Evolutionary psychology generally focuses on the ways in which life's age old pursuit of biological reproductive success shapes our mind's activities. Evolution and behavior are related in another way as well.  Evolutionary epistemologists like me are interested in how the minds activities are evolution by other means. We compare and contrast the mind's trial and error processes with mother nature's.  Today I want to give you an example of our work that provides insight into such hot personal topics as self-confidence, love, addiction, and co-dependence. 

The first two of these, self-confidence and love sound like good things, and the last two sound like bad ones. Evolutionary epistemologists have to strip away those positive and negative connotations to look more neutrally at underlying processes or dynamics. Like evolutionists or indeed scientists in general, we set aside moral questions long enough to understand how something comes about. 

One effective way to neutralize the moral questions is to find counter-examples. Here that would mean cases where self-confidence and love are bad, and addiction and co-dependence are good. That's not hard to do.  Self-confidence can make one over-confident in a bad idea. One can love terrible people and things. One can be addicted to wonderfully productive activities (I'm addicted to blogging here, in case you haven't noticed. I like this addiction--it keeps me writing). Co-dependence--dependence on someone who is reciprocally dependent on you--is not always awful. It's also what makes partnerships, communities, societies and indeed the world go round.

Let's leave self-confidence until the end to talk about love, addiction and co-dependence.  Connotations aside, they have a lot in common. Here's a biological example to illustrate a commonality. 

We need to eat Vitamin C. Other mammals don't. You don't have to give your cat or dog orange juice, do you?  What's up with that? 

Other mammals produce their own Vitamin C.  Geneticists have identified genes that are responsible for this ability.  We have the genes too but in us they're damaged beyond functionality.   Geneticists are confident we too used to grow our own Vitamin C but now we can't. What happened? 

About 35 million years ago our ancestors found their way into trees where fruit was abundant.  They ate the fruit for the calories but in the process got the vitamin C. What the genes had provided the environment started providing also. With this new reliable external source, our ancestors had two sources of Vitamin C. 

You've probably heard of selfish gene theory.  This is lazy gene theory.  If a gene has no effect on survival, then the organisms with it will survive even if the gene mutates. And genes do mutate as they pass from generation to generation. That's what happened to our Vitamin C genes.  Once fruit was available, the genes had no effect on survival. They just accumulated errors until they didn't work.

It's more sloppy than lazy, but if we are to anthropomorphize it's fine to imagine genes as not bothering to show up for work when their environment has the job covered.

And now we're addicted to this external source of C. We love it, meaning we'll go out of our way to get external Vitamin C.  Our dependency on it constrains and shapes our behavior. Fruit loves us too. Not emotionally of course, but in the sense that fruits' dissemination and survival depends upon it being eaten by us.  We facilitate seed distribution; it facilitates the prevention of scurvy. You could say we are addicted to each other, or co-dependent.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing?  I don't know. That's not the point here though I will say I do like a good grapefruit.  I bring up Vitamin C to illustrate a general pattern in how life accumulates associations and partnerships, addictions, love relationships and co-dependencies.   Co-dependency may be the most descriptive of these. Two systems--in my example, primates and fruit--come to depend upon each other for their respective survival.

A grapefruit addiction is safer than a morphine addiction, but the processes by which they come about have a lot in common.  Though our addiction to external vitamin C evolved over generations and a morphine addiction evolves in one lifetime, they both evolve because an external source of something becomes available.  Use it or lose it--since the internal source is therefore no longer necessary it disappears.  When morphine is reliably available, the body down-regulates the production of endorphins (endo- meaning internal, so internal morphine).  When fresh fruit is available, the genome stops producing functioning genes for vitamin C endo-synthesis. Same difference.

And such differences propagate other differences. The morphine addict starts stealing money to support his habit, his dependency on an external source.  Primates gain color vision to support their habit,  their dependency on an external source. Color vision enabled our ancestors to distinguish between ripe and unripe fruit.

OK, now a quick parallel to the dynamics of self-confidence.  in my last article I discussed the ways in which self-confidence plummets when you lose your job, a partner, or when otherwise the crowd that used to populate your day thins or disappears.  Yes, your confidence drops if you're rejected, but it's not just that.  We become dependent on the people around us to remind us of our focus--what we're are and are not doing.  If they're not around it's easy to lose focus. When they are around our own self-confidence and self-directedness tends to atrophy a bit.

Just as the self-starter nature of Vitamin C production atrophies over generations in the presence of fruit, or the self-starter nature of endophine production can atrophy in the presence of morphine, so too can the self-starter nature of self-confidence atrophy in the presence of lots of social affirmation.

So what happens when we cold turkey?  Unlike the vitamin C gene which will never kick back into production should I lose my grapefruit connection, one's autogenerated self-confidence can kick back in. It may take a while.  It takes the body up to six months to get back into full production of endorphine if one cold turkeys on morphine.  And becoming a self-starter after you've lost your job could take that long for some of us too.

One last connection:  Are people more independent these days than in past generations?  Most of us intuit that we are.  We think of ourselves as much more free, but a lot of that is a product of how reliably our dependence on our environment is satisfied.  Lose your job, lose your Internet service, gas stations, police and fire department, grocery stores, cell phone networks, the cold turkey would be intense.  We're more in love with, addicted to and co-dependent on external sources than ever.  Good thing to keep in mind in this season of thanks giving.