Just-so Stories Research Articles

The Evolution of Charismatic Cultures

AbstractThe following essay explains how religion may evolve to support cooperation among anonymous partners. It first reviews honest signalling theory, and reveals a limitation in the model’s capacity to explain large-scale cooperation. It then suggests that much cooperation is threatened by uncertainty, rather than by cheating. Finally, it explains how signalling theory can be extended to address the problem of cooperation threatened by uncertainty, ‘fragile cooperation’. The resulting extension of signalling theory—called ‘charismatic signalling’—directs attention to potential cooperative benefits from religion’s fascinating and diverse effects on the body. The charismatic signalling model is presented as a ‘how-possibly model’, not as a ‘just-so story’. The model’s interest comes from its ability to organise seemingly unrelated puzzles under a common solution, and to motivate the study of cooperative strategies harboured in shared ecologies.

Food Confessions: Disclosing the Self through the Performance of Food

At the end of the episode “Crowd Pleasers,” from her television series Nigella Feasts, we see British food writer and television cook Nigella Lawson in her nightgown opening her fridge in the dark. The fridge light reveals the remnant dishes of chili con carne that she prepared earlier on in the programme. She scoops up a dollop of soured cream and chili onto a spoon and shovels it into her mouth, nods approvingly and then picks up the entire chili dish. She eats another mouthful, utters a satisfied “umm” sound, closes the fridge door and walks away, taking the dish of chili with her. This recurring scenario at the end of Nigella’s programmes is paradoxically constructed as a private moment to be witnessed by many viewers. It resembles acts of secret eating, personal food habits and offers a glimpse of the performed self, adding to Nigella’s persona. Throughout Nigella’s programmes there is a conscious tension between the private and public. This tension is confounded by Nigella’s acknowledgement of, and direct address to, the viewers, characterised by the knowing look she gives to the camera when she tastes her food, licks her fingers as she cooks, or reveals her secret chocolate stash in her store cupboard; the overt performance of supposedly surreptitious gestures. Through her look-back at the camera Nigella performs both sin and confession, communicating her guilty-pleasure as she self-consciously reveals this pleasure to the viewers. At the start of her performance Table Occasions (2000), solo artist Bobby Baker explains that there are strict rules that she must follow, the most important being that she must not walk on the floor. Baker then hosts a dinner party (for imaginary guests), balancing on top of the table and chairs wearing high-heeled shoes. When the ‘meal’ is finished Baker breaks her rule; she gets down from the table and walks freely across the performance space, giving the audience a knowing look of mock-surprise, as if everyone was seduced into believing in the compulsory nature of her rule (Table Occasions). In this performance Baker confesses her anxiety and discomfort in the act of playing the host. By breaking rules of common etiquette as well as her own abstract rules, she performatively constructs her “sins” and her “confessions.” Baker’s look-back at the audience reveals her self-conscious “confessing self.”

