Humans and the Facial Expression of Emotions, or, Can Mike Pence Smile

Primates, especially humans, are very, very good at the facial communication:

Expressing information through facial expressions

Interpreting information expressed facially

Distinguishing real from fake facial information

As with any evolutionary adaptation, there is a range of degrees. For example, there are real, heart-felt smiles, and there are fake smiles. Donald Trump seems to know only the latter. He thinks a smile is to make a face like he is about to pronounce a word that begins with the letter F, or the sound SH. What about Mike Pence? He seems to smile only with great difficulty, making it hard to tell if his smiles are real or fake.

Watch this video and decide for yourself.

John Muir's Scientific Experiment with the Animals of the Forest

Almost every hour of every day, John Muir (see previous essay) was busy walking around and looking at everything in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, taking notes, making sketches. But one day he was resting out in the woods, and the animals started coming up to him. What a perfect time to perform an experiment! He had no hypothesis, but he just wanted to see how the animals would respond to different kinds of music. I describe this in my Darwin YouTube video.

First, he whistled and sang Scottish folk songs. (Muir’s parents were immigrants from Scotland.) The squirrels, chipmunks, and birds seemed to love it. One thrush even hopped out on a dead branch to within a few feet of him. “By this time my performance must have lasted nearly half an hour. I sang or whistled Bonnie Doon, Lass o’ Gowrie, O’er the Water to Charlie, Bonnie Woods o’ Cragie Lee, etc., all of which seemed to be listened to with bright interest, my first Douglas [squirrel] sitting patiently through it all, with his telling eyes fixed upon me...”

Then he sang the Old Hundredth, a famous Christian hymn. It begins, All people that on Earth do dwell... One of its middle-verse lines is the incomprehensible For it is seemly so to do. As soon as Muir began to sing this hymn, “he [the squirrel] turned tail and darted with ludicrous haste up the tree out of sight, his voice and actions leaving a somewhat profane impression, as if he had said, I’ll be hanged if you get me to hear anything so solemn and unpiny. This acted as a signal for the general dispersal of the whole hairy tribe...” Muir tested the hypothesis that animals do not like the Old Hundredth. (Muir never hesitated to make up a word, in this case unpiny.)

A scientist might wonder if this was just a singularity, something that happened once and would not happen again. When Muir sang, just one of the animals might have gotten spooked, for any reason or no reason, and started to run, provoking all the others to flee as well. Muir must have wondered the same thing. When he was later resting outside in the Coast Range, about 150 miles away from his original experiment, the animals paid quiet attention to him as he sang folk songs. “I then began to whistle as nearly as I could remember the same airs that had pleased the mountaineers of the Sierra. They at once stopped eating, stood erect, and listened patiently until I came to “Old Hundredth” when with ludicrous haste every one of them rushed to their holes and bolted in, their feet twinkling in the air as they vanished.” Muir had replicated the test of his hypothesis, and done so in a different forest with different species of animals.

Muir did not intend this as serious scientific investigation, any more than my video investigation of “Do Cats Like Mahler” here and here. But one thing a scientist should not do is to extend his or her conclusions out too far. Muir did not conclude from his investigation that animals are agnostics. I bet that it was just that Muir was happy when he sang the folk songs, and sanctimonious and grand-voiced when he sang the Old Hundredth.

More than anything else, Muir was probably just playing with the animals because he loved them so much. Scientists, too, play with the natural world because we love it so much.

What We Can Learn About Ourselves from Other Animals: More Insights from Konrad Lorenz

I have a few more observations that I learned while reading Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring.

Some animal species are even more cruel than humans. A male roebuck, if confined in the same enclosure as females or young, will kill them and slit their bellies open. And doves, the paragons of peace, or so we think, will (if confined) kill one another; the victor will pluck the feathers off of the vanquished. In many cases, the animal that knows that it is about to be vanquished will engage in submission behavior, in order to keep from being killed. A turkey, for example, will lie down when it knows it is losing a fight. But peacocks do not recognize turkey behavior; so when turkeys and peacocks are confined together, the peacock kills the turkey.

That is, doves can be very cruel. At the same time, wolves are often submissive to one another and refrain from outright combat and cruelty. Lorenz then asks, at the end of one of his essays written early in the Cold War era, will we be submissive like wolves or murderous like doves? The entire future of the world may depend on the answer to this question.

A Congressional Lovefest?

A few weeks ago I posted an entry entitled “Attention All Investors” in which I said that Congrass (oops I meant Congress) was willing to sink the American economy in order to gain political dominance; that this state of affairs was likely to continue indefinitely into the future; and that, therefore, America was not a good place for long-term investment. (The old meaning of the word "congress" is "copulation," and maybe this is what Congress is doing to us.) This essay got more hits than most others. Since there were no comments left, I do not know if the reaction was positive or negative.

Since that time, the budget impasse has been resolved. In December 2013, Paul Ryan (Republican member of the House) and Patty Murray (Democratic Senator) announced a bipartisan budget agreement that has proven acceptable to both parties. Finally, in January, both houses of Congress passed a budget that forestalls any future battles until September of this year. All of the announcements were celebrational; a Congressional lovefest seems to have begun.

