Auburn and Alabama fans are driven by tribal instinct

If you think we’ve come a long way from our primitive ancestors, look around at your neighbors this weekend, and you’ll likely see we haven’t evolved all that much.

In fact, you may only have to look in a mirror.

A significant proportion of Alabamians will be decked out in tribal colors — either orange and blue for Auburn University, or crimson and white for The University of Alabama. But the odd thing is that most people wearing those colors in anticipation of the annual Auburn/Alabama football game didn’t attend either university.

It doesn’t end there. Some members of each tribe turn entire rooms of their homes into shrines filled with football memorabilia. They dress the family dogs in team sweaters. They walk down the wedding aisle to the tune of their school’s fight song. They name their children after dead coaches.

Making fun of such excess is easy. Actually, I encourage it. But that extreme behavior is, in a way, only natural. In fact, it has roots in 200,000 years of human pre-history.

Our earliest human ancestors lived in the African savanna and survived by hunting and gathering. The rule of the day was eat or be eaten. In such an unforgiving environment, cooperation within a tribe was a necessity.

Every living being, humans included, is a complex machine with one biological purpose — to spread its genetic material. “Be fruitful and multiply” isn’t just a Biblical commandment. It is encoded in our DNA.

Members of hunter-gatherer societies best fulfilled their genetic imperative by cooperating with the people they saw every day, mostly close relations. That’s how tribal bonds formed, and it’s why, even today, people have an enormous capacity for social cooperation. Evolutionary biologists call it “reciprocal altruism,” but everyone else calls it “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” (In fact, our chimpanzee cousins practice this literally when they groom each other.) Our brains are wired for it because it’s a powerful survival mechanism, and thus favored by natural selection.

But there is a downside to our mental wiring. While it encourages cooperation within a tribe, it often leads to conflict with other tribes, especially if those other tribes are competing for the same resources. We are “us,” and they are “them.”

Down through the centuries, that tribal instinct had led to racism, ethnic hatred, religious conflict and, on a larger scale, wars between nations fighting to control land, resources and wealth.

Fortunately, human societies evolve far more quickly than human biology does. So, we’ve come up with ways to close the distance between us and them. The most successful is trade. Frederic Bastiat, a 19th century French economist, said, “When goods don’t cross borders, armies will.” Today, large-scale trade between nations is the norm, not the exception. The more trade there is between any two given countries, the less likely those countries will end up at war with one another. As a result, the number of wars going on at any particular time has dropped steadily since the end of the Cold War.

Within nations, individuals are also interconnected by trade. We all do business with each other, and most of our old tribal divisions have broken down or substantially weakened. But we still have that tribal instinct, which now expresses itself, usually, in more peaceful ways — like identifying with collegiate and professional sports teams. We have rituals, like tailgating, that we share with fellow tribesmen, and we compete with other tribes by participating in office betting pools.

We’re driven to join tribes, which is why people who never attended Auburn or Alabama still choose sides. And all tribes seek to grow, which is why natives often pressure newcomers from out of state to pick a team.

You can join a tribe even if you don’t care about sports. For better or worse, tribes form around everything from TV shows (Trekkies) to rock bands (Deadheads) to political candidates (Obamaniacs).

So, when you’re putting on your war paint for the big game Saturday, remember that you’re part of a tradition that dates to the Stone Age. And if your team loses, just tell yourself that football is still better than hunting zebras.

Dr. House offers his diagnosis for the human condition

What makes Dr. Gregory House the best character on television isn’t his medical knowledge. It isn’t even his ruthless wit. It’s that he gets — really gets — human nature.

OK. Maybe I’m just as cynical as the title character of Fox’s hit medical drama “House.” After all, one of House’s key insights is “everybody lies.” But I prefer to think I’m a realist.
So, what is it about human behavior that House (Hugh Laurie) gets? First, he understands that people respond to incentives.

This is basic Economics 101, which means it’s a hard truth that most people would prefer not to believe. But anyone who has ever had to deal with a job-for-life government employee knows it’s true. Zero threat of losing your job equals zero incentive to do your job well. Car salesmen, on the other hand, get paid on commission. That means they have a powerful incentive to sell you a car — whether you want one or not — tempered only by their incentive not to alienate you as a future customer.

House understands this and even cites a classic example of behavioral economics.

In a recent episode, “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” House offers up this bit of wisdom about how people respond to incentives: “You want people to drive safer? Take out air bags and replace them with machetes pointed at their necks. Nobody would drive over three miles per hour.”

I first came across that argument in Steven Landsburg’s 1993 book “The Armchair Economist.” Landsburg uses it to show that seat belts and air bags don’t actually save lives. People willingly accept a certain amount of risk. So, when you make vehicles safer, people drive more recklessly — just as they would drive more carefully if you made cars more dangerous.