How women got their curves and other just-so stories: evolutionary enigmas

How women got their curves and other just-so stories: evolutionary enigmas

The Future of Early Modern Race Studies: On Three Ambitious (Enough?) Books

The Future of Early Modern Race Studies: On Three Ambitious (Enough?) BooksThe publication of three important books devoted to early modern race studies marks a watershed moment in the field. Taken together, Sujata Iyengar's Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Pennsylvania, 2005), Virginia Mason Vaughan's Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2005), and Celia Daileader's Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge, 2005) provide a bold and complex portrait of the current state of, and future outlook for, early modern race studies. Collectively, the books attempt to untangle the meaning of race vis-a-vis color, gender, nationality, and sexuality in the early modern period. Respectively, the books address the taxonomies of and race, the mimetic fissures in performances of blackness, and the disturbing ideological work Shakespeare's Othello has enabled in its various afterlives. All three books make substantial contributions to the field: Iyengar's for the range of its analysis and commitment to sustained close readings; Vaughan's for its focus on actual early modern performance techniques; and Daileader's for its scope and argumentation. As a snapshot of the discipline, the near simultaneous publication of these books allows us to see a challenge facing the future of early modern race studies: how will we address the underlying anxiety about the compatibility of historicist approaches and the desire for social relevance? In this essay, I will assess each book individually before analyzing what their collective presence signals about the future of early modern race studies.Iyengar's Shades of Difference truly broadens the scope of early modern race studies. By analyzing texts that traditionally have not been in the purview of the field, Iyengar asks all early modern scholars to think about what counts as a race text and why. This contribution is invaluable and pushes the boundaries of early modern race scholarship in exciting new directions.Shades of Difference begins by explaining that Iyengar's model for understanding the development of from mythologies of color stems from Raymond Williams's account of social change in terms of and emergent structures of (3).1 This aptly describes her approach because she is reluctant to construct an overarching narrative, a just-so story, about why and how race and racialism came to exist and figure so largely in our lives (15). Instead, she is interested in teasing out the moments when residual, dominant, and structures of feeling intersect. Organizing her book both temporally and generically, Iyengar argues that literary affiliations (the compulsion of narrative, the longing of lyric, the agendas of masque, and the escape of romance) entangle with variable concepts of skin and racial distinctions (1). In order to untangle this knot, Iyengar usually focuses on providing detailed close readings of a stunning variety of literature. Her book ranges from analyses of early modern translations of classical texts, lesser known early modern plays, poems, travelogues, and masques, to Restoration romances and scientifica. The breadth of Iyengar's study is remarkable in the way it opens the field textually and eschews the well-hewn road of most early modern race scholarship (Othello, for example, is only briefly mentioned).Shades of Difference is divided into three parts, and in the first part, Ethiopian Histories, Iyengar addresses the Renaissance employment of two key classical texts: Heliodorus's ancient Greek romance, Aithiopika or Ethiopian Story, and the biblical Song of Solomon or Song of Songs. In her analysis of the early-modern appropriation of these texts, Iyengar convincingly argues that blackness becomes increasingly problemized and written out as the presence of Africans in Britain increases and as the new, scientific - called by Samuel Johnson 'metaphysical' - poetry emerges (12). …

A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization (review)

Reviewed by: A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization Coll Thrush A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization. By Kenneth F. Kiple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 384 pp. $27.00 (cloth). Is it possible to write a world history of food without simply reinforcing master narratives of “civilization”? Many recent works (e.g., Tom Standage’s popular The History of the World in Six Glasses [2005]) suggest that teleological just-so stories of progress and Western hegemony are difficult to avoid. Kenneth F. Kiple’s A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization makes a valiant, if imperfect, attempt to escape such traps. The book arises in part from Kiple’s mammoth undertaking as editor of The Cambridge World History of Food, and unlike Standage, Kiple brings erudition and (literally) encyclopedic knowledge to his study. His central argument, while simple, is provocative. “Until now,” he argues, “we have looked at the Neolithic Revolution as if it were something that happened a long time ago. From another angle, however, it is still ongoing—a process of agricultural evolution” (p. 296). For Kiple, globalization begins with the invention of agriculture, predating by several millennia more familiar transformations such as the Columbian Exchange. This longue durée approach runs throughout A Movable Feast; Kiple even challenges the idea that “fast food” is new, gesturing toward venerable traditions of street food in places such as Edo and Damascus. Kiple’s study is replete with interesting anecdotes (although this is also one of A Movable Feast’s weaknesses: at times, it reads as little more than a list, albeit a fascinating one). He also makes a concerted effort to escape the Eurocentrism that mars so many global food histories. Asia and Africa play central roles in his story, and not just as [End Page 235] outliers: the Silk Road, for example, was a two-way street between the Yellow Sea and the Mediterranean, with winemaking traveling in one direction and noodles migrating in the other. However, in all too many cases his interpretive allegiances often seem to lie with the centers of “civilization.” The kumiss (fermented mare’s milk) of the Asian steppes was, in Kiple’s view, a “notorious Mongol libation,” and the fat-tailed sheep bred by Genghis Khan’s ancestors were “grotesque-looking” (p. 93). The Toltec empire collapsed because of “hoards [sic] of desperate Chicmec refugees” and “waves of wild desert folk” (p. 112), and the Aztec polity that followed is described as “an era of marching armies, war gods, and screaming captives sacrificed” to a “predatory empire” (p. 125). Even China falls prey to unnecessary bias; eggs buried with saltpeter and tea—a great delicacy—are characterized as “abominations in the eyes (and nostrils) of Westerners” (p. 23). Whether it is China or the Aztecs in the eyes of Europe, or the Mongols in the eyes of the Chinese and the Chicmecs in the eyes of the Toltecs, Kiple’s tendency is to write from the perspective of the more “civilized” society, reinforcing both hoary stereotypes and longstanding normative paradigms. These biases and interpretive slips are especially apparent in A Movable Feast’s treatment of aboriginal peoples and societies based on hunting and gathering. Kiple notes that hunter-gatherers fared better in terms of physical well-being and equitable resource distribution than many sedentary agriculturalists; indeed, it was the latter whose lives were nasty, brutish, and short. Arguing such a claim is “blatantly heretical in light of the Western teleological spin given to the history of human progress” (p. 3), Kiple then succumbs to that same spin—indeed, his central argument about “agricultural evolution” is built upon it. Comparing indigenous North Americans to societies elsewhere, Kiple notes that aboriginal people “maintained their health . . . by not completing the transition from hunting and gathering—and such incompletion characterized most North American Native societies” (p. 122). This notion of indigenous societies as “incomplete” is both incorrect (many aboriginal North American peoples practiced agriculture) and reminiscent of outdated hierarchies. At times, Kiple even seems to blame indigenous peoples for their own “incompleteness” or for the dietary misfortunes of others: aboriginal South Americans “passed up a good source of protein” by not...

