Ranthropologist

Tag: evolution

  • Bikini Bodies

    Bikini Bodies

    In my last post, I wrote about tolerance of other people’s beliefs. I want to continue that line of thought but focus this time on tolerance of other people’s appearance. I have gotten into the habit of calling myself on my initial, gut reactions to how people look. It’s a sad truth that people react immediately and viscerally to how others appear, and will form a snap judgement of that person based on what they see. That initial judgement may not last, but it is always there, and we seldom, if ever, pause to unpack the unconscious, culturally dictated assumptions that undergird our reactions. In anthropology, we call this ascribed status.

    Ascribed status is technically defined as a status that one cannot help possessing, like gender, race, or age. It is something we cannot change. This contrasts with achieved status, which is, as the name makes clear, a status you can achieve. This can be good – earning a degree – or bad – earning a criminal record. Ascribing status is exactly what we do when we unconsciously size somebody up just by looking at them. The problem is, the status we may ascribe to someone may not be a status they actually have. Some stuff seems so obvious – of course that person is male, obviously that person is Black – but we often make mistakes. How many of us have been mistakenly ascribed with the wrong racial or ethnic category, the wrong age, even the wrong gender? When I was a student at Humboldt State, many people assumed I was a lesbian because I had short hair and wore nothing but hiking boots, jeans, and flannel shirts! This kind of automatic ascription becomes quite problematic when you add in all the assumptions and stereotypes that accompany it. So, for example, if you see a dark-skinned person, you ascribe to them the race of Black, which in turn may make you come to some other conclusions about this person – for example, that the person is socioeconomically disadvantaged, likely uneducated, probably criminal, and potentially dangerous. Now, I am very deliberately choosing inflammatory examples, but the reality of the way our society enculturates us means that stereotypes – especially negative ones – can be very deeply imbedded. Even if we don’t consciously realize or acknowledge our reactions (and I think many of us don’t), they are there. It doesn’t mean we act on those reactions, but we have them nonetheless. We make similar assumptions based on a person’s assumed gender, age, and many other aspects of their physical appearance. In fact, I think it might be more accurate to rename ascribed status to assumed status.

    We have come to a place in our culture and society where we have been taught that certain ascribed aspects of a person should not be subjected to assumptions and stereotypes. For example, we are not supposed to judge a person for their race or gender. Yes, racism and sexism still exist, for certain, but people are now routinely called out when they engage in racist and sexist behavior. It is not socially acceptable to make racial jokes or use racial epithets, and it is illegal to discriminate based on race (or gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, etc.). The same is becoming more and more true of disability and sexual orientation as well. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, I think we should all – and I mean ALL – admit that we still harbor unconscious reactions to people that, if we make ourselves aware of them, should probably cause us to feel embarrassed or ashamed of ourselves. I know that when I see someone and have an automatic reaction, if I stop to examine my reaction I am often surprised at the stereotypical assumptions I will still, unconsciously, make.

    As always, I believe there are important evolutionary underpinnings to this type of reaction. I’ve said before that humans are pattern-seeking animals. It is beneficial to categorize situations that might be harmful or threatening so that we can recognize them if they occur again. Both individual and group survival are enhanced if people learn to recognize and avoid danger. This extends from things as simple as avoiding poisonous plants and dangerous animals to things as complex as learning how to speak and interact with others in social situations. As animals we are always striving to keep ourselves out of trouble. As humans, we recognize that trouble can easily be caused by other humans. Unfortunately our pattern-seeking propensities can lead to mistakes, where we see patterns where no pattern actually exists, or where a situation may be perceived as more threatening than it actually is. This is a nutshell version of how stereotypes are formed: we see an apparent pattern of behavior by a few people, and based on their appearance, group membership, culture, or any number of other characteristics, we ascribe those behaviors to every perceived member of that group. Thus, some Black people are criminals; therefore all Black people are criminals. Of course, none of this stereotyping takes account of the myriad and complex cultural and institutional systems that contribute to the stereotyped behavior in the first place; that’s too nuanced for a pattern-seeking reaction that evolved in a paleolithic time when other groups of humans could, indeed, be extremely dangerous to your own group’s survival. In that time, better safe than sorry could have mean the difference between life and death, so it’s better to mistakenly think a safe thing is dangerous than the other way around.

