Medical & Science

The Washington Post has an article today regarding an evolutionary psychology explanation as to why Amerians are usually more interested in “fluff” rather than “substance.” 

As they set up the scenario:

Scandal A: A prominent politician gets caught sleeping with a campaign aide and plunges himself into an ugly paternity dispute — all while his cancer-stricken wife is fighting for her life.

Scandal B: A prominent politician’s signature health-care plan turns out to have been put together badly, and he is forced to confess that the plan will cost taxpayers billions more than expected.

It’s a no-brainer which scandal is likely to catch — and keep — our attention. The interesting question as the presidential election heads into the homestretch is why we care more about some stories that do not affect us directly, even as we tune out other stories that do.

That’s interesting, except it doesn’t hold true at all.  Scenario A is considered fluff and something that doesn’t affect us personally, while B is considered substance.  They are both clearly substantive issues.  It definitely affects us personally in what sort of person John Edwards is.  His character clearly plays a pivotal role in sort of overall leader he is, the decisions he would make, etc.  If he’d so easily cheat on his cancer-stricken wife, imagine what sort of decisions he’d make in the highest office in the land! 

One explanation is that cultural mores attune us to certain stories — we live in an era where gossipy scandals rule. To test this, psychologist Hank Davis at the University of Guelph in Ontario examined hundreds of sensational stories on the front pages of newspapers in eight countries over a 300-year period, from 1701 to 2001.

Remarkably, he concluded that the themes of sensational news were identical not only across the centuries but also in diverse geographic locales — from the United States to Bangladesh, from Canada to Mauritius. The stories that editors put on the front pages of newspapers — presumably stories that interested readers — included headlines such as “Crocodiles Tear Apart Thai Suicide Woman.”

The stories were sometimes about important things and sometimes not, but they nearly always involved the kind of themes that people who are part of small groups like to know about one another: lying and cheating, altruism and heroism, loyalty and disloyalty.

Davis and other evolutionary psychologists argue that the reason John Edwards‘s adultery has more zing in our heads than a dry policy dispute that could cost taxpayers billions of dollars is that the human brain evolved in a period where there were significant survival advantages to finding out the secrets of others. Since humans lived in small groups, the things you learned about other people’s character could tell you whom to trust when you were in a tight spot.

“We are continuing to navigate through the modern world with a Stone Age mind,” Davis said.

In the Pleistocene era, he added, there was no survival value in being able to decipher a health-care initiative, but there was significant value in information about “who needs a favor, who is in a position to offer one, who is trustworthy, who is a liar, who is available sexually, who is under the protection of a jealous partner, who is likely to abandon a family, who poses a threat to us.”

Bologna.  This theory assumes that the reason we’d rather discuss Edwards and his issue is because we love gossip and the stupid human brain hasn’t evolved to discuss important issues.  That assumption seems completely wrong.  I think the more likely assumption would be that people tend to discuss issues they can more easily understand, easily relate to others, and that are similar to things that have happened in their own lives. 

Clearly, health care plans are massive, complicated, hard to understand, and hard to relate to others.  This is almost definitely the reason that people would rather discuss Edwards cheating on his wife, as opposed to a complicated health care plan that is so obtuse that even those who originally put it together it don’t fully understand it.  As for infidelity, it’s something most of us have had some contact with on some level.  How many of us have created a health care plan for the nation?  How many of us could even follow a health care plan that someone else created? 

This theory also assumes that the human brain is relatively simple in the sense that it’s built to deal with problems that only arose 100, 000 years ago.  Who says the human brain hasn’t changed since then?  If this is true, and it has not changed since then, why would ANY of us create health care plans, let alone discuss, or want to discuss, them?  Are those who find health care plans fascinating less evolved or more evolved than the rest of us? 

I think both scenarios above are full of substance, and neither are fluff.  Character is important even if we never come into contact with the president personally.  Why they think that because we’ll never meet the president in person that character is somehow unimportant, I’ve no idea…it doesn’t stand to reason though.  Character is vital either way.  John Kerry’s activities in Vietnam aren’t fluff, they played a key role in how we thought he would make decisions, how he worked with others, and if he was trustworthy or not- not only on a personal level one-on-one, but to all of us who would need to trust him as our leader in tough times.   

Darwinism can explain everything, it seems.  It just seems the explanations make no sense at all.