Agriculture, livelihoods, and globalization: The analysis of new trajectories (and avoidance of just-so stories) of human-environment change and conservation

Globalization offers a mix of new trajectories for agriculture, livelihoods, resource use, and environmental conservation. The papers in this issue share elements that advance our understanding of these new trajectories. The shared elements suggest an approach that places stress on: (i) the common ground of theoretical concepts (local-global interactions), methodologies (case study design), and analytical frameworks (spatio-temporal emphasis); (ii) farm-level economic diversification and the dynamics of agricultural intensification-disintensification; (iii) the pervasive role of agricultural as well as environmental institutions, organizations, and governance issues; (iv) the ‹agency of nature’ that blends the roles of non-human organisms and the cultural and social practices of people both at the local scale and beyond; (v) the framing of sustainability initiatives and outcomes through the perspective of historical change; (vi)␣spatial environmental dynamics of the ‹new geographics of environmental conservation’ that impact agriculture, food production, and resource management; and (vii) successful and promising policies, projects, and developments mapping out possible spaces of hope for agricultural sustainability, aquitable development, and food security. The adoption and application of these elements is successful also in avoiding the tendency toward just-so accounts or overly simplified stories of agrarian and environment successes amid the often grim realities of globalization and its impacts.

Remembering the Evolutionary Freud

Throughout his career as a writer, Sigmund Freud maintained an interest in the evolutionary origins of the human mind and its neurotic and psychotic disorders. In common with many writers then and now, he believed that the evolutionary past is conserved in the mind and the brain. Today the "evolutionary Freud" is nearly forgotten. Even among Freudians, he is regarded to be a red herring, relevant only to the extent that he diverts attention from the enduring achievements of the authentic Freud. There are three ways to explain these attitudes. First, the evolutionary Freud's key work is the "Overview of the Transference Neurosis" (1915). But it was published at an inopportune moment, forty years after the author's death, during the so-called "Freud wars." Second, Freud eventually lost interest in the "Overview" and the prospect of a comprehensive evolutionary theory of psychopathology. The publication of The Ego and the Id (1923), introducing Freud's structural theory of the psyche, marked the point of no return. Finally, Freud's evolutionary theory is simply not credible. It is based on just-so stories and a thoroughly discredited evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckian use-inheritance. Explanations one and two are probably correct but also uninteresting. Explanation number three assumes that there is a fundamental difference between Freud's evolutionary narratives (not credible) and the evolutionary accounts of psychopathology that currently circulate in psychiatry and mainstream journals (credible). The assumption is mistaken but worth investigating.

