Basic Instincts: Life on Two, Four, Six and Eight Legs

July 2, 2007, 7:16 pm

Facial Discrimination

By Richard Conniff

It’s usually women who complain about being judged on appearance instead of accomplishments, but pity poor Mitt Romney, a man who apparently suffers from looking too good. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said Romney “has the perfect chin, the perfect hair.” The cover of Time magazine said: “Sure, he looks like a president” but . . . And on “60 Minutes,” Mike Wallace kidded him for being “matinee Mitt.”

And thus facial — not racial — stereotyping reared its ugly head in the 2008 presidential election.

We almost never talk out loud about physiognomy, the bogus science of judging character on the basis of facial features. But we all do it. We like or dislike people, hire and sometimes fire them, steer them onto the fast track or nudge them into the oubliette based in part on facial prejudices of which we are scarcely even aware.

Research on facial stereotyping suggests, for instance, that — kidding from envious journalists aside — Mr. Romney stands a better chance in the G.O.P. presidential primaries because he has the look of a mature leader, with that high forehead towering over deep-set eyes and a strong (O.K., perfect) chin. And John Edwards may be at a disadvantage among Democrats because those chubby cheeks make him look just a little too boyishly winsome.

We make these kinds of unconscious judgments because our biology has prepared us to connect certain facial expressions with specific emotions. And then we over-generalize: Because the lips swell during sexual excitement, for instance, we act as if full-lipped people constantly flutter on the cusp of passion (think of President William Clinton). And thin-lipped people wear out their mattresses only by leaning on them during bedtime prayers (think of President George H.W. Bush).

Similarly, we have evolved as mammals to coo over a baby face. It’s how nature tricks us into taking care of our offspring. When baby-faced features carry over into adulthood, our innate response carries over, too. So Mr. Edwards may well inspire more warmth and trust than someone with a severe brow.

But will that help get him elected?

It may merely make him easier to forgive when he goes wrong. In one study tracking more than 500 cases of intentional wrongdoing in Boston small-claims court, judgments went against mature-faced defendants 92 percent of the time, but against baby-faced defendants only 45 percent of the time. The perception, says Brandeis University psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz, is that “baby-faced people are too honest and naïve to have a high probability of committing a premeditated offense.”

When it comes to choosing leaders, on the other hand, we often opt for people who look the part. For instance, another study categorized graduates in the West Point class of 1950 according to whether their faces looked dominant or submissive. Predictably, the top rank of general overwhelmingly went to people who fit the “tough warrior” stereotype. The people making such promotions apparently treated this facial type as a reliable indicator of the ability to command. And maybe there was method in their madness: Being sent off to war by a leader who looks like Howdy Doody might well be demoralizing.

Businesses still often act as if the stereotypical markings of executive style are a prerequisite for promotion. At a veterinary medicine company not long ago, a vice president got hired in part because he had, no kidding, “managerial eyebrows.”

Apart from the tendency to lead us into utterly superficial snap judgments, there is a darker side to facial stereotyping. Ugly people get overlooked. (They “develop complexes due to the humiliation and abuse they endure over the years,” one executive told me, to justify not hiring them.) Meanwhile handsome people often enjoy the unfair advantage of the “attractiveness halo.”

And one prejudice may shade into another. Abercrombie & Fitch paid $40 million a few years ago to settle a lawsuit alleging that it staffed its stores with hip, attractive young people — who happened disproportionately to be white.

“Looking the part” for leadership also frequently means looking male. People seem to prefer masculine-looking leaders even, weirdly, when all the potential candidates are women. In one study, test subjects considered only female candidates for a leadership position. But they gave their top rating to the candidate with a biologically masculine face and a masculine style of dress.

Being aware of our facial stereotypes is a way to avoid being victimized by them. A feminine-looking candidate can improve her chances by switching to a masculine style of dress — a lesson Hillary Clinton has plainly taken to heart. Changing behavior or facial expression can also help a candidate escape a facial stereotype. Smiling, for instance, might take the edge off Mr. Romney’s “too handsome” problem, or Rudy Giuliani’s prosecutorial scowl. Mr. Edwards, on the other hand, might want to smile a bit less.