    This is all a long introduction to my real topic: the ascribed statuses that come along with people’s bodies. We aren’t just concerned with skin color, age, or gender – we are concerned with overall appearance. What characteristics do you ascribe to a fat person? What is your visceral reaction when you see an overweight person in public? Is it a kind one? I doubt it. What about when someone is skeletally thin? How about if they have funny hair, or unfashionable clothes, or a bunch of piercings and tattoos? What are your assumptions? I think that physical appearance is one of the last things it is still acceptable to ridicule publicly – especially when it comes to people of size. That is why I titled this rant “Bikini Bodies.” We have assumptions about who should be allowed to wear a bikini in public. We roll our eyes and complain about being visually assaulted by an obese person who dares to wear spandex. There are websites dedicated to ridiculing people for what they wear or how they look (I won’t link to any because I refuse to support them, although in the interest of full disclosure I will admit to having visited them in the past – and I did it purely for the entertainment value, before I started to examine my own reactions). We get a guilty, schadenfreude-inflected pleasure from celebrity paparazzi photos that reveal cellulite, wrinkles, and stretch marks. We insult and criticize when a celebrity – especially a female – is too thin, or too Photoshopped, or too made up. Why have we learned that it’s not acceptable to criticize a person’s race, gender, etc. but it’s still okay to assume that because a person is fat or fashion-challenged, they are somehow morally suspect? These are other human beings. Why is it so easy to forget that? They love and are loved by other human beings. They have feelings, lives, experiences, worlds we know nothing about, but to us they are just a symbol of things we’d rather avoid.

    Some of the people I love most in this world are fat. I’m sure some of the people my readers love most in this world are fat. We turn to attribution error to tell ourselves that for our loved ones, it’s different – they aren’t lazy or lacking in will power, and they aren’t moral failures – they are good people who just let eating get the better of them. But for the rest of the overweight, it’s a different story – it is their fault they are fat, and we judge them because of it. I don’t write this to shame anyone. I write it because it’s time for us to examine our ascriptions and change our assumptions. It’s time for us to recognize that body stereotyping – and the real, documented discrimination that comes with it – is just as bad as other forms of stereotyping. It’s time for us to put down the magazines that tell us “How to Get a Bikini Body!” You want to know how to get a bikini body? Put a bikini on your body – and wear it proudly and without shame.

  • Adaptation to Extinction

    Adaptation to Extinction

    I am at a climate change adaptation conference in Denver for three days, and I fully expected to come away from the experience thoroughly demoralized and depressed. At the end of day two, I find that I have both reason for hope and reason for concern. As a person who is well-versed in the scientific method, I have approached the climate change issue as a skeptic should: with a critical eye, and with a desire to hear multiple sides and multiple interpretations. It did not take much research of my own, though, for me to be convinced that climate change is occurring, and that it is extremely likely that it is being made much, much worse by human activity. Ultimately, this may well be what causes the extinction of the human species.

    Scientists have determined that 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. That’s a huge number, but you have to consider that extinction is defined more broadly than the sudden disappearance of a species. Some extinctions occur through speciation; that is, an organism or group of organisms undergoes adaptation and evolution, and over time, changes enough that it is no longer the same species. For example, the common ancestor of chimps and humans, which lived about 5-7 million years ago, does not exist now; but (some) of its descendants do, in the form of Homo sapiens (humans); Pan paniscus (chimpanzees), and Pan troglodytes (bonobos). Other members of those two genera have also existed and subsequently gone extinct (e.g. H. erectus). So, extinction is not always the end of the line for an organism or group of organisms. Even the dinosaurs, many of which went extinct in the commonly perceived way (that is, they were wiped out entirely in a fairly short period of time, geologically speaking) have living descendants. We call them birds.

    If things continue the way they have been, I’m not sure humans are going to have any descendants. And I also think that humans will be the first species in history who have caused their own extinction. Most species go extinct in one of two ways I described above: through adaptation and speciation; or through an inability to adapt to new or changed environmental circumstances. The dinosaurs, and many other organisms who lived 65 million years ago, were unable to adapt quickly enough to the changed environment following a catastrophic asteroid impact, and so they died. The asteroid impact was a random event over which the organisms had no control. Humans, on the other hand, are paradoxically bringing themselves (and not incidentally, many other organisms) to the brink of extinction because they are so good at adapting to their environment. This is a case of too much of a good thing, and when it happens, what used to become adaptive becomes maladaptive and starts to negatively affect the species.