The Origins of the Puritan Capitalist and the Vocational Politician — a Series of Just-so Stories? Or Why is Weber's Genealogy of the Vocational Politician So Uncontroversial?

The Origins of the Puritan Capitalist and the Vocational Politician — a Series of Just-so Stories? Or Why is Weber's Genealogy of the Vocational Politician So Uncontroversial?

The Origins of the Puritan Capitalist and the Vocational Politician—a Series of Just-so Stories? Or Why is Weber's Genealogy of the Vocational Politician So Uncontroversial?

The Origins of the Puritan Capitalist and the Vocational Politician—a Series of Just-so Stories? Or Why is Weber's Genealogy of the Vocational Politician So Uncontroversial?

How the Horned Lizard Got Its Horns

Many descriptions of evolutionary adaptations are criticized as “just-so stories” (1) that are based more on intuition than on direct tests of adaptive hypotheses. The elaborate crowns of horns possessed by many species of horned lizards (genus Phrynosoma) are classic examples of intuitively adaptive features that lack direct tests of function. The bony horns that give horned lizards their name are presumed to function as a defense against predators (Fig. 1B). Here we present data from the wild showing that natural selection by loggerhead shrikes favors longer horns (fig. S1) in the flat-tailed horned lizard (Phrynosoma mcalli).

Commentary: Current Evolutionary Perspectives on Adolescent Romantic Relations and Sexuality

Evolutionary biology has been severely hampered by a speculative style of argument that records anatomy and ecology and then tries to construct historical or adaptive explanations for why this bone looked like that or why this creature lived here. These speculations have been called “just-so stories” if they rely on the fallacious assumption that everything exists for a purpose. Scientists know that these tales are stories; unfortunately, they are presented in the professional literature, where they are taken too seriously and literally. Then they become “facts” and enter the popular literature, often in such socially dubious form as the ancestral killer ape who absolves us from responsibility for our current nastiness, or as the “innate” male dominance that justifies cultural sexism as the mark of nature. —Stephen Jay Gould, 1980

Evolution of Human Jealousy A Just-So Story or a Just-So Criticism?

To operationalize the methodological assessment of evolutionary psychology, three requirements are proposed that, if satisfied, would show that a hypothesis is not a just-so story: (1) theoretical entrenchment (i.e., that the hypothesis under consideration is a consequence of a more fundamental theory that is empirically well-confirmed across a very wide range of phenomena), (2) predictive success (i.e., that the hypothesis generates concrete predictions that make it testable and eventually to a certain extent corroborated), and (3) failure of rival explanations (i.e., that crucial and successful predictions attributed to the hypothesis in question cannot be derived from alternative hypotheses). The author argues that the hypothesis about evolutionary sex differences in human jealousy satisfies all three requirements.

Genes and Cultures

A central theme of the flood of literature in recent years in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics is that much or even most human behavior has been programmed into the human genome by natural selection. We show that this conclusion is without basis. Evolutionary psychology is a series of justso stories rooted in part in the erroneous notion that human beings during the Pleistocene all lived in the same environment of evolutionary adaptation. Behavioral genetics is based on a confusion of the information contained in a technical statistic called heritability with the colloquial meaning of the term, exacerbated by oversimplification of statistical models for the behavioral similarity of twins. In fact, information from twin studies, crossfostering, sexual behavior, and the Human Genome Project makes it abundantly clear that most interesting aspects of the human behavioral phenome are programmed into the brain by the environment. The general confusion created by the genetic determinists has had and will continue to have unfortunate effects on public policy.

