Why Our Outlook for 2009 Is Sunny

Meredith F. Small, LiveScience's Human Nature

Columnist, LiveScience.com

It's been a hard year, a scary year, but we'll all be OK,

won't we?

Of course we will. In the face of a sliding economy, lost

jobs, vanishing retirement and checkbooks in the red,

everyone just keeps on going. In fact, we keep on smiling.

Are we idiots deceiving ourselves? Or are humans a

naturally hopeful species?

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers of Rutgers

University feels that humans are constantly deceiving

themselves, but that self-deception is a good thing.

According to Trivers, all creatures have the ability to

deceive others, and they have to. For example,

insects change color to camouflage themselves against a

background so that birds won't swoop down and eat them;

fish sport odd appendages to bait their prey;

mother birds act like cripples and lure predators away

from the nest;

chimpanzees cover their submissive grins to hide the fact

that they are scared and avoid a beating from higher ups.

Deception is, in fact, a strong selective force. Richard

Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of Saint Andrews,

in Scotland, have discovered that there is a relationship

between the ability to be deceptive and brain size; lemurs,

monkeys and apes that socially manipulate others by

being deceptive have larger neocortexes, the part of the

brain associated with perception and conscious thought.

That relationship makes sense because it takes a really

smart primate to know all the members of her troop and

know which ones to leave alone and which ones to hustle.

More important, a talent for deceiving others would

probably translate into staying alive and passing on more

genes.

Trivers claims that it's an easy leap from deceiving others

to deceiving oneself. And that talent would be just as 

important in an evolutionary sense.

We lie to get ahead and justify our behavior so as not to

feel paralyzed by guilt. Men cheat on their wives and claim

they had no idea what they were doing, and believe their

own explanation. Women forget the pain of labor and get

pregnant again.

All day, every day, we deceive ourselves and it helps us

stay alive, and sane. From Trivers' viewpoint, we are

probably lying to ourselves right now about the economy

so that we will carry on, because the other option, not

carrying on, is not exactly good for passing on genes.

Or does our sunny disposition come from a happier

place?

Evolutionary Psychiatrist Randolph Nesse of the

University of Michigan is a great believer in hope as a

evolutionary strategy.

According to Nesse, all emotions have an evolutionary

basis, and for every negative emotion, there is a

balancing positive one. Hope arrives on the coattails of

despair, and without hope, we'd all be lost. Since

everyone experiences bad stuff, and feels it deeply, our

brains have adapted by also delivering hope. And without

our inborn measure of hope, we fall into depression,

where someone like psychiatrist Nesse has to remind us

to be hopeful.

Nesse also claims that leaders of social groups have

good reason to inspire hope; it's no coincidence that our

incoming president's mantra was all about hope. Societies

function well on hope, but they fall apart in despair, and

we are all clinging to the hope that our new leadership will

fix the economy and make everything right.

If Nesse is right, then hope is something that evolution

has handed us to get through tough situations, and we

aren't deceiving ourselves at all. We are simply looking on

the bright side and searching for the silver linings, as we

are designed to do.

No matter the evolutionary source, humans do seem to

have a capacity for resilience. So go ahead, put on a

happy face in 2009.

·           Video - Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees 

·           Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind 

·           All About Evolution 

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