— And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals
Select Quotes
Part I: Genes And Who We Are
One searches the pages for a middle ground, for the interdisciplinary synthesist who would perceive the contributions of nature and nurture. – Page 16
Introduction
One of the most important concepts in all of biology is that you can’t really ever state what the effect is of a particular gene, or what the effect is of a particular environment. You can only consider how a particular gene and particular environment interact. – Page 22
A Gene For Nothing (Discover, 1997)
your average gene comes with a huge instruction manual about how to operate it, and the operator is often environmental. – Page 38
And what that second fact about variability in noncoding regions means is that “evolution is mostly about natural selection for different assemblages of genes” is not as accurate as thinking that “evolution is mostly about natural selection for different genetic sensitivities and responses to environmental influences.” – Page 39
Genetic Hyping (The Sciences, 2000)
Excuse my facetiousness, but I am troubled by the fact that all too frequently, investigators are reluctant to reject their dearly held preconceptions and allow their expectations to impose blinders. When the Crabbe team’s paper was published, it was accompanied by a commentary written by one of the journal’s staff writers, under the title of “Fickle Mice Highlight Test Problems.” In it, the writer bemoans how hard it will be to deal with the problem of tests that don’t give the expected result. This seems all turned around to me. If the behavioral tests fail to show a reliable genetic effect, the first conclusion that jumps to mind shouldn’t be that the tests need some fixing. If environmental variables that are too subtle to be detected in a study as thorough as this can markedly disrupt a genetic effect on a behavior, then there’s not much of a genetic influence going on here. – Page 51
The Genetic War Between Men And Women (Discover, 1999)
Biology isn’t about what should be, he explains, but what is. It’s a tough evolutionary world out there, it’s dog outreproduce dog… certain things are inevitable. – Page 61
From the very first mating in which intermale competition was no longer a selective force, the rules had changed, it now being a maladaptive waste of energy to produce these chemicals. And as a bigger surprise, these monogamous flies outbred the usual competitive flies. Their approach was more evolutionarily fit, since they were freed of the expenditure of intersexual warfare. – Page 62
Just picture carrying out the same experiment in people. Isolate some humans and force them and their descendants into monogamy for a millennium and we would probably begin to disarm our mammalian weapons of intersexual warfare, namely imprinted genes. – Page 62
Antlers Of Clay (Natural History, 2001)
This seems to mean that if all the females of your social group decide that males with paisley-pattern fur are really hot, even if you think it looks ridiculous, it is to your fitness advantage to want to mate with someone like that. After all, if paisley on males is suddenly all the rage, you want any sons you have to be paisley-patterned so that they can pass on as many copies of their genes as possible. By this circular logic, a trait becomes attractive because it’s attractive because it’s attractive… even if it is completely arbitrary and carries no information about the health or genes of the carrier. – Page 81
Why Are Dreams Dreamlike? (Discover, 2001)
The primary visual cortical region did not show much of an increase in metabolism, whereas there was a big jump in the downstream regions that integrate simple visual information. – Page 99
Not surprisingly, other species don’t have a whole lot of prefrontal function. – Page 100
So I suspect it’s likely that the more prefrontal metabolism remains suppressed during REM, the more vivid and disinhibited dream content will be. Better yet would be some comparative studies of prefrontal metabolism during wake and sleep. Do people who have the most active prefrontal cortices when awake have the least active when asleep? This would certainly fit the old hydraulic models of psychoanalysis, where if you repress something important during the day, it’ll come oozing out during dreams. – Page 102
Anatomy Of A Bad Mood (Men’S Health, 2003)
And amazingly, the muscle relaxant and the antianxiety drug are the same exact medication (something like Valium or Librium). Why does the same drug work for both problems? Because, à la William James, your brain is telling you you’re bat-shit crazy anxious because your tense muscles are telling that to your brain. – Page 107
Your limbic system moves and switches gears almost instantly. But, critically, the autonomic parts of your body move like a freight train; they build speed gradually and take a long time to come to a stop. Adrenaline is secreted, your heart speeds up, your sweat glands get activated. And after the thoughts that prompted these changes have come and gone, it takes a while for adrenaline to clear from your bloodstream, for your heart to slow down, and so on. – Page 108
And, as a cognitive event, it’s over with. The neuronal pathways involved can reverse pretty quickly. But the bodily responses are still chugging along. And here the ghost of William James comes to ruin the scene you had in mind as a result of that hot nostril flair. She knows that it is resolved—you apologized. But if that heart is still racing, if all the other autonomic baggage is still going like crazy, it doesn’t yet feel as if it’s resolved. And the mind fills an explanatory vacuum: Well, I know he apologized, but since I still feel agitated, there must be something else that I’m upset about. Ah, I know, it’s that insensitive thing he did three years ago… what a jerk. – Page 109