    How is the human ability to adapt to the environment bringing about our own potential demise? Humans are supremely skilled at technological innovation. What started with stone tools has evolved to microprocessors, digital technology, nanotechnology, genetic modification, and so on. These things are built on a basis of energy and raw materials extraction. Our technological abilities led to the ability to grow more food, have more children, live longer, and make more and more things. In biological and evolutionary terms, an organism’s ability to reproduce is measured as a level of fitness; and the more offspring you produce, the more fit you are. For many organisms, and for animals in particular, mate selection depends on fitness characteristics – males battle each other for the right to females; females select mates based on displays of desirable traits. For humans, one of the most salient traits is status. The higher an individual’s status, the more likely that individual is to mate and produce offspring – that is, the higher his or her fitness. Status is also linked to the ability to raise offspring to maturity. In humans, status is often linked to power, power is linked to wealth, and wealth is indicated by material possessions (among other things). So, the more stuff you have, the more status you have, and the more power you have, the more people – including potential mates – you control. I don’t want to be too broadly sociobiological about this, but for all intents and purposes, our incredible ability to innovate and adapt through making tools is a direct result of the biological imperative to mate and maximize our evolutionary fitness.

    So, what does our drive for evolutionary fitness have to do with climate change? It’s simple, really; making tools is what we do. Gathering material things to show our status is what we do. Using yet more tools to make having more material things easier is what we do. Desiring material things to show our status is what we do. Innovating, adapting, making the path of least resistance easier and easier and easier is what we do. Competing for resources is what we do. Dividing ourselves into status hierarchies is what we do. Trying to climb higher and higher up the status pyramid is what we do. And to do these things, we have created more and more tools and technologies that are requiring more and more energy and more and more raw materials, and the technologies we use are having a hugely disproportionate impact on the global environment. Put every one of the over 7 billion people on the planet together in one place, and they don’t take up much space, in terms of square mileage; we can all fit pretty neatly standing side by side in an area about the size of Los Angeles County. But our impact – the impact of our technologies, of everything we harvest and cut and mine and burn and use – is global in scale. We have pushed the bar so high that going back seems impossible.

    I know there is much, much more to it than what I have written here, but I really, truly believe that at its very core, it is the biological imperative gone to extremes that has led to the unintended consequences of humans adapting themselves into maladaptiveness. I can also have hope that our innovative, tool-making genius may save us yet. This is not the last I will have to say on this subject, but you have to start with first principles, and I believe our evolutionary history holds that position.

  • The Evolution of Pink Slime

    The Evolution of Pink Slime

    So-called pink slime has been all over the news lately. Friends have posted links and comments about it on Facebook, I have heard stories about it on NPR, and I’ve heard people talk about how they can’t believe our government would allow the meat industry to sell the stuff as food. Pink slime, known formally as lean, finely textured beef trimmings (LFTB), is certainly not a food product that is likely to provoke anticipatory salivation. The term pink slime is itself deliberately crafted to instead provoke a reaction of disgust. And, the associated news that the stuff is treated with ammonia to remove potentially harmful bacteria just adds insult to our collective sense of injury. But there’s a problem here: making decisions about what to eat based on a visceral reaction to something that has been uncritically dubbed with a description designed to elicit just that reaction is not a way to make choices about what we eat.

    I find the whole uproar rather silly, myself. First let’s tackle the linguistic angle: the name pink slime. Some might argue that it’s misleading to relabel this edible meat substance with a name that does not reveal what it really is. The name “lean, finely textured beef trimmings” does not evoke the actual cow parts that are used to make it. The stuff is made by combining fatty trimmings and ligament material from the cow and spinning it in a centrifuge to separate the fats. It is pink and looks slimy; hence the media-friendly and consumer-alarming moniker “pink slime.” One thing to note is that this stuff is not sold as-is; it is combined with regular ground beef as a bulk additive, and can be up to 30% of the final ground beef product (whether raw, bulk meat or items such as hamburger patties). So we are not unwittingly consuming unadulterated pink slime; nor is it being fed as-is to kids in school. A second thing to note is that we use all manner of euphemisms to describe the things we eat, especially when it comes to meat products. Filet mignon sounds much more appetizing than “hunk of cow flank.” Bacon cheeseburger stimulates the appetite in a way that “salted fatty pig belly cheeseburger” does not. In fact, when raw, most meat is pretty slimy, so we might as well add that adjective to all our meats. The point is that these are subjective reactions. Call things what they really are and lots of people might think twice before eating them. It reminds me of the failed “toilet to tap” initiative that was proposed in San Diego several years ago. Once the descriptor “toilet to tap” caught on in the media, there was no way the public would abide this water treatment program, even though the reclaimed water from the sewer system was just as pure and clean as regular municipal tap water. The name killed it because people could not reconcile themselves to water that came from the toilet, no matter how much scientific evidence there was that the water was clean. I find this fascinating in light of the fact that municipal tap water is held in reservoirs before treatment, in which people drive boats, fish, and probably urinate, and which is filled with all sorts of animal and plant matter, both alive and decomposing.

