Eysenck realized that philosophers and theologians often speak on topics proper to psychology without knowledge of either the facts or methods of that discipline. Today, evolution occupies much the same territory. Your compulsory education probably covered evolution insufficiently, if at all. Evolutionary+psychology becomes an impotent mix.

A common charge against evolutionary psychology is that we do not have enough data—and, more importantly, never will—to reconstruct the events that led to our current cognitive faculties. But evolution is not just phylogenetics, palæontology, or history. As a science it describes processes that play continuously. It is possible to measure the strength of selection on most any trait you wish. All an intrepid naturalist needs is cunning and the right kind of ruler.

Nice, easy, managed. Posterous’s interface is OK but I always have to go in and tinker with the markup it generates to get what I want, and it still gets it wrong. I think their system is designed to digest whatever HTML your email client will throw at them. The site also lacks any kind of way to organize your writing.

So I tinker some more and scratch an itch, extend the work I have already done on this website to capture what I’m trying to do with The reader.

I am caught between ease and control.

I owe the term to Alex Weiss. Differential biology is the study of everything that distinguishes individuals, or the biology of individual differences. It is personality—all the aspects of being that make you you—in its most catholic sense.

Despite Darwin’s rejection of species as types and his re-founding of biology on population thinking (cf. Mayr), evolutionary studies long looked only to explain species universals, not why individuals within a species should vary. While genetic and theoretic models have explored the dynamics leading to such variation and other biologists have been cognizant of each creature’s unrivaled singularity, only now are we developing the tools and datasets for evolutionary studies of individual differences in wild populations.

Nascent bailiwicks

Does the world need yet another sub-discipline? You tell me. This work on personality is already being carried out in a number of places, primarily as differential psychology and behavioral ecology. What I wish to add is a bit of evolutionary quantitative genetics. Evolutionary psychology already partly spans this territory, but takes its cue from palæontology. Too much for my taste. I am trying to understand variation as it exists now, not just its history.

It is surprising the amount of work you can get done, with plenty of data on hand, grinding through models and analyses, without knowing anything about the organism you are studying. This summer I have started working on red deer (spp. Cervus elaphus L.). I have never seen a deer in Scotland (do they exist? like the unicorn, only as a name for a pub) yet I am in the position to discover new things about them.

Frank Fraser Darling did not have the luxury of other people’s data. He braved the climate of the Highlands to collect his own. He would find my work as distinctly removed from studying deer in their habitat as that of the laboratorista, even if my data happen to come from observations of wild animals. What I miss is any familiar appreciation of the whole organism in its environment.

A Herd of Red Deer is a beautiful book. Standing apart from other ecologists, Darling considered seriously the psychology of a wild animal. Although it has resigned its duty as a primary source,^* it makes for daring literature.

The snow monkey in Kyoto.

We were taking instructions on observing macaques (Macaca fuscata) along a road following the western coast of the island. I wonder if they enjoy the view? or if they can even see it? The macaques sit on the last rocky outcroppings before the forest plunges into the sea. Perhaps they were just drying off from the morning’s short rain.

With a rustle of bushes, another macaque rushes out of the forest and onto the road, shrieking at the Sunbathers, who in turn cry back. They seem to block the path of this individual, a mother cradling her dead infant: its stiff body—the “lifeless body of a living thing”—pressed to its mother’s side, with one straightened arm hanging away, cruelly, unnaturally. The mother made it through the line of Sunbathers and clambered off the road, down a wall, and toward the forest below.

What was going through her mind?

Jokro at Bossou

The dead infant Jokro.

Watch this film, ”Jokro: The death of an infant chimpanzee” (Pan troglodytes verus) about what happens to the infant’s corpse. The film moved me, both scientifically and emotionally. Having witnessed a similar incident myself, I am very curious about the psychological motivation behind the mothers’ behavior.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, the researcher at Bossou who made the film, also wrote up a summary of the events in Pan Africa News. This short report details some of the other interesting incidents involving the corpse, such as its use by the alpha male in a charging display.

The film suggests what is both exciting and frustrating about the n = 1 case in field work. You have before you an unusual phenomena that may push your research in a new direction, yet you only have one datum that is easily dismissed as anecdotal.^* How do we even hypothesize about what the chimpanzees think of the dead infant?

My first reading of this book coincided with the revival of my interest in photography, so I was attracted first to his ideas about meaning in art & their application to the interpretation of serendipity in photographs. These ideas, along with what else Bateson wrote about, are also applicable to my interest in biology and evolution (particularly the evolution of ideas or “mind”).

I’ve studied a lot about Artificial Life and it’s roots in the Macy Conferences and cybernetics, so much of Bateson’s overall perspective was not new to me. Yet it was enlightening to read about his specific approaches and methodologies, e.g., that it’s okay to have fuzzy concepts at the beginning of an investigation, as long as you keep in mind that they are abstractions only (“Experiments in thinking about observed ethnological material”).

Much of Bateson’s thinking was seen as fuzzy by other students of evolution. He insisted on the persistence of patterns & forms of interaction over a strict study at only one level of analysis (for example, organisms or genes). Organisms vs. genes as the unit of selection or species as the unit of evolution is a subtle resurgence of the essentialism supposedly overturned by populationist thinking. The units of selection are reliable characters (Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information, 48) existing at any of many possible levels.

The differences in these wider viewpoints don’t come up when discussing the specific results of functional or evolutionary biology. Rebecca Goldstein points out that ”physicists who disagree radically on the interpretation of physical theories…can collaborate qua physicists.” This is similarly true for biologists. Where interpretational differences emerge is in the larger applications of this work to what it is to be human and, as a more practical manifestation, the kinds of questions we ask in the first place. (I might even go so far to compare this to Husserl’s notion of not upsetting any particular technical achievements when he prompts scientists to reflect radically back to the life-world).

I wonder if it is still possible to be a generalist like Bateson. While some workers are now specializing in single molecules, bio-chemical pathways, or species, I feel that there are too many things that I want to study. Bateson, with his unconfined research agenda, was attempting to tie it all together.

While the organic/inorganic duality may bring to mind a molecular distinction (“Oh-my, this free-range-organically-fed chicken is made out of chemicals!”), my first thought as a biologist is to the physiological meaning. We aren’t just mushy inside, but are composed out of discrete organs, each with its own ontogenetic life. These cells go this way, those cells go that way.

Spermiduct of Drosophila melanogaster.

If you grab the genital plate of a fruit fly with a pair of tweezers and give it a good tug, the entire gut and reproductive tract comes spilling out, nice and neat; each structure a cozy compartment of function. And yet, this compartmentalization is not a property, per se, of living things; it is a process. Dissecting a pupa—the stage between the wormy larva and the fly-y adult—you might notice a perfectly formed head, the wings folded neatly, six (count ‘em) legs. But the abdomen, the gut, sloshes out: a brown mushy slurry.

Eysenck realized that philosophers and theologians often speak on topics proper to psychology without knowledge of either the facts or methods of that discipline. Today, evolution occupies much the same territory. Your compulsory education probably covered evolution insufficiently, if at all. Evolutionary+psychology becomes an impotent mix.

A common charge against evolutionary psychology is that we do not have enough data—and, more importantly, never will—to reconstruct the events that led to our current cognitive faculties. But evolution is not just phylogenetics, palæontology, or history. As a science it describes processes that play continuously. It is possible to measure the strength of selection on most any trait you wish. All an intrepid naturalist needs is cunning and the right kind of ruler.