Meet Me In Strasbourg: a Romance Novel from which You Can Learn a Lot of Science

You would not be reading this blog if you were not interested in science. So you probably don’t read very many romance novels. I do not; but Meet Me in Strasbourg, a novel by Stan Rice is an exception. I summarized it in an earlier essay.

 

There was a prominent scientist who loved romance novels with happy endings. That scientist was Charles Darwin. Maybe he intended the novels as escapism from the heavy issues involved with his theory of evolution, and the social unrest it caused.

But Meet Me in Strasbourg is a novel that presents many scientific concepts, not as escapism but as part of the plot and character development. These are not concepts from science class, but from the direct experiences of life. Examples include:

• All perception is illusion. The brain knows nothing except what the sensory organs tell it, and all of those sensations consist of nerve impulses. It is the brain that sorts them out into sight, hearing, taste, etc. and makes sense out of them. If the brain does this incorrectly, we call them delusions.
• There is a lot about evolution in this novel, which is why I am telling you about it in this blog. This is especially true of sexual selection, Darwin’s “other theory” of 1871. Why do we find symmetrical faces beautiful? Because they indicate a person’s health and potential fitness as a mate. Is “falling in love” just craziness? Tony’s no-nonsense friend Roald explains that if falling in love—a universal experience—were just crazy, natural selection would have gotten rid of it. But falling in love promotes sexual selection. One teacher even explained to Tony why he should want Aimée to be as beautiful as possible, even though she does not need to be, since she is already engaged to Tony. You can even find out about evolution—It’s what’s for dinner. As Tony explains to his kid sister, of course you don’t like broccoli; many vegetables taste bad because they don’t want you to eat them. But it turns out the truth is a little more complicated than this.
• You can also learn about the mathematics of probability. When Aimée vanishes and goes to France, Tony decides he is going to go there and find her. Roald, the no-nonsense friend I told you about earlier, explains that the odds of him finding Aimée would be one in a million. Of course, Tony tries it anyway.
• You can learn a surprising amount about DNA, chlorophyll, hummingbirds, stellar evolution, facial symmetry, the bacteria of the human body, and nutrition in this novel. You can even learn about how the soil holds water—explained to you by a janitor.
• One of Aimée’s creative writing class stories is about green flatworms. It turns out that flatworms on the beaches of the north coast of France are one of the best examples of symbiosis: photosynthetic algae live inside of the flatworms and make food for them, in exchange for eating the worm’s waste products.

Read Meet Me in Strasbourg, by Stan Rice. You might be surprised at how much fun the intellectual life, especially science, can be.

Sexual Selection and Music: Nannerl's Story

 

Something to think about (music and sex) as spring arrives.

Back when I was taking music courses as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone was wondering why the great musicians were male. Not all of them, of course; two female composers, Thea Musgrave and Emma Lou Diemer, were on our faculty. Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, was an example from the nineteenth century. More recently, there was Dawn Upshaw. But this list is very short, compared to the list of famous male composers.

It is easy to attribute this solely to male oppression of females. Male domination in music is just another example of male domination of society in general.

But there is another factor at work. Males often show off to other males, and to potential female mates, in the hopes of increasing their mating opportunities, within or outside of a pair-bond, in humans as in many other animal species. While this often takes destructive forms, such as war and abuse, it can also take creative forms, especially in big-brained humans. Artistic or intellectual creativity is often a way in which males can show off. We all know of the spectacular paintings on European cave walls. But those same caves echoed the music of bone flutes and drums by which musicians (perhaps mostly male) enthralled their congregations.

This happens more often males than females because evolutionary fitness in males often results largely from the number of mates, while this is not true so much in females. For a man, reproduction can consist of a single sex act, while for a woman the whole process of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children may be her burden alone. Thankfully, there are many of us men who are nurturing and faithful rather than rapacious. But a male can have hundreds of offspring (or thousands, for Genghis Khan) while no woman can have that many. The inevitable result of sexual competition is that some men have lots of offspring, while most of the others compete with one another for whatever women are left.

Women also compete with one another to have the best males as the fathers of their children. Also, women need to have musical ability in order to recognize it in men. Alma Schindler, herself only a passable musician, nevertheless recognized the genius of Gustav Mahler and maneuvered herself into being his wife. Nevertheless, sexual competition is stronger in men than in women.