Strangely absent was any Republican attempt to destroy the Affordable Health Care Act. This was what they insisted on eliminating in October, absent which they were willing to crash the economy. Also absent was any Republican mention that they have changed their views. There was no repentance. None of them, to my knowledge, said, “We have decided that the Republican Party was a destructive force in the world, and that we henceforward wish to be constructive, and to love those whom we formerly and very publicly hated.” The Republicans just changed their approach, suddenly and without explanation. It is as if Viking raiders in an Irish monastery suddenly treated their former victims to a feast in their honor. It is as if Scrooge became an altruist without ever having been visited by the three ghosts and not having a change of heart.

Republicans, after having tried intimidation, have decided to embrace altruism.

Needless to say, I do not trust them. This is because I see all politicians (Democrats as well, though less dangerously so) as acting solely in their own interests, desiring only to increase their dominance in society. Animals use whatever behavior patterns they can to gain dominance in their societies. In many mammal species, dominant males use intimidation. But altruism can also be used as a behavior pattern to gain dominance. This pattern is mostly known from humans, either in tribal or civilized societies. The altruistic humans benefit from indirect reciprocity, that is, they gain social capital by getting other people to think they are nice and generous. Politicians are now, as ever, simply trying to manipulate their images.

Just in time for an election year, Republicans have tried to change their image from dominant gorilla to cheerful altruist. As voters go to the polls, they will have forgotten what the Republicans did in 2011 and 2013. Every odd-numbered year is a time for Republicans to turn into gorillas. Even-numbered years are times for them to become altruists. I am not accusing Republicans of doing something supremely evil; I am merely calling them human.

But some of us are not fooled.

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

Dear Federal Government,

If you need someone to screw up the government and the national economy and the world economy, which is what Congress appears to be bent on doing, I wish to offer my services. I believe I can screw up the government, the country, and the world just as well as Congress does, but a lot cheaper.

Congressional pay averages $174,000 per person per year, and the House and Senate collectively cost the American taxpayers about $258,000 per day, which is over $94 million per year. And all they are capable of doing is to create artificial crises, without addressing any long-term problems. For example, the long-term debt needs to be addressed, but instead their entire attention is focused on making the debt problem into a short-term crisis. As I write, the budget standoff has not been resolved, but it probably will be, say members of Congress. They will, I hear, agree to suspend the debt ceiling crisis until a few months from now. That is, they will fight this battle over and over again into the foreseeable future, thus getting no other work done.

Heck, I can do that. And a lot cheaper. Instead of spending $94 million a year, you could pay me a one-time fee of just a quarter million dollars (plus expenses) and I promise you that I can come in and make a mess of the government, the country, and the world. Maybe not as much of a mess, since the House and Senate have 535 members working full time to create new crises, but I can create enough of a mess to make our government and economy collapse, and if it collapses, does it matter how much of a mess is made? That is, I can do their job for one-376th the cost.

You can even close the Congressional gym. I wouldn’t use it. I just put pillows on the floor and do pushups and situps; I don’t need any fancy equipment or a heated pool. As a matter of fact, you could close down all the other Congressional perks. I have heard, but cannot confirm, that there is a congressional movie theatre, massage parlor, casino, and gentleman’s club. Well, maybe leave them open for a week or so, so I can use them, then shut them down.

I would require the health care plan that members of Congress enjoy but which many of them passionately desire to deny to the rest of America. But you could suspend Congressional health care while the members are locked out of their offices and chambers. Oh, you might need to keep the staff proctologist on call for them.

I would require health care only for the duration of the contract, at which time I would return to my day job. I don’t want to spend too much time away from my day job, since I am actually doing useful work and wish to continue it.

We have the best Congress that money can buy, both at public expense and (even more) as a result of payments by large corporate donors. While normally this is an expense we can barely support, there is a bright side to it: look how much money you could save by hiring me to screw up the world.

I believe that Congress creates these artificial crises in order to avoid dealing with issues. Last year, in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting, there was the very real possibility that, backed by massive public opinion, Congress might pass at least some slight gun regulation. Some Congressional leaders sweat bullets over that, but they won’t have to ever again, because the topic of gun regulation will never come up. As of the beginning of June, the date of an article that addresses this point, the House and Senate had passed 13 laws, none of which addressed any major long-term questions. See that article for the complete list. My personal favorites are H.R.1071 (“To specify the size of the precious-metal blanks that will be used in the production of the National Baseball Hall of Fame commemorative coins”) and S.982: Lamar Alexander’s Freedom to Fish Act. This is not worth $94 million, is it?

In the event that the artificial crisis is resolved, we all know it is a temporary resolution. But my offer remains good for the next time Congress wants to engineer a world crisis.

This blog is about evolution. One of the things that have resulted from evolution in many species of animals is a social structure. In most cases, there are alpha males (and/or females) that coerce the rest of the animals into serving them. Of course, they need the altruistic support of co-conspirators. Humans fit right into that pattern, with our leaders serving only their own interests at the expense of the general population. But in no other case do these leaders deliberately cause the collapse of their societies.