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In my case, for example, after more than forty years of painting, I’ve developed a “mature” style (or what’s known as a “signature” style). People who have seen my pictures easily recognize one of my new paintings even when they encounter it outside my studio or gallery. All serious painters, no matter the quality of their work, inevitably end up with a mature style.

Although my compositions and colors change from one picture to the next, they don’t change so dramatically that they no longer resemble one another. You could say that my paintings resemble one another in the way that children in a given family, even when they have different heights, hair color and eye color, all manage to look as if they are related.

The most famous explanation for artistic style came from Émile Zola, who wrote that “art is a corner of nature seen through a temperament.” Even though the observation sounds profound, I’ve always found it deeply unsatisfying when it comes to understanding artistic styles. Temperament clearly affects style, but it doesn’t explain what, aesthetically speaking, binds together all the art of any given culture or historical epoch. Nor does it address the evolutionary nature of an artist’s art—the way artists develop and change their art over the course of their lifetime.

Although there’s seldom an actual “eureka” moment for artists—a moment where they shout that they’ve finally discovered their mature style—when people look back at any given artist’s complete oeuvre, it’s fairly easy to spot such a moment. Art historians rarely talk about artists in terms of temperament, but frequently talk about them in terms of artistic “development.” Talking about artistic temperament by itself is pointless, since it ignores the very matter that’s of interest—how artists respond to the “form and pressure of the times” (yes, Hamlet again).

More than one student has asked me why I don’t ever change my painting style—to which I respond, “It’s not so easy.” My artistic habits—the way I put on paint, construct compositions, and come up with colors—are deeply entrenched at this point, and are as big a part of my style as my temperament. To alter them is not impossible, but there’d have to be a reason beyond anything I can imagine.

When I was in college, a teacher once told me, “If you have one good painting idea in your life, you’re lucky.” Because I was convinced I’d already had several good painting ideas, I stared back at him blankly. What in the world could he mean?

Only now do I get it.

All painters, no matter their style, start off as whales going through plankton—soaking up as much as they can from their teachers and from the history of art and all the art going on around them, and playing around trying out this or that way of painting a picture.  Gradually, however, they evolve into horses with blinders—painters trotting along at a rapid clip, mostly focused on their own art, but occasionally looking to the right or left and seeing something that affects their gait. In their mature years, painters turn pigheaded. It’s the time of their lives when they can’t help themselves from stubbornly pursuing their one painting idea, whatever it is. If they’re lucky, that is.

Jenny Dyck Brian

Is it a conflict of interest for a bioethicist to work as a paid consultant for the pharmaceutical industry?

In recent weeks I have posted my conversation with Jenny Dyck Brian of Arizona State University, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on corporate bioethics boards.  (See parts one, two and three.)  Today we reach the final installment.

Q: A lot of people outside bioethics seem shocked when I tell them about academic bioethicists working for pharma.  But within the field, I don’t see a lot of pushback.

A: Within the field there is little pushback. A lot of people said they themselves wouldn’t do it (or that an interesting opportunity has yet to present itself), but they think it’s a good thing that industry is getting some good advice, or at least seeking different perspectives. Most people I spoke with argued that working with industry is not in and of itself negative or corrupt, but at the same time, there are not very many people who discuss their work within the private sector openly.

Q: Hmm. “I wouldn’t do it but I’m glad others do it.” What do you think is behind that?  If it’s ethically acceptable, or even something to be encouraged, then why wouldn’t they do it?

A: Well, it’s not like academia has an easy relationship with the corporate world, right?  They may worry about their reputations, or they may in theory believe that it would be great if the private sector sought good outside advice, but believe in practice it would never work.

Q: How much do you think bioethicists know about all the various industry scandals? Maybe I’m wrong, but my sense is that bioethicists don’t really pay that much attention.

A: I don’t believe there’s a strong awareness of various industry scandals. We know the ones that make the news, or the ones directly related to our areas of inquiry, but overall, I think we should all pay better attention to the details.

Q: Over the past year there has been a lot of debate over the decision of Glenn McGee, the former editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Bioethics, to take a full-time position with Celltex, the controversial stem-cell company in Texas.  You devote a section of your dissertation to McGee’s public departure from the ethics advisory board of Advanced Cell Technology in 2000, in which McGee accused ACT of withholding information about an animal-cloning program from the ethics board and said the company used the board to justify its controversial research. But you also write that McGee resigned from the company without ever having attended an ACT board meeting.

