The path to human nature, I propose, began with capable hands. No surprise there. In our brains formed a desire for hobbies, to take advantage of what our hands allowed. Hobbies were the first step toward occupational specialization, which led to the full flowering of human nature (trading, language, procrastination, art, holidays, rituals, fine wine, fashion, Veblen’s Instinct of Workmanship, etc.).

The Hobbyist Within Us is especially clear in the pages of Make, a young magazine devoted to higher-tech DIY. Turn your old scanner into a camera. Make a Joule thief. It started as a website, which was so successful that a print version was launched. More recently, Maker Faires have started.

Thanks to Niall Kennedy, who has written for Make.

Henry Rosenthal, the San-Francisco-based producer of the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston (the best movie ever made about mental illness), has a large collection of pennants. No sports teams, no schools, only North America — those are the rules. Hundreds of pennants. Most are for places (Mexico, the Grand Canyon, San Francisco). A few are for events (a Chicago trade show). “I’ve been collecting since early childhood,” Henry told me. “I made two pennants myself years ago, one for Joseph Albers and the other for Robert Rauschenberg.”

For years I wondered why people collect. By collect, I mean collect gift-like objects, such as frog figurines or erasers with pictures or stamps or refrigerator magnets or pennants. I understood it was enjoyable — you derive pleasure from your collection. It was the evolutionary reason I couldn’t figure out. When I eventually thought of my theory of human evolution — it is all about the growth and encouragement of occupational specialization — I realized this was one of the puzzles it solved.

Will Henry pay more than the average person for new and well-made pennants? Very likely. Will he appreciate an especially well-made pennant more than the rest of us? Undoubtedly. Like most collectors, Henry has placed the items of his collection side by side, making it easy to compare them and, I believe, promoting connoisseurship. Studying his collection — covering the walls and hanging from the ceiling of a large room — made me a connoisseur of pennants.

Collections increase the demand for finely-made things, helping their makers make a living and advance the state of their art, whatever it might be. that people collect all sorts of finely-made things encourages the growth of a wide range of technologies.

Incidentally, Henry is currently working on a movie about Tiny Tim. If you can’t wait for the movie, you can read a book it will be based on.

The latest episode of Ugly Betty ended with Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. I was entranced. I ran to YouTube to hear the whole thing:

What a great performance! Could anyone else come close? I usually like Rufus Wainwright:

Not close.

K. D. Lang?

No.

Leonard Cohen himself?

Well, the best of the rest.

I am a lot more interested in Jeff Buckley than I was an hour ago. From Wikipedia: “The night before his death [by drowning], Buckley excitedly told his girlfriend Joan Wasser that he believed he had found the cause of his dramatic moods, namely bipolar disorder.”

Kris Kuksi is an artist who graduated in 2002 from Fort Hays (Kansas) State University. Here is an example of his work:

Very intricate. What the world calls good art is almost always intricate. Artists, driven by their own preferences and the preferences of customers, move in that direction. Intricacy is technically difficult. The desire for intricacy causes technological innovation.

More intricate art, with great soundtrack.

When I watched Planet Earth, I was impressed that the most successful aquatic animals were mammals (whales and dolphins). Fish had had a huge head start. Mammals such as whales and dolphins had moved back into the water after long evolution on land. Something promoted by terrestrial evolution allowed them to dominate their new world. That “something” is probably learning ability, although research on whale learning has yet to be done.

This is one reason the aquatic ape theory of human evolution makes sense. Judging from whales and dolphins, a little brain power can go a long way. Early humans had not only brains but hands. The combination made sea creatures extremely vulnerable. The threat was so flexible and different than previous threats they couldn’t tweak a few genes and escape. To take advantage of this new food source, humans had to wade into the water — the presumed initial reason (by those who believe in the aquatic ape theory) for bipedality.

Anthropologists at Arizona State recently reported evidence that early humans did indeed live on coastlines, with ready access to fish and shellfish. Other researchers had found evidence of this as early as 120,000 years ago; the new evidence pushes the date of earliest coastline habitation even earlier, to about 160,000 years ago.

