The Ash Twins Blog

While the United States’ universities remain important institutions and are the envy of the world, the NYTimes column by religious studies professor Mark Taylor recognizes real problems and offers creative proposals for reform:

[Our] mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings. . .

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. . .

Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge. . .

Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

The literature on sex differences in human risk-taking explains these differences as the product of sexual selection resulting from reproductive dynamics in the adaptively relevant environment. Males generally faced a winner-take-all market in mating, since females can be fertilized by strictly one male’s sperm (this contrasts with the mating dynamics of felines, for example, which–because they release multiple eggs during estrus–can be fertilized by multiple males). Winner-take-all markets reward risk-seeking, so males adapted a preference for risk-seeking.

Studies have found that males’ risk-seeking disposition diminshes with age. It is worth finding out whether this moderation of riskiness is due to differences in age or differences in fatherhood. While both effects would be adaptive, an experiment teasing out the relative strengths of these effects would be helpful. On this view, one might predict that fathering a child or children and undergoing the paternal bonding experience triggers hormonal or other releases that induce durable changes in risk attitudes. This paternity effect on moderating risk would likely enhance the welfare of offspring by encouraging a stable flow of paternal resources. One could test this prediction by comparing the risk attitudes of males who have fathered children and who have not fathered children, but are otherwise similar. To my knowledge this experiment has not been performed.

According to Travis-Henikoff (2008, 193)

Multiple studies on infanticide within technologically developed societies show a majority of documented infanticides perpetrated by incoming males, who, much as male langurs of Madagascar, eliminate the progeny of past (or current) competition.

Wilson (2006) of Creighton University introduces a three-part framework for integrating empirical data from evolutionary behavioral neuroscience with evolutionary game theory models. He begins with a description of the framework in neuroscience terms:

MacLean’s neuroethological conceptualization essentially describes three main levels of archetypal neuromental circuitries upon which our sociality is based. It further is compatible with two opposing algorithms – one for self-maintenance (agonic competition) and the other for care-giving (or hedonic affection) – operating with rather more refinement as three main assemblages arose in succession (Price, 1988; Gilbert, 1992; Gilbert et al., 1995). This evolutionary neuroethological model is currently the only synthesis that renders the vastly larger and profoundly complex body of neuroscientific data as a valid and workable schematic (Cory, 1999, 2003; Cory and Garnder, 2002; Wilson, 2002). That this schematic describes a coherent, global state mechanism is increasingly important for much social science if the latter is to achieve reliable and valid theoretical or practical progress – much less subsume and reconcile the huge influx of pertinent neurobiological and evolutionary facts underlying behavior.

The first of these three circuitries MacLean dubbed the Reptilian complex (‘R-complex’). The R-complex is constituted of the brain stem and midbrain (along with a very small and primitive part of forebrain). These anatomical structures and behavioral functions evolved with early coldblooded vertebrates and became fully instantiated in the essentially asocial, self-maintaining circuitry of the reptilian line ancestral to humans.

The second of these circuitries MacLean dubbed the ‘Paleomammalian complex’ (or, as an alternative, often retaining a slightly modified extant term, the ‘limbic system’). The paleomammalian limbic system comprises a more recently elaborated assemblage anatomically bordering the earlier R-complex. MacLean’s limbic system is a refinement of the ‘Lobe Limbique’ of Broca, who so named it as it was at the edge (or limbus) of the old brain (Broca, 1878; Pribram, 1958; Harlow and Harlow, 1965). The earliest aspects of limbic system evolution trace to the transitional emerging from the reptilian line 300 million years ago.

The paleomammalian complex became fully instantiated with the more comprehensive and complete mammalian neural structures and behavioral functions that evolved with remarkable rapidity some 120 million years ago. Within only 10 million years or so were laid down the exceptionally complex neuroendocrine anatomical physiology that facilitates all classical mammalian behavior ranging from internal fetal development, parturition, nursing of infants, parent–infant bonding, and continuous interactive, reciprocal ‘warm-blooded’ social life. . .

