Why We Comb Our Lawns and Fertilize Our Hair

Photo courtesy of roel1943 via Flickr

Ah, did I get that backwards? Brace yourself. Here comes another of my thought exercises, again inspired by my latest reading of The Red Queen-Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley. Another word of warning--random bursts of dripping sarcasm can be found in places you may not always expect it.

Ever wonder why we feel compelled to comb our hair and fertilize our lawns?

We do it to look presentable of course, but why do we want to look presentable?

So others won't think poorly of us of course, but why do we care about what others think of us?

Because people are less likely to cooperate with other people who they don't like, for whatever reasons, duh.

In short, we comb our hair because we are social primates and cooperation is written into our genetic code--lone wolves tend to have harder lives.

Although evolution is based on competition we cooperate within groups to compete against other cooperating groups. A war between two armies is the ultimate competition but within each army you will find the ultimate in cooperation.

It doesn't matter if you wear a powdered wig or dye your hair green. What matters is that your hair conforms to whatever is considered acceptable for whatever reasons in whatever group you identify with.

Enough about hair. Lawns are what interest me and because lawns are largely a man's domain the rest of this essay will be mostly from a heterosexual male perspective.

Study after study has shown that women are rarely attracted by wealth and power. No, they are attracted to rippling abs, tight buns, and robust genitalia. They could care less if a man has a job. It is a mystery why men expend so much time working and maintaining their lawns and homes when they should be at the gym ...wearing spandex to highlight their packages.

Ahem ...lawns (as well as houses in general) are a form of status display. They tell others a lot about you. That brown weed patch juxtaposed next to a perfectly manicured green lawn tells passerby that the owner:

A) Does not care what you think about his lawn.

B) Does not have the means or energy to maintain it.

You can spot where the octogenarians (and drunkards) live in my neighborhood by the state of their lawns and houses.

Women may not realize it, but all men are engaged in an endless battle of one-upmanship. My planter strip (that area of grass between Seattle sidewalks and the street) had gotten out of control over the years. I'd one-upped my competitors years ago by dumping river rock on it and planting pampas grass in the middle of the pile. Boom! No mowing, no fertilizing, no watering, and I received a lot of compliments (from women) on how nice it looked.


However, over the years the pampas grass grew to take over the whole area, preventing people from getting out of their cars and filling the street with shed grass stems, thus degrading my stature. It was time for a new game plan.

Yards and houses as status displays can be a double-edged sword. One runs the risk of inadvertently displaying one's lack of creativity and smarts, which is why rich people hire others to design and maintain their homes.

My neighborhood is filled with examples of attempts to create attractive, yet low maintenance planter strips that back-fired badly. Instead of saying "Wow, this guy is creative and energetic," these planter strips say "Wow, this guy must be an idiot."

This is why rich people seek neighborhoods with covenants that forbid creativity. Best to let people suspect you have no creativity than to do your own landscaping and remove all doubt.

While working on my new planter strip, I was often visited by the other silverbacks in the neighborhood who offered pearls of advice as well as consolation, for the task that lay before me was not trivial. A gas powered weed eater with a saw blade on the end took care of the pampas grass, a pickax took care of the roots, and an ad in Craigslist got rid of the river rock.

I was of course leery of their advice, knowing full well they may be trying to trip me up. I think my new landscaping job is a success because I've notice that the other silverbacks have been spending a lot of time lately working on their planter strips. At a mostly subconscious level, men are a lot like male bowerbirds and lawns are their chick magnets.

So, what gives a manicured lawn higher status than a weed patch? I think it's because it displays one's ability or even willingness to control one's environment. Altering and controlling the environment is the hallmark of Homo sapiens. We alter our environment to suit us rather than adapt to an environment. Beavers do the same thing on a much smaller scale.

Wealthy or powerful individuals are able to commandeer the energies of other people to do their bidding. There are undoubtedly some octogenarians in my neighborhood who are wealthy enough to hire an army of gardeners and others to maintain their yards and homes and because of that I am unable to spot where they live.

This all relates to males attracting females. Human males tend to be mildly polygamous, given the chance. Some guys may fantasize about having a harem, but anti-polygamy laws are a good deal for the majority of men because rich guys historically tend to hog up all the women. Assuming you would not be the odd man out means you probably would be.