A: I do not have McGee’s side of the story. He agreed to talk to me initially, and then the timing didn’t work for quite a while because he was moving to Kansas. I waited a year, but by then he didn’t answer follow-up e-mails. I am still hoping to sit down with him someday.  Some of the ACT board members were quite angry with McGee’s behavior and former ACT CEO Michael West seemed confused about the whole thing.  In the Senate testimony, though, West was almost apologetic to McGee, so the whole situation is very unclear.

According to the minutes, he was not in attendance at the first ACT Ethics Advisory Board meeting, and then resigned.  So he wouldn’t have heard what particular research the company was doing or what it was telling its ethics board about that research (and apparently never took the opportunity to discuss it with other EAB members).

Q: Did he actually ask West or anyone else for more information or an explanation before he resigned?

A: According to the other members of the Ethics Advisory Board and Michael West, his resignation was very abrupt and came as a surprise.  There may be someone he spoke with that I did not speak with, but he did not seek more information from West. McGee posted his resignation letter on the MCW message board (a bioethics listserv at the Medical College of Wisconsin) about nine months after he resigned.  The Ethics Advisory Board members I spoke with were quite upset because they felt his abrupt and public resignation did damage to their reputations and served to destroy the credibility of their board before it even had a chance to do anything, and they wrote as much in an article in The Hastings Center Report in 2002.

Q: Overall, do you feel as if bioethics advisory boards are a positive development?  Should we trust the pharma companies with bioethicists on board more than we trust the bioethicist-deprived companies?

A: Well, I certainly feel like they are an interesting development, and I think it’s a good thing when any group seeks an outside opinion. I also think it’s a positive development to see more of a back and forth between industry and academia more generally.

However, it’s difficult to make a normative judgment. Each committee I studied was very different from one another, which in itself is an interesting finding.  At SmithKline Beecham, the VP of Research tried to create a place for a broad debate about social responsibility and complexity, whereas at Advanced Cell Technology, the committee functions more like a watchdog, trying to spot and solve potential problems.  Those are very different functions, and I hope to gain a better understanding of the larger landscape of corporate bioethics (with more empirical data, with more cooperation from companies who have bioethics committees, etc.)

These three companies—SmithKline Beecham, Eli Lilly, and Advanced Cell Technology—are not the only ones engaging in bioethical debate.  I’m interested in what the corporate bioethics committees do, and I want to know more, and I want to be optimistic.  Bioscience companies wield such incredible power, and it would be great if these bioethics committees had the opportunity to have a positive impact.

“Texas Cow Poke” by Clotee Pridgen Allochuku via Flickr/CC

Sometimes I find it useful to think about things that bear no obvious relation to one another. For example, I’ve recently been thinking about sneezing, cars, and cows, and a connection to the problem of climate change has occurred to me.

First, sneezing. When I was young, I was taught to cover my mouth with my hand whenever I sneezed. Good girl that I am, I followed this rule until a couple of years ago, when I read that in order not to spread germs, it’s best to sneeze into one’s elbow. (You don’t shake hands, set the table, or serve drinks to your guests with your elbow.) But it was no small matter to alter a longstanding habit that was sustained, in part, by a feeling that I was doing what my mother had told me was the right thing. With a lot of conscious effort, however, I learned to tuck my nose and mouth into the crook of my elbow when I was about to sneeze. Once in a while, though, I forget and reflexively sneeze into my hand.

Next, cars.  Because I’m married to a man who can easily identify by sight just about every make and model of just about every car that’s ever hit the road (especially those that debuted during his high school years), I’ve received a lot of informal lessons about automobile engineering and design. I’m still not good at telling, say, a Mazda 3 hatchback from a Ford Focus hatchback, but I have learned to see the car (and its internal combustion engine) as an astonishingly beautiful invention. Using a car as a primary means of transportation makes for tremendous personal freedom, and driving—when the road is good, there’s no traffic, and the car has a stick shift—is exhilarating. In addition, the many designs and colors of cars have helped change our primary visual experience of colors from a world composed mostly of nature’s muted grays, browns and greens into a cheery and brilliant, artificial world of kaleidoscopic, bright, shiny colors. And with over a billion cars now on the world’s roads (and 60 million more slated to be built this year), economies all over the world depend on the production and use of automobiles.