Interestingly, the earliest feature of the limbic system is the thalamocingulate gyrus that first evolved to enable ancient mammalian mothers to identify the distress cries of their off-spring (Clutton-Brock, 1991;Wilson, 2002). Later if equally critical adaptations of the paleomammalian complex allows for the emergence of play – reciprocal and convivial social interaction – among mammals as a more general social extension of kinship bonding. Thus, the parent–infant bond that blends self-preservation genetic kinship circuitry with affectional circuitry in a reciprocal social relationship is, in fact, the foundation for extended social reciprocity (‘eusociality’ and altruism) that underpins human social life (Piaget, 1971; Wilson, 1975; Plutchik, 1984; Zajonc, 1980; Panksepp, 1998; Carter and Keverne, 2002; Gardner and Wilson, 2003).

Both the archetypal reptilian and early mammalian circuits are necessary to human sociality. The second was not possible without the first and certainly much interactivity has evolved. Mammalian social circuitry rests upon a basis of self-maintaining circuitry in a manner that reflects Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ with safety first (Maslow, 1971). Moreover, to be favored in Darwinian selection and passed in the genome, their interplay must keep within survival limits. Indeed, even before more recent advances in neuroscience and evolution, ethologists such as Harlow and Harlow (1965), Chance (1967) and Bowlby (1969, 1980) earlier posited such eusociality as a central element in their concepts of affectional systems and attachment, respectively.

MacLean identified a third level of circuitry the ‘Neomammalian complex’. This neomammalian complex is anatomically and behaviorally synonymous with the limbic cortex as it extends the capabilities of the two older circuits more deeply canalized in evolution. That is, the cortical elements of the limbic system allow increasingly sophisticated and frequently conscious analysis of a rational-emotive type. Moreover, the limbic cortex emotive rationality mediates essentially opposing behavioral options.
Such analytic mediations are often enriched via domain-specific input from higher cortical centers, e.g., primary, secondary and tertiary association neocortex that are the basis for language, numeracy, abstract reasoning (and other talents such as musicality and sensory synesthesia). The considerable interaction between the limbic system and neocortex is a factor that has greatly extended reciprocally interactive social life, including self-consciousness, romance, charisma, Machiavellian intellect and much else (Gilbert et al., 1995; Cosmides and Tooby, 1992).

Between the most primitive vegetative neural apparatus in pre-chordates and the most recent and abstract domain-specific modules of neocortex, there are three major phylogenetic levels wherein brain and mind modulate social behavior. These three levels mediate proximal aspects of social rank competition that, ultimately, allocate resources consistent with Darwinian fitness (Darwin, 1859). The later, more advanced of these neuromental assemblages are less ‘hardwired’ and thus can better adjust phenotypy in the face of environmental challenges individuals experience in the course of ontogenic development (Wilson, 1998). . .

Wilson then integrates this three-part model into a game-theoretic hawk-dove model of cooperation:

Game theory models R-complex in terms of ‘Ritualized Agonistic Behavior’ (RAB), as is appropriate for basic algorithms of ‘fight or flight’, evolved some 250 million years ago (Lorenz, 1981; Price, 1988; Maynard Smith, 1982). Strong, strident animals maintain territory or other resources to influence weaker, cowering rivals. This is via displays that are entirely instinctual as driven by the non-conscious interactions of the autonomic (automatic) nervous systems of two rivals. These instinctive behaviors are mediated by circuits enervated by the earliest and most basic vertebro-reptilian types of neurotransmitter receptors (e.g., dopamine 1; serotonin 1; see Wilson, 2002). The tug and pull in specific individuals alters the balance of such neurotransmitters in patterns that predictably predispose to a higher or lower status in the pecking order.

Game theory models the paleomammalian level in terms of ‘Resource Holding Potential’ (RHP), as is appropriate for more subtle algorithms of ‘dominance or submission’ evolved some 120 million years ago (Parker, 1984; Price, 1988; Maynard Smith, 1982). Here, confidently optimistic animals acquire influence over meek counterparts via emotionally charged displays driven by sub-conscious interactions of the paleolimbic systems of the dyad. These emotive behaviors are mediated by circuits enervated by new mammalian subtypes of neurotransmitter receptors. The tug and pull in specific individuals affects the balance of neurotransmitters in patterns that predictably predispose to higher or lower ranges of mood and affect (Wilson, 2002).

