable alternative to missing some pattern. Better to be paranoid than to be gullible -- better to be afraid of the tiger that isn't there than to be eaten by the tiger who is.
I suppose these aren't proven, but I do find this pretty weak, even for a "top 10" list. It's not "mysteries" so much as "cases which are not yet airtight".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Kurt Vonnegut sort of agrees (about the reduced defenses) : "Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward â" and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner."
Laughter is certainly not always pleasant, as anyone who's laughed to much will tell you. You know the laughter that borders on hysteria and sometimes ends in tears. It IS a cleansing experience though, your body's safety valve for letting out stored up emotion and frustration.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
We've all heard the joke about how to get on the front page of Digg. /. it was an article on 10 failed mouse designs. Today it is 10 things we don't know about the human body.
Your article title should be "Top X {Reasons|Ways|Games...] To [Pick Up Girls|Make your own Fusion Reactor...]"
Yesterday on
"Indeed, Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has found that laughing increases levels of endorphins, our body's natural opiates, which he believes helps to strengthen social relationships."
Pretty sure this has been common knowledge for years/decades.
Some of these seem obvious, I am not a researcher or professor not am I involved with any sort of grant so I could be completely wrong but... Blushing - When we become excited or anxious blood rushes faster to the face that it is pumped away so the increased oxygenated blood causes the reddish tint, seems like this one is more of a why does our heart rate increase when we are excited or anxious? Pubic hair, we have hair around every part of the body that has more sensitive skin, head, genitals, inside of the nose, etc... Most of us don't have hair on the palms of our hands (you know who you are you unclean slashdotters) because that would interfere with tactile sensation needed for more dexterous tasks Teenagers, apes don't have someone constantly trying to sell them a look or mood. Teenagers don't invent fashions and trends marketers do. Then a popular teenager decides that what the marketer said about it being cool must be true and their peers all wanting to be cool too follow. I am pretty sure my grandmother was not "emo". Again it seems like the question here is why do humans feel the need to follow the crowd. Superstition - Somewhere along the way someone had a bad experience that they linked with another event (most likely coincidental) and they shared that information, and just as stories are retold superstition is passed along as well. There have also been some early studies showing that belief in superstitions may be a mild form of OCD. Nose Picking, if your nose is clogged up you pick it to open nasal passages. Like any other behavior this can become habitual to the point of it happening unconsciously at inappropriate times.
Laughter, art, pubic hair and kissing are the only things that stand out on the list as possibly unknown. Art is probably the most complex and "advanced" of all human behaviors so it will only have a highly complex answer. I have this feeling that laughter is not unique to humans and is probably based at some level on a physiological/neurological response to a number of mental states such as relief, happiness, perception of incongruity (irony), and a few others (for some people pain which is where we will probably have the best shot at figuring out that actual mechanisms...). At least in males and probably females this would probably be the product of the overlapping expression of two (maybe more) genes, one receptor that triggers localized hair growth when it receives a signal from another molecule (probably testosterone?), thus, when humans hit puberty and start developing secondary sexual features high concentrations of pubes form in the crotch because the signaling molecule is in such high abundance there (just a guess...). Kissing? Hell if I know, maybe a delaying tactic developed by females to see just how committed and patient a male was.
Nose picking? DUH??!!?? Ever seen a fly groom itself or a monkey in the mirror? The monkey always checks its teeth. No one likes boogers, they are irritating, thus, remove the irritant. Same as picking at scabs.
Puberty? Tons of animals have it, its just another stage in development which just so happens to involve major rewiring of their neural circuitry and reformatting of their bodies. Not surprisingly, they tend to get a bit testy during this phase.
Blushing? Vasodialation caused by a hormonal release triggered by embarrassment AKA a type of fear.
Altruism? Pretty good explanations out there based on group selection theories and group size + competition.
Supersition? Our brains continually look for causes by default and when they don't find an obvious one they will make the next best connection based on the associations available in the brain. Very hand if someone comes up with a single universal cause for everything (god anyone?).
Dreams. Ok maybe not very well understood experimentally, but lots of animals dream. Neurons have to keep firing or they loose their connections, at some point during the evolutionary process a state developed for neural networks at rest were they started to replay their most recently experiences and integrate them in to the structure of the brain. Basically dreams are the time when the brain does upkeep and integrates its most recent experiences and solidifies the most memorable ones. Probably where we do most of our associational learning.
(Full disclosure: NON EXPERT, but this is /. so you know that already)
...to incest, which is bad for the gene pool.
When our primate ancestors stopped leaving the cave as soon as they could and started staying home with their parents until later in life, what better way to avoid interbreeding between offspring and parents than to make teenagers hate/piss off their parents, and do whatever they could to impregnate/get impregnated by someone else?
That's nature saying: "Get away from these same-gene carriers. Get out, and get wild. Multiply now!". And when they do, that's positive feedback for the evolutionary push. Interbreeding would reduce the probability of survival of the group in the long term (and short term, if <disgusting attempt to joke about people locked in basements removed>).
I want to know why noses run (secrete clear liquid) when it's cold outside.