Finally, the cow. In its own way, the cow is almost as much an “invention” as the car, and as with the car, there are over a billion of them on the planet. The current species of cow emerged several thousand years ago as a result of domesticating what was once a wild beast. In some cultures, the cow is sacred, but in most cultures, people raise cows for their milk, cheese and meat—ah, especially the meat!—and leather, dung, and whatever else humans find appetizing or useful. For someone like me, who doesn’t eat meat, the cow seems a harmless creature with an appealing wet nose, big brown eyes and soft, floppy ears, to which, unfortunately, people aren’t all that nice. But people love hamburgers, steaks, and leather shoes and handbags almost as much as they love to travel in cars, which is why we produce more cows and more cars every year.

Alas, there’s a rub to the pleasures derived from cars and cows. To climate-change scientists, it’s clear that driving cars and raising cows together have contributed significantly to the dramatic increase in recent years in the man-made greenhouse gases rapidly heating up our planet. (For stunning visual confirmation of the “rapid” part, take a look at these NASA images of the surface melt of Greenland’s ice sheet this summer.) Why, then, isn’t there more consensus that we should drive less and cut back cattle herds?

The answer, I think, lies in what my experience with learning to sneeze in a new way teaches. Even when we human beings know full well that doing x is better than doing y, if we’re habituated to doing x, it takes an awful lot of work to change to doing y. A concerted, world-wide effort to cut back on driving and eating meat would ease AGW (anthropologic global warming), but people love cars and cows too much to habituate themselves away from them rapidly enough to forestall, or prevent, arriving at a tipping point in global warming. There are other proposals to tackle global warming that don’t require radical changes in habits, but they all require political will and money, and most of them are stalled. Procrastination is another harmful human habit.

This is very much the position of a small group of biologists and medics who are pushing what has come to be known as “evolutionary medicine.” Crystallized about 20 years ago by a book – Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine – authored by the distinguished evolutionist George C. Williams and the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, it claims that the force that caused us all, Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, does not care about human happiness or even human health per se. What it cares about is survival and reproduction and it is prepared to go to great measures to achieve its ends.

Too long has medicine focused only on proximate causes, the physiological and other reasons for ill health. What we must do also is look at end causes, what Aristotle calls final causes and what we might call ultimate causes, and put our bodies and their functioning in perspective – a perspective that in this day and age means Darwinian evolution brought about by natural selection. If selection found that fevers increase life expectancies and consequent reproductive success, then bring them on, no matter how unpleasant they may be.

That evolution is important is probably accepted by every medical person today in some respects. As soon as a new wonder drug is introduced, the countdown is on to see how quickly nature will respond by making viruses and bacteria immune to the drug. Penicillin was introduced in the early 1940s. By about 1947 it was being made ineffective by disease-causing agents that had been selected for resistance.

That evolution is that important is far from generally accepted. How many, for instance, take seriously the idea that troubles in pregnancy might be the result of conflict between mother and fetus? It seems obvious that the mother cares for the child without reservation and the same has to be true of her biology. But according to the Darwinian medicine enthusiasts, this is not necessarily so. Apart from anything else mothers tend to have more than one child, so biologically it is in the mother’s interests to spread her attentions. The child, on the other hand, although related to its siblings, has itself as its prime concern. If it dies then it isn’t going to reproduce. It is thought that this causal infighting might be going on in such dire medical conditions as preeclampsia, where pregnant women get very high blood pressure. This could be of benefit to the fetus even if the mother is put at risk. Of course, a dead mother means a dead fetus, but sometimes natural selection is willing to gamble.

Obviously causal understanding does not at once lead to methods of amelioration, but it sure helps. Why then is evolutionary medicine not embraced by all? Why was it not embraced at once after Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859? My suspicion is that today it is, in major part, natural conservativism coupled with reluctance to give time to such ideas. In biology departments, we know how hard it is to get in courses on evolution. There is always someone arguing for yet one more course on biochemistry. I would not be at all surprised to find that there is also a religious factor here. My experience is that if you want to find your evangelicals on campus – often, the real fundamentalists – you had best start with your medical school. Or, as I discovered from working for 35 years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, with your veterinary college. These people really worried about the dimensions of the Ark and thought that their professional training was directly relevant.