I recall watching an investigative piece on television where they visited a town in Utah where some wealthy individual had about a dozen wives. They interviewed another guy who had moved there so he could have multiple wives. Much to his chagrin, after years of trying, he was still single. He just didn't get it.

In the distant past, high-status, rich, powerful people had more children. That's not true anymore but the genes that promoted that behavior still reside inside of us, goading us to do strange things like, maintain our lawns and comb our hair.

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Domesticated Dogs--Mutualists or Parasites?

Photo courtesy of Dog Tag Art via Flickr

This thought exercise was motivated in part by my second reading of The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (by Matt Ridley) while on a trip to Argentina. The book covers parasitism's role in evolution. While in Argentina I noticed the stark difference between the urban mostly purebred lapdogs in Buenos Aries and the often malnourished mutts found in rural areas. Here are some Wikipedia links to the terms parasitism and symbiosis for reference.

Look at the picture of that blue-eyed, smiling beauty. Is that a smile? It's like the false eye patterns that have evolved on some moth wings. The false eye patterns are an illusion to scare off predators and just maybe that false smile is an illusion that works to tweak human emotions. The moth can't close its false eyes anymore than this dog can stop smiling. Dogs have evolved ways, both physically and behaviorally to endear themselves to us (elicit chemical reactions).

Most of us would not be best buds with another person who has bad breath and a tendency to pant while their huge dripping tongue hangs out of their gaping mouth, but dogs have to do that to regulate body temperature. Rather than evolve another way to manage body temperature, have some managed to get us to look past that rather unique and bizarre cooling system by placing a (simulated) smile behind it?

I'm not a dog hater. But I'm also not a "dog person." I consciously resist attributing more to a dog's behavior than is really there. The dog wants my resources but will do nothing to move my genes into the future in return for them (help me provide food and protection for my family), which is one definition of a parasite.

The dog will make me feel good the way a cigarette makes a smoker feel good (a case for tobacco plants manipulating us), whereas my natural affinity toward the opposite sex evolved specifically to move genes into the future. And of course dogs don't really consciously scheme in this way. The laws of mathematics and natural selection are simply moving things in this direction.

For 98 percent of our shared history, our relationship with dogs could be viewed as a form of mutualism, where both species benefited. This remains true where dogs are still used as biological burglar alarms, defenders of and even herders of livestock, and for hunting. All of these activities served indirectly to help move human genes into the future by helping to keep us safe and fed.

However, it's easy to see a trend, especially in cities, where dogs have lost most if not all of their usefulness when it comes to gene propagation (from an evolutionary perspective) and may actually be hindering human reproductive success. I'm not saying that is a good or bad thing. I'm just saying...

Clearly we have impacted dog evolution, and they have impacted ours although we tend not to notice or acknowledge that fact. Evolution is a response to our environment and clearly dogs have been a major part of that environment long enough to have impacted us genetically.

Most dogs today in first world countries are used almost exclusively for companionship. By companionship I mean the good feeling (chemical reactions) derived from the company of someone you like who also likes you. Feelings (chemical reactions) like that evolved in social primates to motivate the formation and maintenance of groups or monkey troops for mutual benefit.

Dogs are commandeering for their own gene propagation our companionship chemical pathways (feelings). Your dog is programmed to like his owner. The fact that everyone's pet dog seems to love its owner and vice verse is some evidence to suggest that this happens automatically, without conscious effort or thought--to like its owner regardless of who it is and for the dog owner to like their dog even if it is an ugly, snarling, stupid, untrained, hand-licking, crotch-sniffing, carpet-pooping, hair-shedding, smelly abomination. And that goes for cats as well:


My neighbor's cat--with summer hair cut

Given time, your dog would develop the same affinity with a new owner, and you with a new dog. This tendency probably evolved to enhance our past mutualism, but once this relationship evolves away from "mutual" propagation of genes, you have by definition, a parasite.

Grandparents can contribute mightily to the welfare of grandchildren, which may help explain our ability to live so long past our reproductive age. It's easy to see how a lapdog could not only divert physical resources from that role, but reduce the motivation to spend the time and energy to seek out those grandchildren by meeting those needs (feelings, chemical reactions) for those grandparents, especially now that most of us don't live in three generation households.