Sexual selection must have chosen whatever genetic basis there is for musical ability, in men more than in women. But that genetic basis cannot be found only in men. Men have a Y chromosome, which is largely a lump of useless DNA. The genetic basis of musical proficiency must be found on either the X chromosome or the non-sexual chromosomes, and this means that it shows up perhaps just as frequently in girls as in boys. In the absence of ongoing sexual election, musical ability, even if it began as a male characteristic, would soon equalize itself between the sexes.

And this is why even spectacular musical ability shows up in females even if it started in males thousands of years ago.

Everyone has heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was clearly a musical genius. But did you know he had a sister who was perhaps just as gifted as he was? She was a superb keyboardist, and her father Leopold took her on concert tours throughout Europe at the same time as he took young Wolfgang. Audiences were perhaps even more impressed with the beautiful Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl) than with her little brother who could do musical tricks. But her father convinced her that her only chance for success was as a performer and teacher, and as a wife. While she continued teaching and performing until her own death, decades later than Wolfgang’s, none of her compositions survive. One movie I saw (of several that have been made) showed her, at about fifteen years old, sadly burning her compositions in the family fireplace. It turns out Wolfgang was a genius; but perhaps Nannerl was also. We will never know.

 

 

Natural and sexual selection, drivers of human evolution, are not destiny. The adaptations they provide must be continually maintained by culture, as I explained above. As culture evolves, the forces of selection can change. Thankfully they are already doing so. When I was in high school, most brass players in school bands were boys, except the very competent Linda. The girls chose flute and clarinet. When I was in California State Honor Band in 1974, I was the last chair baritone horn player. The first chair player (in the concert band) was a black girl. She was really good. I admired her for her pioneering spirit on her instrument and for the way she represented her ethnicity. This was an important part of my development, coming as I did from a racist family.

There are forces that try to suppress opportunities for women. A few years ago, there was a scandal among the Southern Baptists because male leaders often seduced females without serious punishment. The church’s response? There were a few women in positions of Southern Baptist leadership. The church removed them and forbade women to be in such positions at all.

But even religion cannot completely hide female talent. Probably every church choir director has heard of composer Natalie Sleeth. Things look pretty grim for women in conservative religion, but I suspect things will never get as bad as a Margaret Atwood novel.

Beta Males

I’m a beta male and proud of it. I’ll let the alpha males swagger around and show off their strength and (in Dixie) act like their big trucks prove their virility even if paying for them drives them into bankruptcy. In contrast, I live in a world of quiet intelligence and keep my finances from disaster. Let the alpha males have their alpha females; I like beta females just fine, not the least of whom is my wife, who is as quiet, intelligent, and responsible as I am, if not more. My wife and I have not spent one moment wishing we were alphas.

You might think it would be fun to be an alpha male. But, in nature, alpha males experience a lot of stress because they have to constantly fight off the other aspiring-alpha males. Only in human harems can the alpha male sit back on his cushion and relax as his eunuchs guard him. Elephant seal alpha males lose up to half their weight during the breeding season, not by producing sperm (which are cheap) but by waddling around all day and all night (which is also day in the Arctic) fighting off the challengers. Their cortisol levels are much higher than those of the beta males.

(Photo by A. Friedlaender)

Beta males sometimes save the species. In nature, sexual selection favors alpha males who develop outlandish adaptations such as huge antlers. And the alpha females love it. Sexual selection favors ever more and more outlandish adaptations. One might guess that this process would go on until the males could not even lift their heads, and the species would go extinct.

But this is not what happens. While the alpha males are butting their horns together and injuring each other, the beta males are hanging around the outskirts, so to speak, and they have some action with the beta females. Many of the females in the alpha male harem have some action with the beta males, since the alpha male can’t be everywhere at once. By the time Mr. Alpha has waddled around to chase away the beta intruder, the female has already welcomed his sperm. And if the alpha adaptations ever do become so outlandish as to, it would seem, crash the species, the beta males are always there to step in and do the job.

You’re welcome.

Sexual Selection in Dixie

It is pretty much standard fare in the South to see guys driving big pickups around, very loudly, hoping that the girls will be impressed enough to have sex with them, and maybe give them a half dozen kids or so. I know this happens everywhere, but it is particularly common in the South.