The Peacock's Egg: Bhartrhari on Language and Reality

Anyone who has ever opened a book on Indian philosophy will have been struck by the sometimes strange doctrines that were held by the different schools, and may have wondered to what extent it is possible really to understand Indian philosophy. And what do we mean when we say that we understand this or that Indian thinker, or Indian philosophy in general? Indeed, to what extent did individual philosophers themselves understand the philosophies they wrote about? The Samkhya philosophy, to take an example, proclaims the existence of twenty-five factors (which they call tattvas) that somehow evolve out of each other so as to create the phenomenal world. Did individual Samkhya thinkers know why exactly these twenty-five factors had to be accepted and not any others? Did they perhaps accept these factors simply because they had been sanctioned by their particular tradition, and because early exposure lent them a degree of plausibility that they are unlikely to acquire in the case of those who do not become acquainted with them until later in life? If this is so, how much understanding can we modern scholars ever hope to attain? Are we condemned merely to record what the Indian thinkers thought, perhaps adding a historical dimension by investigating how some of these ideas succeed more or less similar earlier ones? Or a social dimension by pointing out that this or that position served the interests of this or that particular philosopher and those of his group? Such investigations, which put Indian philosophy in its historical and social contexts, are, to be sure, possible and extremely important. Historical continuities have been studied and more will no doubt be discovered. But is this as far as we can go? If so, our understanding of Indian philosophy will not be very different from that of mythology: a number of just-so stories that we can study in their historical and social contexts.

How homo academicus got his name and other just-so stories

There are many things in life, including the nature of human origins and behaviors, that modern science cannot explain. To understand these phenomena, we posit theories and try to test them, but often, in the end, we are left only with faith and speculation to assuage our anxiety about the human condition. Origin myths are speculative claims about our past that help us make sense of our present and future. In storytelling, they make light of human vulnerability relative to the forces of nature, in language, they set a cognitive framework through which to construct shared meanings about the world, and in science, they provide the "givens" that we must assume in order to work out our theories and proofs about the things we observe around us. At the turn of the century, Rudyard Kipling concocted a number of origin myths, called "Just-so Stories" (1902) to explain observable variations in animal life to young children. One such story, "The Elephant's Child" (1902), speculates about the origins of the elephant's trunk. "In the high and far-off times," writes Kipling, "the elephant had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it" (Kipling 1902). Until one day, a young elephant who was full of"satiable" curiosity ventured off to the banks of the great Limpopo River, where he encountered a crocodile who bit him on the nose and pulled and pulled until the elephant's nose had stretched to nearly five feet long. Having narrowly escaped with his life and a seriously misshappen nose, the elephant's child returned to his elephant family, who quickly realized the practical utility of having a trunk and ventured off, one by one, to the river to "borrow new noses from the crocidile" (Kipling 1902). Ever since that day, Kipling muses to his young audience, "all the elephants you will ever see, besides all those that you won't , have trunks precisely like the trunk of the 'satiable Elephant's Child" (1902).

ZIMMER, C. 1998. At the Water's Edge. Macroevolution and the Transformation of Life. ix+290 pp. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore: The Free Press; distributed in the UK by Simon & Schuster. Price £17.99, US $25.00, Can. $35.00 (hard covers). ISBN 0 684 83490 1.

ZIMMER, C. 1998. At the Water's Edge. Macroevolution and the Transformation of Life. ix+290 pp. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore: The Free Press; distributed in the UK by Simon & Schuster. Price £17.99, US 35.00 (hard covers). ISBN 0 684 83490 1. - Volume 137 Issue 4

The meme metaphor.

In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, arguing that natural selection must be understood from the perspective of the genes because they alone—not individuals, not groups, not species—are the replicators on which selection ultimately acts. He also stressed that the concept of the replicator, not the gene per se, is the key to this understanding: “The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others” [1]. In his concluding chapter, Dawkins speculated that human culture might actually be hiding another such replicator, which he dubbed the “meme,” a neologism combining memory and mimetic with gene to suggest “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” [1] Dawkins was by no means the first or last theorist to speculate about an entity akin to a social gene [2]. However, his coinage has proved the catchiest, and the meme-gene analogy as he presented it is not only memorable, but ideologically appealing: on the one hand, it holds out the tantalizing prospect of an elegant, universal theory of cultural evolution; on the other, it evades genetic determinism by offering a parallel cultural process with interests of its own. The meme provides a second replicator, which, though as “selfish” as any replicator, is at least independent of the interests of our selfish genes. As a “just-so story,” it comforts us: “So that’s why we’re different from the other animals. So that’s why we feel like we exercise a measure of precarious control over our bodies. So that’s why we do such counterproductive things and feel so ill-at-ease in our own skins. We’re the product of a conflict of interest between our memes and our genes.” Still, the concept of the meme didn’t really blossom until the 1990s. Its championing by cognitive philosopher Daniel Dennett in a pair of books (1991’s Consciousness Explained and 1995’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea), cou-