“We also found what archaeologists call bladelets – little blades less than 10 millimeters in width, about the size of your little finger,” [one of the anthropologists] says. “These could be attached to the end of a stick to form a point for a spear, or lined up like barbs on a dart – which shows they were already using complex compound tools.”

If you have watched Survivor, you will remember tools much like that being used to catch fish.

Thanks to Michael Vassar.

Mark Todd (thecheesedude at aol dot com) is a cheese expert who lives near the Russian River. Today he was in a local store demoing a cheese (Chiantino) that he and his business partner import from Germany. We had a long and utterly fascinating conversation. He has met most of the chefs who appear on the Food Network. His favs:

The best cook: Jacques Pepin “hands down”.

The most knowledgeable food expert: Alton Brown. “He knows ten times more than all the rest of them put together.”

How did he become a cheese expert, I asked. “Persistence,” he said.

The details of that persistence were not what I expected. When he was 30, his dad, who was 58, died of a massive heart attack. At the time, he was a lawyer. He hated it. What do I really want to do? he wondered. Something with food. He and his wife moved from crowded Palo Alto to near the Russian River. At a food event in the months that followed, he met someone who was paid to carve cheese. Wow, you can get paid for that, he thought. He asked the guy if he needed help. No, he didn’t. He and his wife hung out with the guy and his girlfriend. Several months later, the guy told him he needed help at an upcoming event in Monterey. He went down and helped and was paid $500/day in addition to free hotel for him and his wife and conference admission (usually $750). After the conference, he contacted the guy’s boss. “I want to do this,” he said. “What do you know about cheese?” he was asked. “Nothing,” he said. “Well, then you’re no use to us,” he was told. Two weeks later he called the boss again. “I’ve read four books about cheese,” he said. “Do you have any work for me?” No, he was told. “I really want to do this,” he said. He called the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And the next day. Finally the boss said, “I get it. You really want to do this.” And he was hired for six figures a year to go here and there and talk about cheese. Now he works for many cheese organizations. Next week he’s going to China to teach them about California cheeses.

I told him I was interested in how people come to appreciate “fine” food. Exposure, he said. “Are some exposures more powerful than others?” I asked. “Peer exposure,” he said. When he was a sophomore in college (at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo), he didn’t like beer. He decided he wanted to learn about wine. One of his roommates had been to Napa and come back with notes. Teach me about wine, he said to his roommate. It takes time, his roommate said. They decided that Wednesday would be Wine Night. Every Wednesday for the next two years, he, his roommate, and another guy went to Safeway and bought three versions of the same varietal — e.g., three Chardonnays. Then they did blind tastings. His palate became better than most of the guys in the wine business, he said. Side-by-side tastings are crucial, he said. If you taste 500 cheeses on 500 different days, you won’t know much. But if you taste those cheeses side by side, you’ll learn a lot.

As wallpaper patterns, store displays, and millions of graphic designs reveal, we like to see similar things side by side. I have blogged here, here, and here about side-by-side comparisons and human evolution.

From a review of The Surgeons: Life and Death in a Top Heart Center by Charles Morris:

For better or for worse, the quality of health care is driven by what Morris calls an “artisanal” value system, one that has little to do with institutional allegiances or administrative management objectives, but rather with “internalized systems of ethics and the expectations of other professionals.”

My theory of human evolution says it started with hobbies. Hobbyists became artisans. It hadn’t occurred to me that an “artisanal” value system exists but what Morris says makes sense. Such a value system should be powerful, easy to spread, and hard to eliminate.

In a recent post I mentioned Once Were Warriors, a movie about Maoris in New Zealand. Yesterday I met someone from Australia who said that the Maoris had/have an exceptionally war-like culture. They are not the same as other “native” groups, such as the American Indians or the Australian aborigines. They came to New Zealand relatively recently — from Samoa, maybe — and flourished by killing everyone who was already there. The Wikipedia entry for Maori doesn’t make this clear but doesn’t contradict it, either.