I generally have great esteem for women: their capacity for empathy, and often their intelligence, far exceeds that of men. Boys aren’t born inferior, but as they grow up they learn, especially in the South, that empathy and intelligence make them look less manly and might interfere with their chances to impress and impregnate girls.

But sometimes women can make some stupid choices. When a guy drives a big pickup truck around and makes noise and releases a cloud of fumes thick enough that I could run my Prius on them (just the fumes), what does this prove? It only proves that they can push a gas pedal down. It does not prove that they are skillful drivers (I saw one of them get stuck in a ditch, having assumed that his truck was powerful enough to back out of it at a 45-degree slope), nor does it prove that they are rich (the truck might have been bought on credit). Some women actually fall for it. I mean, if it never worked, then guys might stop doing it; natural selection would certainly operate against it. But it works often enough that the dynamo of sexual selection keeps the Dixie stereotype going. The kids pop out and learn to behave like their parents.

Trucks, guns, beer, and sperm: the male characteristics produced by sexual selection in Dixie. The female characteristics? Telling the males how virile they are and having lots of kids. From this list, only the sperm and the kids make any sense from the evolutionary viewpoint. Sexual selection in Dixie certainly does not produce intelligence or skill which might bring wealth or reduce the burden of social problems. This is why Dixie will remain forever poor. In other cultures in America and in other cultures of the world, intelligence and cooperation are sexually desirable traits. The future belongs to those cultures, whether the progressive culture in America, or the prevailing cultures of Europe, China, and Japan.

The Measure of Manhood in Rural Oklahoma

Evolutionary fitness results from successful reproduction. When mates select one another (in animals), they (consciously or subconsciously) try to select mates that have the best genes. Of course, they cannot see these genes, so they must use indirect fitness indicators as a basis for the choice. In birds, these indicators include bright plumage and beautiful songs. These are reliable fitness indicators because a genetically inferior bird cannot produce either of them.

How about humans? Frequently, human fitness indicators in the modern world make no sense. Maybe they are the modern remnants of fitness indicators that did make sense in prehistoric times. For example, a male driving around a loud car does not indicate anything about the quality of his genes, but a male riding a horse in prehistoric times most definitely did indicate genetic quality.

Modern human fitness indicators can be very unreliable and vary wildly from culture to culture. I do not simply mean geographical cultures, but cultures within cultures as well. The fitness indicators in the academic world (number of publications, number and size of grants, number of teaching awards, etc.) are very different from those in society as a whole.

I present here an incomplete list of some of the male fitness indicators that I have seen in rural Oklahoma, for the benefit of those of you who have not been here.

• Size of pickup truck
• Amount of fumes coming from pickup truck. The most prestigious trucks have grossly enlarged exhaust pipes and you can smell them a block away.
• Amount of noise from pickup truck (same comments)
• Amount of mud on pickup truck. About half the trucks I see are nearly covered with mud. In most cases, the mud is so uniformly spread across the vehicle that I suspect it was deliberately sprayed on.
• Size of wheels on pickup truck. Supersized wheels and tires may cause damage to the truck, but in the short term it can be impressive to some people.
• Frequency of spitting on the ground right where people walk (tobacco spittle preferred but not essential)
• Amount of garbage produced. Sometimes people will dispose of their garbage in your bin, or in your yard, but more frequently they will have overflowing garbage bins on pickup days. This, rather than expensive cars or suits, is the rural Oklahoma way of advertising conspicuous consumption.

Remember that true fitness is related to the number of successful offspring, not just to the number of offspring. In Oklahoma, many males leave behind a large number of offspring but only minimally support them. These children survive but are at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to having a satisfying life.

Let me close by mentioning a good fitness indicator in rural Oklahoma. A lot of men are proud to be employed, even if it is only to mow lawns. One of the problems Durant, Oklahoma faces is a shortage of skilled labor. But doing a job, frequently under unpleasant conditions, and getting paid for it, is a mark of distinction, and a good one.

What I will tell my evolution class next time we meet

We just finished an evolution class about sexual selection. This, as you probably know, is a really wild subject. In particular, competition among (usually) males can take some strange forms.

