Several writers have entreated me to leave you alone, something I fail to understand completely, since I have no means of compelling you to do or not do anything. I guess it must be a fancy way of telling me to play nice and sound agreeable.

The French have a saying: everything has the defects of its merits.

In everything I have heard you say so far, I detect not so much an analytic error as an inadequate synthesis, not wrong so much as not going the full mile, leaving yourself open to an obvious logical criticism. The fault lies in what is omitted.

You are using, by your own account, an organizing structure built around anger and strength and the secondary relation of anger recognition. These are your putative isolates. From studying these attributes you go on to make conclusions about the relations between physical strength, anger, psychology, and the evolution of social structure. Because these are not features of your isolates, this effort is a non sequitur Your conclusions may be true but studying anger and its relations to strengths will not tell you so.

(Part of the problem may devolve from confusing 'cladogenetic' development from the original human proto-culture with the 'anagenetic' separation of developed cultures.)

There's a different argument out there with similar features and problematics: All language descends from a single proto-language. (This is an unexceptional statement that holds water nearly every way you can look at it.) Therefore it follows that all languages have the same fundamental substructure. This is a non sequitur. (The logical error goes like this: If b is integral to a, d is integral to c, and c follows necessarily from a, then d must follow necessarily from b.) Neither comparatiave linguistics nor brain physiology supports this conclusion, but it is one of those statements that can never be ruled out because it imputes the truth to something yet to be found. Nevertheless, its devotees still drool over it and in some cases have hyped it as the linguistic equivalent of e=mc-squared.

In your case, several handy methods already exist to help perform the veridical test.

One, an independent body using analogous tools and methods could try to replicate your results.

Two, using mild manners and cooperation as your organizing paradigm you could discover if there are complementary rules of behavior which reciprocate to your findings.

Three, by choosing subjects at random, using interviewers who are unaware of the study's objectives, and preparing lists including dummy questions along with groups of photographs including ringers of some kind, you could fashion a double-blind study that would act as a control.

This would take you a long way toward verifying your findings, although it would not settle the questions of the difference between the cladogenetic and the anagenetic evolution of culture.

Sure. It would take time and money. But you want to be right, don't you? That way you could take the wrecking ball to your critics instead of skittering around like a hen whose chicks got lost.

J. Ackerman, The reason people have been encouraging you to stop posting is not because you're being rude, it is because your posts are an incoherant mix of unsubstantiated personal attacks coupled with basic misunderstandings of science and an unfamiliarity with the research program you are criticizing. For example, the post you have made here goes on for seven paragraphs without mentioning any alternative explanation, without making explicit any criticism. You say, "I detect not so much an analytic error as an inadequate synthesis" but you never explained what was inadequate. You said I left myself, "open to an obvious logical criticism" but you didn't specify what that criticism was. You said, "The fault lies in what is omitted" but you never mentioned what was omitted. I can't really call them criticisms because they don't say anything, they're more like the skeletal structure of a criticism that never gets fleshed out. After a variety of philosophical arguments that seem to have nothing to do with my research you end with three ways that I could test my hypotheses to get around whatever problem you think but haven't explicated about my research. I've encouraged you about half a dozen times now to read the original research reports, and if you had you would know that all three of these tests have already been done. 1. The basic results have been confirmed by an independant research team on a different population, namely Archer and Thanzami showed roughly the same effect on East Indians. An anthropologist with whom I've collaborated has also found these effects among the Aka in Africa, and another among the Tsimane of Bolivia. I am a co-author on the research in the Central African Republic and Bolivia, but I didn't perform the research. I had nothing to do with the East Indian data. 2. My paper in PNAS discusses anger both in cooperative and competitive relationships (I'm repeating myself here) and tests individual differences based on factors that predict benefit conferral as well as cost infliction. 3. The original studies were double blind. When the strength measurements were taken the researchers had no idea what subjects had said in their questionnaires, thus they had no idea what "condition" the subjects were in. And the subjects had no idea what the hypothesis was, so obviously they were blind to what was expected as well.

Gee whiz, now you're being a hypocrite. I made it clear what the logical error was, what the inadequate synthesis was, and what was omitted.

I'm glad you're a good scientist. Now, if you don't want me criticizing your enlargements of your research study to include other things that it doesn't cover, I don't see how you can stop me. To me, these expansions are every bit as off the wall as you find my observations.

By the way, one doesn't have to offer alternative explanations in order to criticize something. This is like saying you can't criticize a book if you haven't written one.

Which is a crock.

I've got more crazy, absurd, ridiculous observations for you, but right now, I have run out of time.

I'm still pretty well convinced that you don't have it right, any more than I think the psychologists who believe that talent doesn't exist haven't got it right. They've got plenty of supporters in their own field even though they have it mostly wrong.

As with the psychologists who don't believe in talent (and they are no small number), many theories are not so much wrong as wrong-headed. The psychologists have no trouble justifying their views or finding corroborating research or corresponding claqueurs. It's still a crock. On its face, it's a crock.