However, going back further, fascinatingly and paradoxically, the person most responsible for keeping evolution out of medical education was Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s self-styled “bulldog.” Huxley was a fanatical evolutionist and preached it publicly on every occasion. But he was never that keen on natural selection and thought overall that evolution was too speculative – and of no real value – to biological education. As I discovered by looking at student notebooks, in a 165-lecture course on biology, he would give less than half a lecture to evolution, and selection got all of 10 minutes.

As a master academic politician and system builder – and as one who incidentally started life with a medical degree – Huxley saw the medics as the source of support for his science and his students. After the total muck up in the Crimean War, when most soldiers died of disease and dirtiness and not battle, the medical profession realized that the time had come to stop killing and start curing. Huxley gave them the perfect solution. “I will educate people in basic biology and then you can take them and turn them into doctors.”

Everybody was happy and it wasn’t overall a bad solution. But evolution for Huxley was always as much an ideology as a science and there was no place for it in his professionalized science education. And I suspect we still live with that legacy. But as the Nobel Prize winner H. J. Muller once wrote: “A hundred years without Darwin are enough.” And that was over 50 years ago. I would say: “A hundred and fifty years without Darwin in medicine are more than enough.” Looking back, my prediction is that in 2059, the 200th anniversary of the publication of the Origin, we will all celebrate the insights of George Williams and Randy Nesse.

Jenny Dyck Brian

Do bioethicists make pharmaceutical companies more ethical?

This is a central question motivating my interview with Jenny Dyck Brian, an Arizona State University professor who wrote her doctoral dissertation on corporate bioethics boards. (See parts one and two of the interview.) Today we turn to Eli Lilly, a company that has had its share of ethical scandal: the recruitment of homeless alcoholics for drug-safety trials, the suicide of a healthy volunteer in a Cymbalta study, the company’s controversial promotion of Xigris, a sepsis drug that was later taken off the market, and most recently, a record-setting penalty for fraudulent marketing of its antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa. Throughout it all, Lilly has been guided by a group of bioethicists that includes some of the most prominent names in the field. As Brian says, Lilly has a bioethics consultation service that offers “specific advice and guidance to research scientists about the ethics of their work.”

Q: How did Lilly decide to set up an advisory board?

A: The Lilly board grew out of an initial proposal from the Hastings Center to conduct a study on the ethics of using homeless persons in clinical trials following a story in The Wall Street Journal about Lilly’s clinical trial recruitment practices. Lilly rejected their proposal, but did hire bioethicists—one of them from the Hastings Center and three others. Following the study, Lilly retained the services of two of those bioethicists, and would occasionally seek the help of other ethics consultants.

Q: And yet Lilly has had some pretty spectacular research scandals, even by the standards of other pharma companies.

A: Yes. They argue that—at this point—they do not have the capacity or capability to deal with the business division (and that tends to be where many, though not all, of the scandals come from).  The Chief Medical Officer admitted that they will always have a credibility problem if they cannot deal with ethical problems across the company.

Q: Were any of the members of the committee willing to discuss those scandals?  The Tracy Johnson suicide, for example, or the Zyprexa scandal?

A: Not specifically, no.

Q: I’m also curious about disclosure issues. It seems to me that bioethicists are often very reluctant to disclose their corporate ties. For example, just looking at the timing, it appears as if Robert Levine was working as a consultant for Eli Lilly while also editing IRB, a research-ethics journal. Tom Beauchamp does not appear to disclose his Lilly ties in publications such as this recent article in the Journal of Internal Medicine, or this one in the American Journal of Bioethics. Did you discuss this issue?

A: We discussed it only peripherally.  The three academics who work with Lilly have slightly different ideas about disclosure. Tom Beauchamp told me he believes he needs to disclose only when he is presenting or writing about topics directly related to Lilly.  I did not ask Robert Levine—and he did not mention anything.  Eric Meslin stopped consulting for Lilly when he had a conflict that could not be resolved, but few people knew he was a consultant at all.

One of the SmithKline Beecham people wrote an article about industry funding of science shortly after his tenure on the board ended and never disclosed his affiliation. The others do not disclose, as far as I can tell.  Advanced Cell Technology people always disclose.  I feel like they are trying very hard to show that private-sector bioethics committees can be very productive and meaningful.