Males compete with one another for access to females. There are different ways of doing this, depending on the animal species. Male gorillas produce few sperm because they maintain their harems by physical force. Male chimps produce lots of sperm because they mate promiscuously. A male gorilla maximizes his paternity by fighting, a male chimp by flooding away the sperm of other males. And humans are in between. But humans and some other animal species have another mating system—monogamy—that is yet a different way of maximizing the assurance of paternity.

Males also compete for the attention of females. Obvious examples are the songs and plumage of (usually) male birds. In humans, according to Geoffrey Miller’s book The Mating Mind, it can include hunting, sports, language, music, art, religion, etc. Nearly all of the mental capacities that we think of as uniquely human may be the result of sexual, not natural, selection. For example, big-game hunting (whether by stone age tribes or by Oklahomans hunting bucks) provided and provides relatively few calories. It was and is mostly a way of males showing off. And people who can speak most elegantly, play the best music, and commune with the gods most effectively may attract the most and/or the best mates (this can apply equally to men and women).

That’s where I ended, and that’s as far as the science goes. But I feel the need to tell them something else. They may have ethical and religious reasons for believing in the moral superiority of monogamy and the reality of religious experience. I am not saying, for example, that every time a preacher gets on the radio or television, he is trying to win access to mates, although there are numerous examples of this. (For example, the notorious preacher Garner Ted Armstrong kept a list of female undergrads at Ambassador College whom he would regularly call up and pressure into having sex.) I am not saying that every time a skilled musician spends hours practicing then gives a performance, he or she is trying to get in bed with an admiring mate, although this seems to have figured prominently in the lives of some composer-performers such as Franz Liszt and Niccolò Paganini, as well as numerous rock stars. But I am saying that this is how sexual selection produced the human mental capacities for monogamy, religion, and music. Today, a musician today might perform for the sake of pure art, but the “mating mind” would not have a physical thrill from music were it not for thousands of years of sexual selection.

This is also an example of how both liberals and conservatives can misunderstand evolution. Conservative creationists reject sexual selection in human evolution because they reject evolution. God gave us the capacity for music and religion (as one theologian wrote, God created a “God-shaped hole” in the human spirit that makes us thirst for God) and commands us to be monogamous, and that’s that. But I would say that evolution has put these behaviors, and they are now available as part of our behavioral repertoire to use for any purpose, whether connected with sex or not. Meanwhile, liberals might think that monogamy is an artificial moral system thought up by priests to foist upon deluded followers. But monogamy is a natural part of the human mind—it is not the only mating behavior that evolution has conferred upon us, but it is one of them.

Darwin at the Mall

Ho ho ho. The Christmas shopping season is upon us. Greetings from someone who doesn’t enjoy shopping. I’m no Grinch or Scrooge; I just do not enjoy materialism. A walk in the woods, or reading or writing something creative, is much more enjoyable to me than a trip to the Mall. I enjoy receiving gifts, but not all that much. I am sort of like the Dalai Lama on his birthday in the cartoon: he said, “Just what I always wanted! Nothing!” as he looked into an empty box. But it was recently necessary for me to go with my family to the Mall, and when I did, I decided to use it as an opportunity to observe the human species from the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist.

In Tulsa, “The Mall” usually refers to Woodland Hills Mall at 71^st and Memorial. The first thing I noticed was how many clothes retailers there were, each with its own brand. As far as I could tell, all of the clothes that they sold were more or less alike, except for either (1) a status label, or (2) subtle messages that are meaningful only to the sender and the receiver of the message. Right away this reminded me of the 1981 discovery by Nancy Burley that the simple act of putting a red leg band on a male zebra finch would enhance its success of mating. Although this effect has recently been called into question, it remains a memorable example of how something as arbitrary as a leg band can turn out to be a social signal to animals. In many birds, bright feathers are indicators of health. But the exact form of the indicator in one animal species may be meaningless to another. We think it quaint when we read about the Mayoruna tribe in the Amazon decorating their faces with cat whisker tattoos and even embedding palm fibers in their lips like cat whiskers. But to them, our flaunting of brand name clothing would seem as incomprehensible as their decorations seem to us. Of course, they are probably now wearing American brand-name T-shirts and shorts, having been brought into the splendor and comfort of western civilization.