Game theory models the Primatohumanoid level in terms of ‘Social Attention Holding Potential’ (SAHP), as is appropriate for overtly affiliative algorithms of ‘attraction or avoidance’ evolved over the past 60 million years (Gilbert, 1992; Maynard Smith, 1982). Here, affably charismatic persons win the esteem of others in whom they inspire confidence. This is via displays that are social and intellectual as driven by conscious interactions of the limbic and neocortices of familiars. These rationally creative behaviors are mediated by circuits enervated by the newest neomammalian, primate and hominoid subtypes of neurotransmitter receptors (e.g., humans have more than 16 subtypes of receptors for serotonin laid out in highly specific circuits). Here, the tug and pull in specific individuals alters the balance of such neurotransmitters in patterns that predictably predispose to higher or lower ranges of sociability, charm and influence (Wilson, 2002).

According to the New York Times,

Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years.

Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990. In South Carolina, they more than tripled, to 10 percent from 3 percent. Not all the “nones” are necessarily committed atheists or agnostics, but they make up a pool of potential supporters. . .

Despite changing attitudes, polls continue to show that atheists are ranked lower than any other minority or religious group when Americans are asked whether they would vote for or approve of their child marrying a member of that group.

I also thought this part was interesting:

At the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, 19 students showed up for a recent evening meeting of the “Pastafarians,” named for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — a popular spoof on religion dreamed up by an opponent of intelligent design, the idea that living organisms are so complex that the best explanation is that a higher intelligence designed them.

Andrew Cederdahl, the group’s co-founder, asked for volunteers for the local food bank and for a coming debate with a nearby Christian college. Then Mr. Cederdahl opened the floor to members to tell their “coming out stories.”

Andrew Morency, who attended a Christian high school, said that when he got to college and studied evolutionary biology he decided that “creationists lie.”

Josh Streetman, who once attended the very Christian college that the Pastafarians were about to debate, said he knew the Bible too well to be sure that Scripture is true. Like Mr. Streetman, many of the other students at the meeting were highly literate in the Bible and religious history.

These “proud atheists” retain a taste for religious ceremony and ritual but have lost their belief in the doctrine. Part of that taste for religiosity, it seems, involves proselytism. These born-again atheists can’t help but feel an instinctive need to spread their new “faith,” including lobbying on behalf of their group in politics. It is ironic that the group of individuals who will do the most to spread atheistic beliefs are the most religious at heart.

Belk (1995) offers an idiographic study of the sociology of collecting:

Collecting is a common acquisitive and possessive behavior that is generally regarded by society as more valued and less selfish than other forms of luxury consumption. Based on depth interviews with 200 collectors, an assessment of collecting is offered considering its problems and benefits for the individual collector, the collector’s household, and society. While extreme cases are found in which collecting is addictive and dysfunctional for the individual and his or her family, it is more commonly found to be a beneficial activity, at least for the collector. But interpersonally, collections are found to be perceived as non-human rivals for the affection of collectors in the household and to leave a cultural legacy of material artifacts that over-represent powerful social classes.

The absence of a theory of the determinants of human preferences (desires) has repeatedly struck me as a gaping oversight of economic science. Ben-Ner and Putterman (2000) offer a framework for filling this gap:

[T]he conjunction of: (a) a postulated genetic basis for human behavioral predispositions, and (b) the demonstrable impact of environment on phenotypic variation in behavior, opens up the possibility of a scientific research program for studying the influence of human environments on human preferences. The research program we envision is one that  endogenizes preferences to economic and social environments. There exist a number of important economic and social problems, including those of cooperation and loyalty in organizations, the provision of nurturing and supportive environments for children and the elderly, the viability of humane social insurance mechanisms, responses to addiction and criminality, and even the creation and preservation of individuals who support the ethical norms sustaining low-cost exchange relations, with respect to which the economic method of analysis involving individual optimization subject to constraints can be more usefully applied if scope is allowed for extended preferences (Aaron, 1994; Bowles, 1998; Rabin, 1998). Understanding of such issue calls for a realization of the mutual impacts of institutions and environments upon preferences, including normative ones, and conversely the influence of such preferences on the performance, viability, and ultimately the very selection of such institutions and environments. . .