Coming up soon: the final part of the interview, on Advanced Cell Technology and the way bioethicists see pharma.

Like many people in mixed-political families, I more or less ignore it and focus on what ties us together: eating, eating, and more eating. This month, as I sat around the family table, enjoying the beautiful meals we who can agree on nothing but food conjure up, I felt a certain amount of bitterness in my mouth. Like the jokes about Chik-fil-A tasting ever so much better before it was full of homophobia and hate. It is a sad thing to look around at my clan and realize once again votes will be cast and monies given to a political party that seems to hate women, gays, poor people, immigrants, and the environment.

I would like to believe that the choice of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate would be enough to make not just my family, but all reasonable Republicans stop in their tracks and turn their back on the GOP. After all, Ryan is a favorite of the Tea Party, a man so far to the right that he:

1. has said no abortion should be allowed even in cases of rape or incest or the mother’s life being at risk;

2. believes same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry or adopt children and that gay Americans should not serve in the military;

3. is opposed to equal pay for women (he actually voted against the Lilly Ledbetter act for equal pay for equal work);

4. would cut food stamps, education funding, health care, and more while at the same time lowering taxes for the wealthy;

5. voted against the Dream Act and for more extreme legislation in Wisconsin that would have made immigration violations felonies;

6. seems as opposed to the protection of habitat and species as he is dedicated to protecting every fertilized egg in women’s wombs. In fact, his voting record indicates an opposition to most environmental legislation, like cash for clunkers or Amtrak rail improvements.

And so another election year is spent swallowing some serious grief with the family meal. These people who love me would happily see me lose nearly all of my rights as a woman and a lesbian parent. They would deny opportunities to immigrants even though they are but one generation removed from immigration. They would vote for a party that funnels tax breaks to big oil even as it withdraws money for protection of the environment.

I cannot pretend to understand why they do what they do.  Nor can I even fully explain why it is that we gather each year like some oddly masochistic group of birds, flying south, to forage for food together. But I guess we gather because deep down we don’t want politics at the family table. After all, nothing ruins the taste of good food like knowing the people around you would force you to have a baby you don’t want, allow your employer to pay you less than male colleagues, take your children away, and tie your dog to the roof of the car.

Education is often compared to two other industries upended by the Internet: journalism and publishing. This is a serious error. Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas.

And so forth, before concluding:

Can technology make education less expensive? College is expensive, but colleges do things other than educate. Many courses simply convey information and provide technical vocational skills. These could be automated, presumably at savings. The price tag includes the campus experience—an education of a different sort—with all its lovely, cherished amenities. But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive; it requires the time and effort of smart, highly trained individuals. We will not make it significantly less time-consuming without sacrificing quality.

One can dispute the distinctions Hieronymi makes between real education and the mere conveyance of information and transmission of skills, but I think it’s more interesting not to. Let’s concede for the sake of argument that everything she says about the nature and expense of a legitimate college education is correct. And let’s imagine that every course at UCLA and colleges around the nation that fail to meet her criteria for authenticity are replaced by cheaper technology. Her criteria being:

the training provided by one mind interacting with another—when, for example, a teacher discerns what is on a student’s mind (even though the thought may be novel and half-formed); sees how it relates to the material; and knows how to question, encourage, challenge, or otherwise prompt the student to find his or her own way out of confusion, to a clearer expression of thought or a more powerful argument or analysis.

How many courses does she imagine are left?

A quick look at what students actually major in shows an awful lot of people studying education, business, engineering, health professions, and other fields that involve a substantial amount of technical skill. Even in the liberal arts, many introductory courses are so large as to preclude interaction based on the magical spark of insight gleaned from the student’s eye. And then there are the courses that ought to involve a great deal of intensive student-teacher interaction but don’t because nobody is paying much attention to the quality of teaching.

That’s why the comparison to journalism is apt. The Internet can’t replace the expensive, time-consuming process of investigative journalism, in which a highly-trained, expensive professional works with diligence, skill, judgment, and insight. The problem with newspapers is that they have traditionally lost money on investigative journalism while earning healthy margins on things that can, and have been, replaced by the Internet, such as classified advertising, sports updates, and opining. So, too, with the kind of high-quality education in philosophy that I’m sure Dr. Hieronymi provides. Even if she’s entirely correct that she’s not replaceable by a MOOC, that misses the point: Low-cost Internet courses will replace many other things that subsidize real education as she defines it.