The cold is an irritant, and there's this one trick that mucus membranes can rely on to ward off irritants: excrete mighty mucus!
Have you ever been out in minus 30 or below weather? The first breath you take flash-freezes all the humidity in your nose, it feels really weird. A nice layer of mucus between your living cells and water crystallization is better than frost bite.
You can't take the sky from me...
You pointed out nicely what I was about to post. Here are the links I was going to add though:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=teenage
http://www.answers.com/topic/teenager
http://www.home-school.com/Articles/PlattTeenagers.html
As resource bases contract and the world goes back to a solar economy, expect the teenager to disappear.
I wouldn't agree on this though.
Teen and teen-age are a western 1st world invention - now in use globally.
Unless entire western... no... HUMAN civilization disappears COMPLETELY - the term and the stage of human development it describes will remain distinctive from childhood and adulthood.
And I am talking going back to hunter-gatherer stage long enough that current languages are changed and forgotten.
Even then, upper classes WILL continue to pamper their young long after they (the "rulers" and "thinkers" - not the kids) stop writing dictionaries and regulating language. Teenagers would continue to exist in tradition among the upper class even if no one remained who could remember the word any more.
The only way it may be replaced or removed from use (other than what I said above) is if it is further broken down to early and late teens.
Into something like earleens and lateens. Or prims and seconds. Or juniors and seniors.
But, for something like that to happen you would need a HUGE social difference to appear. Globally.
Like for example giving 15-16 year-olds a right to vote or something similar.
Just like teenagers first appeared when kids globally started being sent to school despite hitting puberty (instead of being sent to work in mines, fields etc.) - a new stage in the society would have to be created first.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I think you will find that most human reactions that occur "when it's cold outside" exist to help people survive in extremely cold weather. Maintaining a body temperature of 98.6 degrees in anything from 30 to 110 degree environments is quite a feat.
The benefit of a runny nose is to loosen mucous and prevent respiratory infections. This is obviously more important for people with large noses adapted for cold weather and those who spend long periods of time in confined spaces, during a long winter for example.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
You hold the same view on gambling as Descartes
Do you mean Pascal maybe ? Come on, the guy had a programming language named after him and everything.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Kissing? Hell if I know, maybe a delaying tactic developed by females to see just how committed and patient a male was.
From a "psychology of language acquisition" course I took back in the early '70s:
Apes and (some?) monkeys have a social signal called "pout face": It consists of puckering/pursing the lips in the direction of another individual, and signals that the sender is attempting to be friendly. It looks very much like a human's extreme solicitation for the other individual to kiss the sender (though it is not).
Perhaps kissing in humans as early pair-bonding and sexual foreplay evolved from this "Hi! Be my friend?" signal of our primate ancestors?
Alternatively: Some herd herbivores, such as camels, do kiss - to share saliva containing necessary digestive bacteria with other members of the herd, in order to help each other build and maintain a healthy digestive tract. This is especially necessary for getting cultures established in the newborn, to enable digestion of forage and thus weaning. Perhaps kissing babies performs a similar function for humans. If so: Courtship behavior often contains elements of treating the potential partner as one would a child, to show the partner that you'd be a good parent. Thus kissing as courtship would follow from kissing as a good child-care action.
A third possibility: Some diseases have different outcomes depending on what tissue receives the initial infection. Example: Smallpox. Before "vaccination" (injection of the related "vaccinia" (cowpox) live virus, which doesn't generally kill people and confers cross-immunity) was developed, "innoculation" with live smallpox virus insured that the infection started in the skin (usually survivable) rather than the lungs (usually fatal). The mouth has a VERY active branch of the immune system, as a defense against food-borne pathogens. Perhaps, when one is starting to come down with some infections, giving the other members of the family their initial infection in the mouth, rather than risking it take root in the lungs, increases their chance of survival.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Sleeping.
Why do we have to spend somewhere between 4 to 10 hours at a time in a defenseless state? What is the evolutionary rational for this mode of behavior?
There was a really good story not too long about about a theory of why dreams evolved. Basically, it says that it's practice for real-life situations. I know, sometimes they're crazy, how is dreaming that you've managed to go to school in just your underwear practice for real life? Although you may never actually go to school in your underwear, you do experience the same sensations in real life--embarrassment, fear, love (and lust), terror, and so on--that you experience in these crazy dreams. They prepare you for the real life stuff that happens to you.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me.
I recently discovered a general list of unsolved problems, which I find fascinating. It's like a summary of the current limits of science and human knowledge and understanding.
TFA was ridiculous.
Laughter increases the feeling of mirth in people who hear it.
Mirth itself is harder to explain, but it appears to serve a number of purposes, from a defense mechanism against hopelessness to stress relief to social reinforcement (teasing, mocking).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
I can't speak for anyone else, but usually the only reason why that happens in my own case is if there's something in there that has hardened and is sticking into the wall of one of my nostrils, and it itches, or even hurts.
So to remove the pain, I remove the source of it. ;)
I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward
Unless your drink ends up on your monitor and keyboard.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.