The fall and rise of Dr Pangloss: adaptationism and the Spandrels paper 20 years later

Twenty years have passed since Gould and Lewontin published their critique of ‘the adaptationist program’ – the tendency of some evolutionary biologists to assume, rather than demonstrate, the operation of natural selection. After the ‘ Spandrels paper’, evolutionists were more careful about producing just-so stories based on selection, and paid more attention to a panoply of other processes. Then came reactions against the excesses of the anti-adaptationist movement, which ranged from a complete dismissal of Gould and Lewontin’s contribution to a positive call to overcome the problems. We now have an excellent opportunity for finally affirming a more balanced and pluralistic approach to the study of evolutionary biology.

A theory of the Earth: Hutton and Humpty Dumpty and Holmes

Abstract Paradoxes can be viewed as a bother or as a rich source of information. Paradoxes, fallacies and logical inconsistencies, along with the unstated assumptions behind old worldviews often form the foundation for a new worldview. This is where science differs from myth and just-so stories. Mantle dynamicists and geochemists have developed a worldview that, in many respects, is incompatible with modern theories of planetary accretion, geodynamics and geophysics, and with the geological context of volcanoes. A primordial undegassed mantle, as both the furnace and the fuel of midplate volcanoes, occupies a central role in the geochemical models. Although modern data alone are sufficient to overturn this view, it is interesting to address it in terms of its own assumptions, fallacies and inconsistencies, and the history of ideas. This is a vast field, so, in honour of James Hutton, I focus on volcanoes, their products, their causes and their sources. The following axioms are developed which point toward a different kind of world from the pristine primordial worldviews and the plume paradigm. • Linear volcanic chains delineate the stress field, not the displacement field, of the lithosphere. • Lithospheric architecture, not the core-mantle boundary, dictates the planform of convection in the mantle. • Incipient melting is the normal state of the upper mantle. • The lower mantle is depleted in the heat producing elements compared to the crust, upper mantle and the bulk silicate Earth. • The Earth is depleted in volatile elements. • High 3 He/ 4 He ratios in mantle materials imply a deficit of 4 He. • Primordial heat contributes a significant part of the Earth’s heat flow. These axioms [ A ] are the inverse of the assumptions of the plume and primordial mantle paradigms [not- A ] and the new and the old views are to each other as looking-glass worlds. An ‘axiom’ is a self-evident truth or an established rule. It is also an undemonstrated proposition concerning an undefined set of elements and relationships. The above ‘axioms’ [ A ] are not true axioms but [not- A ] provide the axiomatic framework of the current world model. These [not- A ] propositions are treated as self-evident truths so [ A ] can also be called axioms, even though they are falsifiable. The prevailing worldview, the ‘standard model’, attributes both melting and volcanic chains to deep mantle upwellings controlled by the bottom of the system with most of the original radioactivity and volatile inventory of the Earth in the deep mantle. This is not only inconsistent with modern data but also with the previous worldview embedded in the axioms. These axioms have not been pushed out by better ideas, or falsified; they have simply been overlooked or forgotten. Mantle dynamics is controlled from the top, not the bottom.

Atran's evolutionary psychology: “Say it ain't just-so, Joe”

Atran advances three theses: our folk-biological taxonomy is (1) universal, (2) innate, and (3) the product of natural selection. I argue that Atran offers insufficient support for theses (2) and (3) and that his evolutionary psychology thus amounts to nothing more than a just-so story.