The antics of the grandparent's lapdog hanging out on a couch has become a ubiquitous stereotype and endless source of material for the TV show called America's Funniest Videos. These lapdogs might be viewed as genetically modified biological endorphin generators (tranquilizers).

Another ubiquitous stereotype is the guy in a pickup truck with his best friend hanging out the passenger window, a big (false) smile on his face, tongue flailing in the wind. Instead of a real person, man, woman, child, uncle, brother, parent, or in-law who might help care for or defend a family, you find a dog sitting there making his owner feel good inside. One could argue that chicks dig dogs and the dog will therefore attract a mate, but you can't argue that all chicks dig dogs. Chicks that do not dig dogs have been eliminated from that guy's list of potential mates the way cigarette smoking would have limited it. A tradeoff many smokers and dog owners are perfectly willing to make.

There is a trend among some street persons to keep a pit bull in their company, much to the chagrin of government officials and anyone else that feels obligated to cross to the other side of the street rather than cross a potential alcoholic, mental patient, or drug addict in possession of a dog bred to fight to the death.

And finally we have the young mom with her stroller and one, two, or three young kids along with two golden labs out for a leisurely stroll. Do those dogs add to the extensive energy and time required for child care? I have on more than one occasion seen parents who actually give deference to the family dog over their kids, within limits.

Most of today's lapdogs started out as hard working rat dogs, which today is considered a derogatory term. They were bred to chase and kill, and even to go into the burrows of various rodent pests, rats in particular.

Today, dogs bred to hunt bears, or foxes, or wolves, or game birds, or water fowl, or to herd and protect livestock, are caged up in cramped dark houses all day with nothing but a bowl of dried dog food and maybe a chew toy for company. They get to go outside on a leash twice a day to crap in a planter strip, or if they are really lucky, fill the backyard with their poop. Zoo animals have it better. What's wrong with this picture?

Dog owners quite simply rationalize away this grim reality so they can continue to get their fix. Their dog is ecstatic to see them when they walk through the door (after having spent the day alone in mind numbing isolation) and just look at that smile on his face!

The backyards in American cities are literally open sewers. This mountain of poop accounts for much of the degradation of bodies of water in and around cities. The news headline while I was in Buenos Aires was that a parasite spread by dogs had been found in the grass and soil of every park in the city.

Our dog and cat rescue and shelter facilities are bursting at the seams. Having saturated homes with rescue animals they have started rescue foster animal programs. It's starting to get ridiculous.

From an environmental perspective, consider keeping only lapdogs, dogs bred specifically as companion animals instead of larger, higher status breeds bred for other jobs. They did not evolve (albeit artificially) to live in a house environment. A dog's ability to elicit endorphin releases from your brain is not dependent on its size.

One environmental argument in favor of dogs is that a dog (poop issue aside) will do far less damage when substituted for children. That's a valid point but it also supports the contention that some dogs, by intercepting energy, resources, and feelings from owners, have moved from mutualist to parasite, which from an evolutionary perspective is neither good or bad, it just is.

Parasites, you gotta love 'em, or at least some of them.

[Update 5/9/2010] My eldest daughter pointed out that it has become popular for single young guys to own cute lapdogs, which she suspects are being used to get the attentions of women. If she's right, then using lap dogs as chick magnets would not qualify them as parasites ; )

[Update 11/21/2010] I watched a film called Dogs Decoded last night. Here is the transcript near the end of the show:

NARRATOR: But when we treat dogs as if they were children, do we sometimes allow them to replace our children?

MORTEN KRINGLEBACH: They are, essentially, moving our focus away from having children onto having pets.

PETER ROWLEY-CONWY: I think we can think of little puppies brought home as parasites. They don't do anything useful, they're not perceived as a food source, they're not perceived as a guard dog. They are simply brought home for fun.

The cuckoo is perhaps quite a good analogy because the baby cuckoo, of course, being planted in somebody else's nest, prompts mother bird to look after baby cuckoo, even though there's nothing in it for the mother bird at all.

MORTEN KRINGLEBACH: I think it's safe to say that dogs have, evolutionarily, been very successful. If you compare them to wolves, you will see that wolves are now an endangered species, while dogs, of course, are all around the world.

NARRATOR: Whether they are viewed as parasites or as beloved companions, no one can deny the evolutionary success of the domesticated dog.

In fact, there are over 400 million, worldwide. And humans have created over 400 genetically distinct breeds.

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