The evolutionary approach is rich not only in its allowance for an “extended” model of preferences, but also in its recognition that realized preferences are the result of both inherited receptivities and of the way in which experiences of the individual impact upon those inheritances. The biologists’ distinction between a genotype, the sum of the genetic instructions provided to an organism, and a phenotype, the realized organism dependent on the interaction of those instructions with a particular environment, is especially useful for the study of human preferences. In certain insect species (for instance locusts), the individual is prompted by environmental stimuli (in that example, the degree of crowding with other members of the species under which it matures) to become one or another of two or more radically different types of organisms marked by differing physiology and behavior despite possession of an identical set of genes. In a similar manner, human beings are influenced by the environments of their upbringing and socialization, as well as those in which they live as adults, to develop one or another set of preferences, including ones traditionally associated with moral values. Thus, much as recent cognitive research has shown that the development of specific areas of the brain is influenced by an individual’s exposure to relevant environmental stimulae during a critical period of growth, so future research may show how exposure to different normative  signals in formative periods leads to differing actualizations of the social potentials latent in our genes. . .

While basically alike except in instances of gross genetic error, humans differ in numerous details, including the settings of mechanisms regulating fear and other emotions, and thus conceivably also in receptiveness towards moral exhortation. Genetic differences in receptiveness to particular cultural messages are probably randomly distributed across populations: the genetic make-up of an average individual in Hungary or Peru differs little from that of an average individual in India or Japan (Tooby and Cosmides, 1990), so children with Hungarian genes can be as easily socialized to be culturally Peruvian, Indian, or Japanese, depending on how they are raised. Yet variations across individuals within any given society, and variation of environmental stimuli both within and across societies, lead to substantial differences in behavioral inclinations of specific human beings. . .

Economists are often heard to complain that the attempt to explain some behavior which appears to defy standard neoclassical theory by appeal to additional arguments in the utility function are ad hoc in character. . . To allow for extendedness of preferences is viewed, from this standpoint, as an instance of “cheating by changing the rules of the game.” . . . What the evolutionary sciences are providing is the foundation for a nonarbitrary reformulation of individual choice theory along scientific lines.

Today’s Frank Rich column reports the deeply disturbing finding that Guantanamo detainees were subjected to torture in order to extract false confessions about links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which would then be used to justify invasion. After discussing the recently released torture memos, Rich writes:

Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

This is evidence of profound evil; evil that truly shocks the conscience; evil that ruled our country for eight years. Rich continues:

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

Hagen et al. (2008) make a compelling case that deliberately harming oneself can be ecologically rational. Here is the abstract:

A long-standing theoretical tradition in clinical psychology and psychiatry sees deliberate selfharm (DSH), such as wrist-cutting, as ‘functional’ – a means to avoid painful emotions, for example, or to elicit attention from others. There is substantial evidence that DSH serves these functions. . . Economists and biologists have used game theory to show that, under certain circumstances, self-harmful behaviors by economic agents and animals serve important strategic goals. In particular, ‘costly signals’ can credibly reveal a ‘private state’ in situations where verbal claims and other ‘cheap’ signals might be disbelieved. . . The social contexts and associated features of DSH suggest that it might be a costly, and therefore credible, signal of need that compels social partners to respond. . .

Some other excerpts:

Skin cutting is the most common form of DSH, occurring in 40-70% of cases, followed by hitting or banging in 21-44%, and burning in 15-35%; pinching, scratching, and biting also occur in a few percent (Klonsky, Oltmanns, & Turkheimer, 2003; Ross & Heath, 2002).

Age of onset for DSH is typically between 14 and 24 years of age (Herpertz, 1995), and rates are high in clinical populations, ranging approximately from 20% (Briere & Gil, 1998; Joyce et al., 2006) to 35% in women with eating disorders (Paul, Schroeter, Dahme, & Nutzinger, 2002) to over 50% in women with borderline personality disorder (Brodsky, Malone, Ellis, Dulit, & Mann, 1997). There are few studies of the prevalence of DSH in the general population, but two relatively recent studies, one of the general population (Briere & Gil, 1998) and one of an adult, non-clinical population (Klonsky et al., 2003), both found that about 4% of respondents reported a history of DSH, with less than 1% engaging in chronic DSH (Klonsky et al., 2003). Community studies
of adolescents and college-aged populations uncovered much higher rates, however, ranging from approximately 14% to 17% (Ross & Heath, 2002; Whitlock, Eckenrode, & Silverman, 2006). Most studies have not seen significant sex differences in prevalence rates. . .