Off the top, I found your findings suspect. And nothing you have said so far has convinced me that they are not wrong-headed. I suppose to be fair sooner or later I'll give your work a good going-over with the sledgehammer.

And this leads me to another problem. Your persistent hint that if I just read your work, I'll find that I am too overwhelmed to disagree. (It is possible that I could read your work and find it even more objectionable.) This is just a subtle evocation of the politics of academe, with which I am too familiar to find anything other than odious in more or less degree. The objectionable sentiment has been echoed by a couple of posters, one of whom cautioned me to 'leave the professor alone'. I don't give a good goddamn whether you are political or conservative, anarcho-syndicalist, or Bantu syncretist. The politics I object to is of the scholarly sort.

And my feeling is that you have been disingenuous in a very clever way. Your interest in your own research and your apologetics here are not just professional pride or career advancement. You have some other reason, unless it is a compulsive obsession, to answer all these objections here. My best guess is that your are hoping to have your findings used in some military or security capacity, and you are testing the waters somehow. A wild speculation maybe, and no skin off my nose, but only you would know. This is also political.

Wait till you read my next foray into your sensitivities, how evolution is like Beethoven. You're going to get a real kick out of that.

Well you are right about one thing, I do have a compulsive need to respond to criticism, which is what I find so frustrating about your posts. They aren't criticism; they have the trappings of criticism but with no substance. I should point out that I never said you would be overwhelmed by the papers such that you couldn't disagree; it's just that if you read the original works you would know what you were criticizing. As it is you repeatedly ask me to run controls that I've already run (such as the cross-cultural work), make points that I've already made (such as that there are positive effects of fighting ability) and generally speculate wildly about what my results mean with respect to evolution and politics.

I'm afraid that until you respond with actual criticisms such as any one of the following: a) a confound in the data that should be ruled out, b) an alternative theory that could plausibly account for the data, c) evidence of a Type I or Type II error, or d) arguments that the primary variables in my theory are subsets of larger variable that offers a more parsimonous explanation for the results then I'm afraid we don't have anything more to discuss.

p.s. Your claim that I want my research used for military purposes is nonsense and bordering on psychosis. As the author of this article points out in the very first paragraph, facial profiling is not very useful for such a purpose. There's nothing in my current data that allows the military to better identify a threat; and if there was such an ability people in their natural state would already be better at it. I do have plans for my research, and it involves deconstructing the anger face, identifying cues of violent vs. cooperative anger and understanding changes to the voice and body postures that accompany different kinds of anger.

Now you're calling me psychotic. Oh well, I guess you would know. You don't deny, however, that it might be used for security purposes, which is part of what the military does nowadays in its overseas adventures. I wasn't claiming anything. I was guessing. You don't read very carefully.

Now, here's your chance to complete your denunciation, because I'm venturing into theoretical territory regarding my main objection to some of your statements, namely that there is universal cultural selection for muscularity. I haven't been quite fair to you, it is true, partly because I find any methods about recognition involving photographs or drawings ipso facto suspect.

Some phenomena, such as the evolution, or development, of culture where there is little physical evidence can be explained by a form of modal mathematics which is non-commutative and not subject to interpolation or extrapolation. Subtraction and division are non-commutative: you get a different answer front to back than you do back to front. Nevertheless, they are subject to interpolation. If you start with 100 widgets, and you subtract 20, and then you subtract three unknown numbers, and end up with 20 widgets, you know that the sum of those unknown numbers must be sixty, and you could make an educated guess that what you have is a string of incremental subtractions of twenty widgets each time. The middle can be interpolated from the beginning and end, and some hypotheses can be proposed regarding it.

Suppose, however, that you have the equation A, which gives you the answer B. This can then be restated as the equation B, which gives you the answer C. This can be restated as the equation C, and so on, until you get to Z. Suppose you die of apoplexy after spilling a sixteen ounce cup of soda on your work, obscuring everything from D to U. A colleague discovering your pages tries to reconstruct the middle. He does not know what your alphabet is. He has an equation D to which he can propose an answer and an answer U for which he does not have a question. He surmises correctly that the operations are non-commutative and therefore can only proceed in one direction. Likewise, he sees that the missing pieces, the number of which are not known, are not interpolable because neither the operations nor the units from D to U are given. It could be twenty. It could be a thousand. The terms could be E, F, G, and then again they could be epsilon, theta, pooh-bear, and Darwin's ghost.

The situation is even worse if all you are given is U, U,...,Z. You know that some equation ? preceded and led to U but you have no idea how it was stated. It could be any number of things. It is not implicit in the conversion U to U and cannot be discovered by trying to work your way back from U to U to ?. Just as U is simply a restatement on different terms of U, so ? is simply a restatement of ?, which cannot be extracted from U any more than you could know what U was before you knew the value of U. In other words, no logic connects U, V,...,Z without the intervening U, V,,,,,Z.

It can all be worked out once everything is in place. It all comes clear. Even if only one piece is missing, however, the string is faulty. That one piece could be anything. The elementary reason for this is that U can be restated as U in more than one way. Only one way gives you V but the only way to find this out is to do it.