Of course, most people don’t understand that.

On an automotive Web site, I found an article that said, “Surprisingly, that grim crash fatality statistic (40,000 deaths per year) has held steady for the past two decades — even as cars have become more crashworthy and sophisticated safety features more widely available.”

Here is what House would say to that article’s author: “You’re an idiot.” There’s nothing surprising about it if you understand incentives the way House does.

House also understands another subject that makes lots of people uncomfortable — evolution.
In the same episode, House is convinced that a patient’s extreme niceness must be a symptom of some underlying disease. Why? Because being nice with no expectation of getting something in return isn’t natural.

House explains: “Three cavemen see a stranger running toward them with a spear. One fights, one flees, one smiles and invites him over for fondue. That last guy didn’t last long enough to procreate.”

Evolutionary psychology holds that just as plants and animals pass down physical traits to future generations, people pass down behavioral traits. So, just as it does with physical traits, natural selection weeds out some behavioral traits — like extreme, naïve niceness — because the people who have them tend to die before passing them on.

This is the sort of evolution that upsets most liberals just as much as it upsets conservatives. It’s one thing to say that people’s physical characteristics are the product of millions of years of natural selection. But behavior? Lots of liberals hate that idea because if behavior is largely biologically driven, you can’t make people behave differently just by forcing them into sensitivity training.

But, as John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” They’re still facts whether you believe them are not.

That’s why all of the other characters on “House” think Dr. House is a jerk. He’s armed with more facts than anyone else on TV. And facts don’t necessarily play nice.

Culture Shock 03.01.07: Loving celebrities is in our genes

It's a common complaint: People are too interested in trivial celebrity gossip and pay too little attention to real news. And the mass media fosters this "culture of celebrity" by pandering to it, while coverage of important issues suffers.

Instead of reporting on the war in Iraq and the state of the economy, the argument goes, cable news channels offer hours of coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith legal battles, Britney Spears' shaved head and Madonna's latest trip to Africa in search of some unsuspecting child to adopt.

In the stuffy neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein writes "Without celebrities, whole sections of the New York Times and the Washington Post would have to close down."

The assumption, usually unspoken, is that the culture of celebrity is something new, something forced on us by "crass consumerism" and media saturation. All I needed, however, was a quick Google search to find some genuine, capitalism-hating Marxists making the point forthrightly.

A blogger at RadicalLeft.net writes disparagingly of Andy Warhol's pop art. Warhol, you see, had the gall to turn celebrity and pop culture into an art form. The same blogger also slams Oprah Winfrey: "... Oprah, whose fetishizing of celebrity and high-end consumer goods is legend, has fed that compulsive consumerism as much as anyone in modern media."

There is no doubt that capitalism produces more — better, faster and less expensively. That is why the capitalist West was growing rich while people in the former Soviet Union were standing in lines for hours to buy toilet paper. Capitalism and the mass media make celebrity gossip, and even the rare instance of real celebrity news, convenient and inexpensive for anyone who wants it.

But they don't create the demand for it.

People have been obsessed with celebrities going virtually as far back as our written records take us. Archaeologists have found graffiti about famous gladiators of the day scrawled on ancient Roman ruins. And ancient Greek athletes had cult-like followings.

Our collective interest in the lives of celebrities has been with us all along because, like most human behavior, it has its roots in our genes.

Celebrities, after all, are not like the rest of us. Some are bigger, stronger and faster. Others are prettier. Others still are just stranger. They stand out.

In prehistoric times, those were the sorts of qualities that helped get you a mate, enabling you to pass on your genes to the next generation. And genes are all about being passed on.

To get an idea how this works in practice, it helps to think about birds. In many bird species, males have brightly colored plumage. This makes them easier prey for predators, but the females love it. Attractive feathers are so useful when it comes to finding a mate that the advantage outweighs the disadvantage of possibly being eaten. Male peacocks in particular have elaborate tails that require a lot of extra calories to maintain. This would be an evolutionary minus if not for the fact that those otherwise useless tails drive the ladies wild.

Paris Hilton is the human equivalent of a peacock. She is mostly useless, but she has wealth, looks (to a degree) and fashion sense that signal "successful mate" to the primitive parts of male brains. Her night-vision sex tape probably didn't hurt, either.

Still don't believe celebrity culture comes from your genes? Well, not even the Marxists are immune. They're the ones buying T-shirts emblazoned with the image of communist guerrilla and ruthless killer Che Guevara. Che is now the celebrity icon for people who claim to hate celebrity icons. Regardless of politics, we all have some celebrity who arouses our interest. After all, we're only human.