Shortly after Spence proposed that costs could serve to credibly signal private information in economic transactions, Zahavi (1975) proposed that costly displays, which he termed handicaps, could credibly signal private information about, e.g., physical condition, in conflictual interactions between the sexes, predators and prey, and so forth. The logic is the same as that put forward by Spence: by evolving a signal whose inherent cost differs by type or condition, organisms can send honest signals to those with whom they have potential conflicts. A large peacock’s tail is a credible signal of mate quality, for instance, because only a healthy, fit peacock could afford one. This idea has had as large an impact on evolutionary biology as it has had in economics. . .

The logic is as follows. When an individual needs help from others (i.e., is relatively powerless to unilaterally improve their own condition), and relations with key social partners are good, ‘cheap’ signals like verbal requests or crying are sufficient to elicit help because the parties trust and care about one another.

When there are severe conflicts with key social partners, however, a costly signal might be required to convince skeptical social partners the need was genuine and not a deceptive ploy to exploit them. In such cases, a behavior that was inherently less expensive for individuals in genuine need, but more expensive for individuals not in need, could serve as a credible signal of need. DSH is such a behavior.

For individuals whose lives are going well and who are obtaining substantial benefits from their relationships (i.e., not in need), DSH is very costly because it threatens one’s health and thus one’s ability to generate and obtain benefits. For individuals whose lives are not going well and who are not benefiting from their relationships, on the other hand (i.e., in need), DSH is much less costly because although it similarly threatens one’s health, there are fewer benefits to be lost. Thus, only individuals with little to lose, i.e., those genuinely in need, will exhibit DSH because they are the only ones who can afford to do so – these harmful behaviors credibly signal need. . .

Webb found that, compared to controls, self-harming adolescents had significantly more problems with family, friends, romantic partners, and school. School problems tended to involve bullying and not academics, although pressure to achieve and achievement failure were also factors. DSH adolescents did not feel more criticized by their parents, but they did feel less well understood . . . Additional discriminating factors included sexuality, feelings of past violation, family suicidality and illness, personal loss, family conflict and friend suicidality. Factors that protected against DSH included family intactness and cohesion, with cohesion being more important when the family was no longer intact. Webb concluded that family problems in combination with external social pressures play an important role in DSH.

Childhood trauma, particularly sexual abuse, is strongly correlated with DSH later in life. In a comprehensive review of the literature from 1988-1998 on the relationship between child abuse and self-harm and suicidality (29 studies in all), Santa Mina and Gallop (1998) found that there were more reports of self-harm, suicidal ideation, and suicidal behavior in clinical and community populations of adults who reported sexual and/or physical abuse in childhood than in comparison groups who did not report abuse. Four of the studies focused on DSH in abused and non-abused samples. Although overall rates of DSH varied widely between studies, childhood abuse typically increased DSH rates by factors of 1.5 to 4, or more (e.g., from 48% to 77%, or from 12% to 50%). . .

Klonsky (2007) conducted a meta-analysis of 18 empirical studies of DSH functionality. These studies included inpatient, outpatient, general and psychiatric hospital, forensic, and nonclinical populations, and used one or more of three methodologies: self-reported reasons for DSH, selfreports of the phenomenology of DSH (i.e., general descriptions of reasons for DSH by self-harmers, but not in reference to instances of their own self-harm), and laboratory studies using proxies for self-harm (e.g., measuring emotional arousal in patients who are visualizing selfharm). From these 18 studies Klonsky distilled seven potential functions of DSH: affect-regulation, anti-dissociation, anti-suicide, interpersonal boundaries, interpersonal influence, self-punishment, and sensation-seeking. . . All 18 studies found support for intrapsychic functions. Support for an affect-regulation function (to alleviate acute negative affect or affective arousal) was especially strong. Modest-to-strong support for an antidissociation function (e.g., to generate feelings, even if negative) was also found in the 10 studies that examined it. But there was clear and consistent support, as well, for an interpersonal-influence function of DSH. This function was found across inpatient, outpatient, general and psychiatric hospital, and non-clinical populations, and across two methodologies: self-reported reasons for DSH and selfreports of DSH phenomenology. Although it was it endorsed by a majority of patients only in one study, all of the 10 studies that examined an interpersonal-influence function found support for it. . .