The reality, on the other hand, is that it’s the kitchen, not the dining room, where the exciting stuff happens. More to my point, it’s in the imagination of the chefs, those who try new combinations and invent new recipes.

Enough with the culinary metaphor. My point is that there is a whole lot more to the science that we don’t know—the mysteries yet to be solved—than a catalog of what we do know. Here is a short list of just a few human evolutionary mysteries, puzzles of human nature that are as yet unsolved. In each case, numerous hypotheses have been proposed; “final answers” aren’t yet in. But that’s OK – in fact, its more than OK: “There’s a crack in everything,” writes Leonard Cohen, “that’s how the light gets in.”

Homosexuality. Why does it persist, given that same-sex preference results in lower individual fitness?

Hypotheses: – Homosexuals ultimately enhance the fitness of gay-preference genes by contributing positively to the success of those genes, in relatives other than their own children (“kin selection”).

-       Gay genes contribute to their own success when present in the bodies of opposite-sex relatives, so-called “sexually antagonisic selection.” The idea here is that genes predisposing to, say, gayness in males (lower genetic fitness) also result in higher fitness when present in females.

-       Homosexuality diminishes within-group competition and/or increases altruism, coordination, and sharing, thereby selecting for homosexuality at the group level.

-       Homosexuality is a strategy for those who for whatever reasons would be less successful in heterosexual competition.

-       It’s a nonadaptive or even maladaptive consequence of hormonal, genetic, and/or experiential circumstance.

-       It’s just a manifestation—one of many—of nature’s “exuberance.”

-       It’ a way of cementing social relationships, enhancing “reciprocal altruism.”

-       It’s a consequence of some as-yet-unidentified heterosis (like sickle-cell disease).

-       It correlates with greater verbal, social, and artistic skills, with consequent reproductive advantages, if not for the individuals then for their relatives and or larger social unit.

-       It may be socially imposed upon certain individuals, analogous to the phenomenon of “reproductive skew” in other animals.

Art. Defined broadly to include music, visual art, poetry, literature, dance, sculpture, etc: Why is it – in some form or another – a cross-cultural universal?

Hypotheses: -  Maybe it’s a nonadaptive byproduct of our exceptionally large brains that have been selected for other reasons; i.e., “cheesecake for the mind.”

-       A different incidental result of our large brains, this time because we have evolved neural capacities for perceiving and appreciating more than is needed simply to maximize our fitness? Spandrels?

-       Practice? Play? Social coordination? An opportunity to run through various scenarios in one’s head rather than in real life?

-       A means of displaying internal social cohesion, for internal and/or external consumption?

-       A sexual display, on the part of consumers no less than art’s creators?

-       The equivalent of social grooming among nonhuman primates?

Religion. Given that religion, in some form, is another cross-cultural universal – and something that typically demands sacrifice without obvious compensations -  what explains its adaptive value?

Hypotheses: – Genes “for” religion? (But if so, what’s their selective payoff?)

-       A parasitic or viral meme?

-       The result of a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device?

-       An extension of the clearly adaptive human capacity to entertain what psychologists call a Theory of Mind?

-       An unadaptive consequence of having large brains—selected for other reasons—that induce us to wonder about things like death, purpose, etc. (thus, a similar hypothesis to one advanced for the evolution of art)?

-       Spurious attribution of causes to “explain” any effects (analogous to placebo)?

-       Juvenile vulnerability to adult teaching?

-       Saves people from the pain of having to think for themselves (Dostoyevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” phenomenon, aka “choice overload”)?

-       A holdover from our eons as nonhuman primates, gaining security by following a dominant individual: God as alpha male?

-       Mimics the addictive effects of other ritualized activities?

-       Generates group coordination and cooperation, a kind of “social glue,” especially during war?

-       Helps subordinate selfish, individual goals to that of the larger group?

-       Helps generate reliable social norms and morals among participants?

-       Occasionally generates powerful “last gasp” efforts when non-believers might give up?

