Seth’s blog

Waiting in line at Tokyo immigration control, I met a woman from North Carolina who’d come to Japan for an organized tour of Japanese baseball parks (17 of them). She learned about the tour from a friend. In America, she’s visited 117.

I told her I was a psychology professor and had a theory of evolution in which connoisseurship played a big role. She was a baseball-park connoisseur, I said.

From The Story of Science, a great new BBC TV series, I learned that in 1856 William Perkin, a British chemist, while trying to synthesize quinine (to cure malaria), created the first aniline dye, called mauveine. It could be used to dye cloth mauve. (more…)

The dates of the Ancestral Health Symposium have been set:　August 5-6, 2011 at UCLA.

Speaking of good-luck charms, a study at the University of Cologne found in four different experiments with four different tasks that people did better when they believed that they somehow had Lady Luck on their side. For example, they did better when they had their lucky charm with them than when they didn’t.

If lucky charms work then it’s reasonable to buy them. I explained why it’s helpful in an evolutionary (i.e., long-term) sense to buy them: long ago, the resources paid for them supported technological innovation.
Via Bad Science.

In a museum about the history of Tokyo, I saw an exhibit that showed a typical Tokyo home from hundreds of years ago. It contained an elaborate good-luck charm next to the shrine. I realized that good-luck charms can be explained by my theory of human evolution as another example of behavior — along with art, ceremonies, and gift-giving norms - that long ago supported technical progress. This particular good-luck charm was hard to make. Because people wanted them, they bought them. This helped support skilled craftsmen, who were the ones who made technical progress. Along the same lines, ceremonies usually involve lots of high-end hard-to-make stuff, such as fine clothes.

Visiting distant big cities has taught me a lot about human nature. The big examples are the Shangri-La Diet (Paris) and the umami hypothesis (a earlier Tokyo visit led me to make a lot of miso soup, which had surprising effects). Trips to Antigua (single words make it easy to trade), Toronto (gifts support technical progress), and now Tokyo (again) helped me think about human evolution.