At Language Log, Mark Liberman has an excellent discussion of a new paper that reports a correlation between voice pitch and number of children for men in a hunter-gatherer population. Men with deeper voices had more children. This portion of Liberman’s post surprised me:

This particular form of sexual dimorphism is apparently not shared with our relatives the chimps and gorillas, so it must have evolved during the same period that human speech and language did. Therefore, starting at some point during the last five million years or so, there must have been a selective advantage for male hominins with lower voices. And according to the featured study (C.L. Apicella, D.R. Feinberg, F.W. Marlowe, “Voice pitch predicts reproductive success in male hunter-gatherers”, Biology Letters, published online 9/25/2007), evidence of this selective advantage can still be found today.

I agree with all of this. The puzzle is that the effect remains. Five million years is a long time; shouldn’t the dimorphism have gotten larger and larger until an equilibrium was reached, and then stayed at that equilibrium? Once equilibrium is reached it will be the average voice pitch that is most successful.

I can think of several possible answers.

1. The correlation is due to random variation. Because lots of surveys have shown that women prefer men with deeper voices, this is less plausible.

2. Evolution is still happening on this dimension. That is, equilibrium hasn’t yet been reached.

3. This particular tribe was pushed away from equilibrium for an extended time — that is, for a long time higher-pitched men’s voices were more advantageous than usual. Whatever caused that has disappeared so this group is moving back toward equilibrium.

4. It’s about signalling. The voice-pitch variation observed in populations is mostly due not to genetic variation but to early environment (say, testosterone in the womb) and is correlated with something less visible that makes a difference in the reproductive success of one’s children.

I imagine the authors of the paper favor #4. When the full text is available for free, I’ll find out and post again.

After reading Christine Kenneally’s The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (2007) I could see that most theorists agree with me that language must have started small: With single words. None of the theorists seem to use my other guiding principle: Lightning doesn’t strike twice in one place for different reasons. If two rare events — such as (a) a sound in the night that sounds like a burglar and (b) in the morning your wallet is gone — might be due to the same thing, they probably are. Use of this principle means that how language evolved should fit into a larger explanation.

Humans differ from our closest primate relatives — not to mention all other species — in many ways, of course. One big difference is language; but there are many others. Application of the lightning-strikes-twice principle means that language probably began for the same reason as the other differences.

The overwhelming difference between humans and other species is that humans specialize in terms of jobs. Two randomly-selected people almost surely make their living doing quite different things all day. No other species does this. Two randomly-selected members of any other species almost surely make their living doing the same thing all day. The story I am trying to tell in my human evolution posts is how humans came to specialize like this. (I believe the aquatic ape theory is right, but it’s about an earlier stage of human evolution, before job specialization.)

For me, the question of how language evolved becomes the question: How did single-word language promote job specialization? This has an obvious answer: It promoted trade, which job specialization obviously requires. The first words were nouns — in particular, the names of objects (chair, knife, bag, etc.). These words promoted trade because:

1. They served as advertising. It became much easier to tell others that you or someone else had something to trade. It’s weird that there is no word for the other side of the picture: Wanting something. Single words also made it much easier to broadcast that there was something you wanted.

2. They emphasized function. The words chair, knife, and bag describe the function of the objects they name. Objects have many other qualities, of course: color, location, ownership, age, materials, etc. Common words tend to hide those qualities and emphasize function. Trades based on function became easier to arrange than trades based on desires for other qualities. The first words helped people trade for stuff they could use, in other words.

Single words work perfectly as advertising. They are still used this way. In a Guatemalan market, I heard a man shout the Spanish word for “toothpaste” over and over. Lots of businesses use single words on their signs to indicate what they sell. Early names, moreover, reflected what a person would have to give in trade: Smith, for example.

People who criticize evolutionary explanations sometimes say it is impossible to have evidence. Not so. In the case of language, you can examine how single words are used today. Sure, new ways of using language have grown up; but they are unlikely to have made old uses impossible. There are dozens of things you can’t do with single words. But you certainly can advertise and request (”fork?”).