    My second issue with this uproar has to do with food supply in general. There are seven billion people on this planet. They all need to be fed. In many places people subsist on foods that we here in the US would find appalling, and not merely because of cultural differences, but because some people are so poor that they will eat whatever they can. Our objection to LFTB is a beautiful example of a first-world problem. I know many people are rethinking where their food comes from and signing on to local food and slow food movements, and that’s all well and good, but within a country like the US, that is (for the most part) an upper-middle class movement. Poor people in this country do not have the luxury to worry about where the food comes from, much less exactly what is in it. For a poor family, knowing the kids will at least get lunch at school is a bigger concern than whether or not that lunch may contain pink slime.

    When agriculture arose 10,000 years ago, humanity began the evolutionary road towards pink slime. Agriculture allowed previously nomadic people to become sedentary. Sedentism led to expansions in technology and booms in population. Ultimately, agriculture allowed for centralized cities ruled by top-down leaders, supplanting the egalitarian cultures of hunting-gathering and small-scale agricultural groups. Technological innovations continued to abound and populations continued to boom, and to feed all those people, intensive, factory-driven, and mechanized industrial agriculture became necessary. Can we really turn back that process now, and all start growing our own gardens and raising and slaughtering our own livestock? I’m not talking a fancy herb garden, heirloom tomatoes, and hobby chickens; I’m talking feeding yourself and your entire family by the products of your own labor. We do not live in that world any more. We live in a world where a beef supplier will use every part of the cow. Our industrial food complex has grown so efficient that almost nothing goes to waste.

    I’m not blind to the fact that the beef producer is also trying to turn as much profit as possible; this is capitalism, after all. But I have no objection to seeing otherwise wasted parts of the cow get turned into an edible substance. As for the ammonia gas issue, it is simply a way to make the stuff safe. A chemical like ammonia is certain to provoke another knee-jerk: it’s in glass cleaner! It’s a poison! Well, yes; but without understanding how the process works people somehow conjure a picture of the pink slime getting dipped in a bright-blue Windex bath, which is far from the case. I can see the other side of the coin if the stuff didn’t go through this process: how dare the government allow us to eat beef that has not been treated for bacterial contamination! (Which reminds me of another rant I have against what I see as a massively over-reacting food safety process in this country; I think it’s ludicrous to destroy thousands or even millions of pounds of a food because a few people got food poisoning – but that’s a rant for another day). In fact, much of our food goes through similar sanitizing processes to prevent illness. As far as I can tell, no one has ever died from eating ammonia-treated LFTB, but they have died from food poisoning caused by the very bacteria the ammonia treatment is designed to prevent.

    I can understand, to a degree, the people who argue that we have a right to know what is in our food so we can make an informed decision about whether to consume it, and I don’t object to the idea of more comprehensive food labeling. However, I still think this is a first-world and middle-class problem. How many people actually read food labels? Yes, the information should be there, but then the consumer does have some responsibility to think critically about what they see on the label if they decide to read it. I would bet that many of the people upset about pink slime have never bothered to really research what is in the other foods they buy at the store. Some people make it a point to not buy food products with lots of chemical additives and unnatural ingredients, but that is a tiny minority. Most of us are happy with the “ignorance is bliss” approach; and I would argue that if we didn’t take that approach then we might be paralyzed with largely unnecessary worry. Does anybody ever really stop to think about how many other people’s mouths have been on the fork they use at a restaurant? Wow, that’s gross, isn’t it? Of course the dishes at the restaurant are cleaned between uses, but to me, pink slime is no more dangerous than using a cleaned fork that has been in 1,000 different mouths. It’s gross if you think about it – so, don’t think about it!

    This controversy will fade as other things grab people’s attention, but what I fear is that whatever the next issue is, people will still have the same knee-jerk, uncritical reactions. Sometimes those reactions turn out to be completely justified, but that is irrelevant to the initial reaction. People need to come to conclusions that rely on more than a sound bite and an unappetizing label or picture that is designed to grab attention. Thinking critically means gathering facts and forming a provisional opinion that may be modified in light of future information. Being grossed out is not a good reason for objecting to a food product.