This is not a fantasy.

It is how music works generally speaking. The relations are all mathematic and the logic runs in one direction only. It is not a series of syllogisms, where the given two of the elements of the syllogism you can piece together the third. Music is a complex mathematics involving pitch and periodic intervals and time. Some of the harmonic changes in Western music are predictable but not the melody. In non-harmonic music like the music of India not even this is true.

It is likely that listening to the first rapid sequences of Beethoven's Fifth, you could surmise that the common figure of four notes, three of equal pitch and the fourth four or five half-steps lower, had already been introduced, but you could not know the dramatic introduction, bom bom bom BOM, G to E-flat. Likewise you could not work your way back to this from the finale.

Not to speak of Beethoven's Ninth. There is no possible way of working your way back from the choral finale to the introduction, or knowing both, calculate what came in between, or knowing the internal elements, calculate the entrance of the chorus. It is simply not possible. Once you hear the whole thing from beginning to end it all makes sense, but you could listen to the first and last movements separately (without knowing they are from the same piece) and not connect them.

So it goes with numerous aspects of cultural evolution, or development. You can observe certain seemingly universal traits of a culture, and then you can surmise that they descend from early human evolution and have been selected genetically as part of the trait-complex of the human animal. But this cannot be positively demonstrated, even by molecular biology. Molecular biology gives you the incidence of received traits linked to DNA. It does not give you the elements of the transfer mechanism, other than the obvious: sex. It does not give you the role of epigenetic factors which are genetic but not heritable. And complex traits that involve many different genetic factors common to all peoples are by definition difficult to trace.

For instance, showing that muscularity holds a certain status in modern humans, common to many cultures, does not make good the argument that it devolves from the evolution to Homo sapiens. This is magical thinking designed to make a certain social point. It looks like it belongs to logic but it has no basis in it.

It doesn't do any good to try to extrapolate the answer from any common dimensions between the 'original' humans and modern 'so-called' primitive cultures. All modern cultures, whether they are stone-age or industrial, bear the same relation to early man of highly evolved functional structures to rudimentary ones, by definition. Rudimentary here doesn't necessarily mean simple. It has been shown in terms of tool technology that even the Neanderthal produced some implements superior to those of modern neolithic cultures. In the evolution of cultures, which necessarily involves the development of language and therefore patterns of thought leading to belief systems of some kind, patterns are evolved that make sense out of chaos. Before the development of belief systems of some kind, all effects happen by chance, and everything happening by chance is one definition of chaos. It leads to a state of endless confusion except for what is at hand in the here and now, a condition of extreme complexity, since nothing repeats itself and all causes are mysteries.

In other words, to make a long story, there is no way to tell by extrapolation how cultural values came about, and no calculation will give it to you, either. The development is non-commutative. It may be pieceable together by other means, but theorizing is incompetent.

If it could be shown that muscularity had some certain value in every culture, the story might be different, but you cannot show this. As to what you do know about culture and cultures, I am fairly confident that you have not thought it through, given it a thorough go-around in the gray matter. If you knew enough about enough cultures, you might have a different take on the genesis and universality of muscularity, anger, and anger recognition. Not every culture reacts in the same way to anger, or to its antonyms. The Trobriand Islanders have little trouble with anger, just to take one instance. They are extremely suspicious of friendly behavior.

That's all, folks. Go have yourself a good laugh, and take a good belt of something strong. You take yourself far too seriously.

...to make a long story short,...

We never did have anything to discuss. Other than this top post, you have mainly been responding to me, not vice-versa.

And you're making your own form of incoherence here. If my criticisms are invalid by their very nature, the rantings and ravings of a drooling fool blowing spit-bubbles, then your response to them is pathological by definition.

Apparently the source of your confusion is the Standard Social Science Model that posits that all human behavior is cultural and not genetic in origin. We are already able to point to certain specific genes and know which part of which behavior they influence or predispose us to. We are not able to illuminate precisely how that happens yet.

We are also very close on the topic of universal grammar, partially owing to being able to watch a new language evolve in the deaf community in Nicaragua.

A combination of finding a pattern in widely divergent cultures, presenting a reasonable evolutionary argument for why such a behavior would be selected for, finding similar patterns in other species, and then sometimes finding the actual genes involved does allow us to make reasonable conjectures about human behaviors having evolved and not cultural underpinnings.

I know all of this is a huge threat to your belief system and your percieved group that you have committed to, and you are responding in a very typical way that has evolved underpinnings, but I still would join in encouraging you to just give up on it. Your side had their day with their pretty and pleasing ideas that helped people feel good about themselves and let them place blame on others easily, but now it is time for real science to make real progress on the real problems humanity faces.

Yeah, you are blowing spit bubbles here.

Threat? Belief system? My side? Perceived group? Committed to?

You had a good day knocking down your straw man. It doesn't matter if he looked like Mike Tyson or Woody Allen.

You don't have a clue what my "belief system" is.

And nowhere in anything you have read that I have written will you find any disregard of human genetics.

You are the one holding the prejudice.