Consciousness. It isn’t difficult to imagine “humans” who function very effectively in the biological world, but are essentially unconscious zombies; given the anatomic and physiologic cost of big brains, why are we conscious?

Hypotheses:- A nonadaptive byproduct of having evolved large brains for other, adaptive reasons.

-       The payoff of being able to play “trial and error” in one’s head instead of in the much more dangerous real world?

-       The payoff of being able to restrain one’s “natural” inclinations, or force oneself to do something that doesn’t come “naturally.”

-       A tactic that results from the human awareness of mortality, which in turn induces (at least some) people to reproduce, as a response?

-       A consequence of our convoluted social lives, which selects for the ability to imagine how others might perceive us, all the better to manipulate them?

Among some of the other evolutionary mysteries, which I’ve already described briefly in prior posts, are a number associated with women’s sexuality: Why do women experience orgasm? Why do they menstruate, have pronounced nonlactating breasts, conceal their ovulation, undergo menopause? Why do men have shorter lifespans? Why do we blush, laugh, sleep, dream? Why did we evolve such large brains, and so quickly? Did we evolve from one phylogenetic line or many?

Unlike Sisyphus, who was condemned to spend eternity pushing a huge rock up a steep hill only to have it roll back down again, the scientific push for greater knowledge doesn’t slip backward (at least, not for long) – although it never reaches a safe, secure, tedious and satisfactory stopping point. There are always more hills to climb, more mysteries to identify and then to solve.

It might also help to recall a different parable, in which two brothers are told to dig for treasure in the family vineyard. They found neither gold nor silver, but their labors greatly enriched the soil.

Thanks for your note today; your mom told me you’d be writing to me to get some advice about how to make your second year at college better than your first.

Let’s begin: The best way to get off to a good start with your professors is to call them “Professor,” and, if they’re women, not “Miss” or “Mrs.”; “Ms.” is preferable to either of those, but I’d stick with “Professor” since you know the person whose advice you’re asking happens to be one of those.

It’s also good to spell that person’s name correctly. You didn’t. Not even close despite the fact that you had the correct spelling right there in the email address.

If I mention these details early it’s only to begin our relationship the way I hope it will be built: I’m delighted to help you determine what’s best for you at UConn–and UConn has a great deal to offer–but I’m not going to coddle you or let you off the hook.

Details count, especially in an introduction. This is especially significant when you’re asking for guidance from someone you’ve never met.

Okay, we’ve got that settled. Now for the tougher part: It’s up to you to bring your interests and appetites to the table, so let’s decide before we meet which classes you believe will interest you most and why.

I asked my old friend, your mom, to get you to send me a note yourself (rather than her continuing to explain your “issues”) because I want to get to know you as a student. You say you didn’t “find your way” during your first year and never really “got serious” about your classes. Your candor works in your favor, but I’d like to know more specifically what you felt you were missing–and whether you thought that missing piece was an element you expected from the teachers, the course materials, the curriculum, or some other variable….In other words, what in particular did you want that you didn’t get?

Let’s meet and talk about it.

You said you’ve signed up for classes but “aren’t sure which of them” you’ll be taking. Before we meet, please make a list of the classes you intend to take this semester and a list of the classes you intend to take next semester.

Construct a full schedule for the year based on your interests and then select classes you’d use as a backup if you don’t get into the classes you pick initially (not unusual for sophomores or those whose majors are undecided). Typically the names and times of courses are there for you to look at, often with the instructor’s name attached.  You can then check on the faculty (what their interests are, what their publications history reflect, even–on occasion–what they describe as their teaching philosophies) through the individual department Web sites. And–while it is far, far from infallible–you can check their “scores” on places such as Ratemyprofessor.com and other sites like it.

This is a good way to begin. It involves patience, work, frustrating and annoying choices that make many students whine (you should hear my office during registration) but it is an excellent way to take responsibility for your own education–and that is what I can help you do.

After you’ve done that prep work–the equivalent to chopping and slicing and mincing in the kitchen before beginning an elaborate meal–then we can start cooking. I’m happy to stand by your side and walk you through various recipes.

It’s time to eat–I’m getting hungry. I’ll sign off now and hope that you, your mother, and I can set up a date for you to come to my office either this week or next with your initial plans laid out so that we can talk about how to make your next year of college far better and more satisfactory than your first.

I look forward to meeting you.