Direct observations of DSH eliciting interpersonal benefits would obviously provide strong support for the bargaining model. For infants and children who exhibit selfinjurious behavior (SIB), primarily by head-banging, but also by biting, hitting, scratching, and other means, there is excellent observational evidence that these behaviors elicit responses from parents, which, in turn, reinforce the behaviors.

The prevalence of SIB in infants aged 9-18 months is 15%, and 9% in two-year-olds (Kurtz et al., 2003, and references therein). Behavioral studies show that SIB is largely socially maintained, either by social-positive reinforcement – the provision of favored stimulus, such as attention, food, or toys – or by social-negative reinforcement – the removal of an aversive stimulus, such as escape from an onerous task. Kurtz et al. (2003), for example, found that in a sample of young children (10 months to 5 years old) referred for SIB, 48% of SIB was socially maintained, mostly by social-positive reinforcement. Similar results have been found in older children and adults with mental retardation. In a referred sample of mentally retarded individuals ranging in age from 1-50+ years of age, Iwata et al. (1994) found that social reinforcement was a determinant of SIB in over two thirds of the sample. . .

Crying is obviously an evolved signal, yet it is not uncommon to consciously override its signaling function, e.g., by crying alone. Many adaptive signals and behaviors, such as the behavioral manifestations of anger, jealousy, and sadness, can be consciously overridden or concealed if desired. The same could be true of DSH. Some self-harmers admit to a tension between concealing and revealing DSH, with attention-seekers being seen as less ‘legitimate.’

Biological nepotism among humans presents a serious problem to the efficient and equitable function of modern societies. Nepotism predictably arises from the effects of kin selection, which, put simply, holds that genes that help their kin help themselves. Kin selection theory predicts that altruistic behaviors toward a target conspecific will be selected for inasmuch as they satisfy the inequality rB > C, where r represents the genetic relatedness of the target, B represents the fitness benefit to the target, and C represents the fitness cost to the actor. When this inequality is satisfied, the act results in a net fitness enhancement to the genetic endowment in question even if it imposes a fitness cost on the acting organism. Parental investment in offspring is an example of this theory’s dynamic, as well as sibling altruism, cousin altruism, and other forms of kin altruism. Kin selection is evident in human behaviors as, for example, when one babysits her younger sister or helps her pay for a new car.

More controversially, a CEO might hire her sister as vice president over a more qualified candidate. The reason that the second example is more trouble to our moral sense is that while the first example is harmless, the second example imposes negative externalities on the shafted applicant and–by potentially reducing revenues–onto the company as a whole. In both cases, the target’s rB is greater than the actor’s C, but a fourth term representing the sum of costs to other individuals of the act in question, ΣD, does not enter into the actor’s decision function. By reducing the incomes of the shafted applicant and of the other employees at the company, the CEO’s nepotistic hire also reduces their reproductive fitness–formally speaking, ΣD < 0.

Apart from the fitness-related externalities, it is also worth noting the utilitarian effects of nepotism. A serious question arises whether the kin-selection benefit accrued by the nepotistic actor should be included in a utilitarian calculus. Represent the kin-selection-related utility to the nepotistic actor as F, the utility to the beneficiary as G, and the sum of externalities as ΣH. Assuming that the actor’s kin-selective benefit is not included, that ΣH < 0, and that G < |ΣH|, then the aforementioned nepotistic hire imposes a net disutility on society and should be prevented by legal or other institutions. If F is included, and again assuming ΣH < 0, then the nepotistic act should be allowed when F + G > |ΣH|.

What “kin-selection-related utility” might mean is unclear, but it is clear that humans at least derive decision utility from nepotistic acts.