At the same time, many of the businesses appeared nearly desperate to come up with something new other than just to sell the same items as everyone else. In these cases, it is innovation, not just a label, that is the status marker. However, innovations can be just as arbitrary as labels. Just how much innovation can you have in a wristwatch? You can make them into timepieces with atomic accuracy. Or you can replace the hands with little bubbles on an analog face; a large and a small bubble revolve around the center of the watch face. And there was a shop that sold many interesting and wonderful flavors of tea. But after awhile, all the different fruit and flower flavors start seeming alike. Enter monkey-picked tea. This is tea made from the youngest leaves of the tea trees, which grow on branches so delicate that only trained monkeys can harvest them. I tried some; it tasted like tea. The only value of this type of innovation would be if the recipient knows that the tea leaves were picked by monkeys. These innovations are mostly valuable as status symbols.

Perhaps the main products being marketed at this mall are placebos. The labels and innovations do not produce a qualitative difference in the products, but the shoppers can easily imagine that they do. They imagine that monkey tea tastes different from ordinary tea if, in advance, they know that it is monkey tea. It is well known that even many expert wine-tasters will choose wines they think are expensive, even if the wines are cheap brands in expensive bottles. In one corner of the Mall, there were a few shiatsu-massage chairs into which you could insert a dollar and try them out. I gave one of them a try, and found it to be annoying, perhaps because I am not shaped like a typical American and the pokes and nudges touched me in the wrong places. It goosed me a couple of times. I wonder if  “shiatsu” is Japanese for “placebo.” While there is no doubt that massages feel good, I am skeptical that there are “shiatsu points” of special significance on the body. I watched a young Thai mother of four trying out the chair as her kids pommeled on her. The chair evoked an artificial lordosis from her as she was transported into ecstasy. It worked for her. Or maybe it was just her kids tickling her. I wondered whether I should even be watching her.

Finally, I noticed that even though I’d come without the intention of buying anything, I ended up spending a couple of hundred dollars, largely on status and placebo items. Social forces act upon our behavior in ways of which we are hardly conscious, and sometimes despite our best efforts to be conscious of them.

I bought some items at See’s Candies. At last here is something that is truly different and superior: I have tasted many kinds of candy, but none can measure up to See’s. As I tried a sample, I kept asking myself if I was merely experiencing a placebo effect. If I was, it was despite my best effort to be objective. But this purchase accounted for only about twenty dollars of my total expenditure. When I got home, I was not sure how I ended up spending sixty dollars on candles. Evolution has adapted us with flexibility to adjust to changing social environments. The social environment is our human environment; we create it, and it creates us.

Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants

This is the subtitle to Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. Those seven words delineate a perfectly adequate diet: for anyone; for anyone interested in saving the planet; and for borderline diabetics.

Last winter I was diagnosed with the beginning of diabetes. I am not yet at the stage that requires any medication, and the fact that since that time I have lost 20 pounds might mean that I am safe. My response is to find creative solutions that I can enjoy. I am posting occasional entries about diabetes on this site if they relate to evolution and/or to the environment in which we have evolved and in which we live. I am not turning this blog into a diabetes forum.

Diabetes is considered to be a disease of civilization. That is, many scientists believe it results from physiological adaptations that were perfectly good in the Stone Age but which are maladaptive for civilized people. I can see that this argument makes sense for obesity. The ability to store food in the form of fat, during a time of feasting, and then use it up later during famine, was utterly essential in the Stone Age, when your tribe might get to feast on a dead mammoth then have nothing for a long time. But today, when food is continuously available, obesity results from fat storage. As Pollan said in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, our bodies are preparing for a famine that never comes. Not only that, but fat storage was a sign of affluence in the Stone Age; being fat was therefore attractive to potential mates. There is a fair amount of Paleolithic pornography to this effect. Therefore both natural and sexual selection favored the potential for obesity in Paleolithic times.

But diabetes? How could the inability to control blood sugar levels be adaptive under any set of conditions? Some scientists say that having high blood sugar levels (that is, a reduced ability of cells to absorb and use the sugar) was adaptive because it kept our Stone Age ancestors from using up their blood sugar too fast. Sorry, but this sounds like one of those just-so stories that modern evolutionary science is trying to get away from. The nascent science of evolutionary medicine would be well served to leave such stories behind. Of course, I could be wrong, in which case I will post a revision of the opinion here stated. Diabetics need to eat lots of small meals; this is precisely what our Stone Age forebears did not always have the luxury of doing, especially when they spent all day chasing down big game and when wild grains, roots, nuts, and berries were unavailable.

