Anorexia
Perhaps the quickest and most easily accessible illustration of my
thinking on things is my theory concerning Anorexia Nervosa. The
basic premise of much of this work is that behavior is largely
genetic and as such has been tuned for the purposes of evolution.
My 3rd year at the U of C I took a course called Mind, which was a course
jointly run by the biology and psychology departments. During the first class
the professors were trying to make a point about the importance of
scope when looking at a problem. Their point was that the same system may
look different when looking at it microscopically versus telescopically
or when looking at nanoseconds versus eons.
Arbitrarily, they picked a topic to discuss with this context in mind, which
was Anorexia Nervosa. My discussion period was 90 minutes long and the discussion
was a little dry. I had been thinking about evolution and behavior for a
while and started to try and figure out how to shift the conversation towards
something more interesting.
As I was thinking about this in my mind an image of a plant that I had in my
apartment popped into my head. I had a tree like plant with a woody stalk
and green leaves in my apartment that I was continually forgetting to water.
I had noticed that when I failed to water it for an extended period of time,
one leaf would start to wilt, turn yellow and then eventually fall off. After
this another leaf would start the process. The leaves would not all die
together, they died one at a time.
If each leaf had some minimum amount of resources it needed to accomplish its
function, then this seemed like a logical mechanism for dealing with reduced resources.
If a leaf needs at least 60% of its ideal water usage in order
to accomplish its function, a plant that’s water is suddenly reduced by 50%
is much better off having 50% of its leaves get 100% of their water as
opposed to 100% of its leaves getting 50% of their water.
Perhaps, Anorexia was this same phenomena in animals. If a tribe of animals'
food source was suddenly halved, it might be better for half the individuals
to get all the food they need, there by allowing half the individuals to
survive as opposed to all the individuals getting half the food they
need and having none of them survive.
Hypothetically, all individuals had a genetic code that gave them a
certain threshold of reduced resources that if crossed put them into an
Anorexic mode. This would be an elegant way for a group of individuals
to scale themselves back during such intervals.
For example, perhaps in humans if an individual gets insufficient food
for a period of 2 to 3 months, they cross a threshold that switches them
into an entirely different behavioral mode, an Anorexic mode.
A women who decides to go on a diet would not start out anorexic. She
would start dieting and loosing weight. However, if the diet went on too
long and was too severe she might cross the genetic threshold and artificially
trigger the anorexic mode.
A wrestler who tries to stay under a certain weight in order to maintain
a certain weight class could also artificially trigger the anorexic mode
by starving himself for too long a period.
By this theory, Anorexia is not a disease, but rather is an advantageous
genetic behavioral trait that is being accidentally triggered at the wrong
time, that is at times when resources have not been reduced.
If hypothetically, this were true, then wouldn't we see lots of instances
of anorexia in areas experiencing famine? Why don't we? The theory would argue that
in times of famine such as in Ethiopia and Somalia many individuals would
enter an Anorexic mode. I would argue, however, that when individuals
do in fact not have food its very difficult to tell that they are starving
themselves.
Anorexia would only be observable in a situation where there was more than
enough food around, but some other reason was causing an individual not
to eat enough.
Now, I'm not saying that I necessarily believe this to be the case. But,
the ideas are at the very least reasonable enough to at least consider
the possibility that they are true.
Reasonable is ok, but I wanted to create a more empirical test for this
and many other related ideas related to behavior and evolution. My
solution to this is Evolizer.
Evolizer is an evolution simulator that allows a developer to program
the behavior of one or more species and then let them compete against one
another for survivial. If the addition of a particular behavior increases
the survivability of a species in Evolizer, it of course, is not proof that such a
behavior exists in humans and was formed by evolution to increase
survivability. But, it is one more level beyond reasonableness arguing
that such a behavior should be considered for the possibility of a genetic behavioral
basis formed by evolution.