Some people propose that we adopt the Paleolithic Diet. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that this is not too useful unless you adopt the Paleolithic Lifestyle—running through the forest or across the savanna all day.

Michael Pollan’s advice, to eat food, not too much, most plants, is good advice for all of us. People with diabetic tendencies could include a bias against starch and sugar.

I will be participating in Botany 2013, the big meeting of botanists, starting next weekend. If I have a chance, I will blog from there.

Natural Selection for Efficiency

At the moment, I am able to post essays from a different location than what I normally use. My usual location remains unworkable. I now resume my usual series of essays.

In a previous essay I wrote about how our economic system is (almost) forcing us to waste resources. In nature, sexual selection often favors wastefulness (think of colorful bird feathers and flowers), and in the human species, social and sexual selection can favor conspicuous consumption. However, this always occurs within the broader picture of natural selection favoring efficiency.

One example is the evolution of CAM, which is a type of photosynthesis found in many succulent plants. The leaves of most plants absorb carbon dioxide and make it almost directly into carbohydrates such as sugar during the daytime. But CAM plants absorb carbon dioxide at night, make it into acid, store up the acid, then use the acid as a source of carbon dioxide from which to make sugar in the day. Carbon fixation therefore occurs in two phases: the night shift, and the day shift. And, like a factory that might need to hire two sets of employees rather than just one, this system is more expensive than just making sugar during the day shift. In fact, the night shift consists of an almost completely separate set of enzyme reactions from the day shift.

Under cool, moist, or shady conditions, CAM would be clearly wasteful. As my educational mentor from grad school days said, CAM plants don’t have it made in the shade. But CAM plants grow in desert conditions. In order to absorb carbon dioxide during the day, a plant has to have its pores open, and when it does so, it loses water vapor. In a cool, moist, or shady environment, this is not much of a problem. But out in the desert, it might cause the plant to lose too much water. For succulent plants it is more efficient to open their pores at night, when it is cooler, and store it up in the form of acid. The wasted energy is more than compensated by the water that is saved.

Here is an analogous situation. Suppose you have a factory that has to shut down on hot days. But even when the factory is shut, you still have to pay the workers. Is it cost-effective to pay a night shift of factory workers so that the factory can stay open in the summer? It depends. If the factory is in Minnesota, probably not. But in the desert, such a factory would be closed from May through September. Not surprisingly, CAM plants are more common in the desert than in Minnesota.

It seems obvious that CAM photosynthesis has evolved and become common in conjunction with the spread of deserts in the late Neogene period. And it has evolved more than once, as existing enzymes have been reassigned to new functions. However, it appears that CAM may have first evolved as an adaptation to low carbon dioxide availability rather than to hot, dry conditions. How else to explain CAM in primitive aquatic plants such as Iosetes? (See the article by Jon Keeley.) A similar adaptation, C4 photosynthesis, may have first evolved in grasses not because of hot conditions but because of low levels of carbon dioxide during glacial periods especially in tropical highlands. CAM and C4 photosynthesis may have begun as an adaptation to low carbon dioxide availability, and they later proved useful in hot, dry conditions. (I did not explain C4 in this brief entry because it’s more complex.)

Everywhere you look in the world, natural selection has favored efficiency. In many cases, after the needs of efficiency have been met, sexual and social selection have favored wastefulness. But in our society right now, we continue our binge of wastefulness even when we are not meeting the basic needs of efficiency.

We may have to learn not just efficiency but extreme frugality in the decades ahead of us. Of course, it is possible that the very rich, and people with lots of guns, might not have to do this, but then there’s the rest of us. Stories from the past tell us that much human creativity has been employed in the invention of new forms of frugality. I grew up hearing stories about how Native Americans used every part of the bison (in contrast to white Americans, who would shoot a buffalo, cut out the tongue to eat, and let the rest rot), and my Dad telling me that a World War II soldier could clean up, shave, and brush his teeth using one helmet-ful of water. Storing runoff water from the roof in cisterns is a practice thousands of years old. The thrifty Scots did not waste anything from sheep; hence the invention of haggis, which (in its original form) was a combination of oatmeal and sheep lung and other organ tissue and which is reportedly a food item.

We can only hope that, when called upon to do so in the years ahead, we humans can display the kind of creativity in our cultural evolution that CAM and C4 plants have displayed in their biological evolution. Sexual and cultural selection can favor wasteful displays, but only if there is a surplus of energy, materials, and opportunities, however slight, left over from the demands of natural selection. A big colorful male bird that starves is just a dead bird.

Are We Being Forced to Waste?

It is clear that large corporations are trying to force us to be wasteful. Here are just three examples I have recently experienced, individually trivial but collectively painting a picture of waste.

First, I tried to buy some of those little paper cupcake wrappers. I tried two supermarkets, and could not find them. Instead, what you had to buy was the paper wrappers and a disposable pan to put them in. (In addition, the pans and papers were inside of extremely durable plastic, the kind that you need a Klingon bat’leth sword to open.) Second, in a major supermarket, there were a couple of shelves of jars of instant coffee, but an entire rack of boxes of instant coffee with disposable cups. If current trends continue, you will be unable to make instant coffee in your own cup at home. Third, there are whole displays of dry laundry detergent packed into individual packets, to save you the trouble of measuring the amount you put into the washing machine.

One can only hope that such wasteful items will go the way of the paper dresses of the 1960s—dresses actually made of cellulose, which could be worn once and discarded. They were uncomfortable and flammable. I have heard interesting stories about what happened when a woman wearing one got caught out in the rain. You cannot readily find them anymore. In the 1960s, few people gave a second thought to throwing everything away; the paper dress market failed because the novelty wore off. But today, one would think, the sheer wastefulness of disposable clothing would make it a market failure.

I do not believe that most people demand to use disposable cupcake tins, to use disposable cups even at home, or that most people are too lazy to measure their laundry detergent. If consumer choice were the driving factor, such wastefulness would sink these products. But manufacturers, and the supermarkets that carry their products, can make more money if you buy a box that contains twelve disposable coffee cups with individual servings of instant coffee than if you buy a jar of instant coffee with ten times as many servings in it, for about the same price. A manufacturer’s paradise would be if consumers had to buy, for each meal, expensive MREs (meals ready to eat) instead of ever fixing their own meals. Corporations will never be able to do this, but they can constrict the more efficient items to smaller and smaller shelf space and present a large display of disposable items to consumers. Consumers prefer the more efficient items but not enough to actively refuse to buy the wasteful ones. It is as if Wal-Mart made a corporate-level decision to market only paper clothes, a highly unlikely but no longer unthinkable prospect. Already, major food product corporations are pressuring the government for restrictions on farmers’ markets, ostensibly for sanitation concerns. Never mind that all the cases of food  contamination on the news involve large corporations.

Individual evolutionary fitness has long been served by the efficiency of resource use. Our prehistoric ancestors almost never threw away stone tools; they kept re-sharpening and reusing them. Recycling was the norm until recent decades; Dickensian rag-pickers were recyclers. Home canning reused the glass jars every year; I doubt that my grandmother on rural northeastern Oklahoma farms ever bought anything in a can until she moved to town. Natural selection rewarded such behavior: less waste meant that you had more resources.

But there have always been evolutionary fitness benefits to wastefulness. A rich, wasteful person (like a bird with outlandish feathers) can attract mates. The difference between conspicuous ostentation and the modern supermarket variety of enforced waste is that the individual cannot readily choose what to do. A person may choose to display their wealth by showing that they are free to generate a lot of garbage. I do not so choose. But I am being pressured by corporations to so choose.

This is an example of the process of individual selection in evolution. I choose efficiency, but corporations choose waste; and they are stronger than I am. Group selection would dictate efficiency as well, but the decisions are largely made by corporations, the individual profits of whose CEOs determine that consumers should be wasteful.

Wastefulness will sink us. We should use less energy and materials—this is an essential component to averting climate disaster from global warming. Our only hope is that the collective feeble insistence on frugality by conscientious consumers (who also want to save money) will out-compete the corporate interests that largely control our society.