None of this is likely to determine the outcome of this presidential election. Looking handsome and mature didn’t help another Massachusetts candidate in the last one. But it suggests a useful strategy if you want to get past your own superficial judgments during the next big presidential debate:

Just close your eyes and listen to what they say.

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Basic Instincts: Life on Two, Four, Six and Eight Legs

June 27, 2007, 6:27 pm

Nested Tug-of-Wars

By Richard Conniff

The other day in an interview in The New York Times Magazine, Al Gore’s daughter Kristin revealed that when she was a child, she couldn’t stand to think about wrists. All those veins and tendons. Probably didn’t like to gnaw chicken bones either. Too squeamish.

And when her sisters found out, did they promptly don four-button gloves out of sympathy and respect, to spare their delicate sister the dreadful sight? On the contrary, they waved the naked veiny insides of their wrists in her face. The horror, the horror.

But this is what siblings do, isn’t it?

The strange nature of the sibling relationship has been in the news a lot lately. A study last week, for instance, demonstrated that first-born children, those conscientious overachievers, really do turn out smarter than second-borns, and this predictably stirred up lots of preening and muttering, respectively.

But the sibling news that really caught my attention had to do with the origins of altruism, and also its seeming opposite, our tendency to band together in groups and gleefully crush the enemy — the best and worst in human nature. And the explanation put forward last month — “nested tug-of-war” theory — sounded a lot like family life as we know it.

O.K., there’s a caveat: Like a lot of the best behavioral theorizing, the paper by H. Kern Reeve at Cornell and Bert Hölldobler at Arizona State University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was actually about ant siblings, not people. But we can read between the lines.

The paper suggested that the dynamic of groups is a constant back-and-forth between one tug-of-war nested inside another. The first tug-of-war is selfish competition for resources within the group. The second is the group’s competition with rival groups. And here’s the startling part: Self-sacrificing devotion to the group, meaning cooperation and altruism, is largely a byproduct of kill-the-enemy competition.

An old Arab saying puts roughly the same idea in a family context: Me against my brother; my brother and me against our cousins; our cousins, my brother and me against the world. But anybody who grew up with siblings knows the feeling. Karenna and Sarah Gore might well have flashed their wrists at sister Kristin. But if some non-family member tried it … well, closing ranks against outsiders is also what siblings do.

Scientists have been trying to explain the origin of altruism and cooperative behavior for decades now, on the theory that the urge to give away resources and individual advantage would never have become part of human nature unless it provided a benefit to individuals displaying the trait.

But none of the familiar scientific explanations has really hit the mark: For instance, reciprocal altruism says we do it out of I’ll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine self-interest. (But then why do we leave a fat tip in a restaurant we never intend to re-visit?) Kin selection says we help close relatives because it’s a vicarious way to get more of our shared gene pool into future generations. (So why do we also help total strangers?) And handicap theory says altruism is just a big gaudy show of prowess, to attract mates. (Yes, but then why do some donors remain anonymous?)

The new theory got its start when two celebrated co-authors, Hölldobler and the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for their 1990 book “The Ants,” couldn’t get past the altruism question while collaborating on a new book. The two of them published a paper together in 2005 wondering aloud if natural selection might actually operate at the group level, favoring colonies or tribes that muster the highest level of internal cooperation and altruism.

This was, by Wilson’s own admission, heresy. Evolutionary biologists have been arguing adamantly for the past 40 years that the rough-and-tumble of life favors individuals, not groups, to pass on their genes to future generations. But individual selection didn’t adequately explain the behavior of highly social and cooperative species like humans or especially ants, where individuals may willingly give up their own reproductive future, or even their lives, for the good of the group.

According to Hölldobler, the “nested tug-of-war” idea got its start when he and Reeve were thinking about certain primitive ant species that don’t fit the selfless ant stereotype. They live in small colonies, and individual selection is still very much in play. Nobody gives up reproductive rights for the good of the group. They also communicate poorly and disagree about who does the chores. (Sound familiar?)

So how did other ant species evolve from this chaotic start to the point that millions of selfless individuals in a colony can live together in almost perfect harmony? Wilson emphasizes group selection. Reeve and Hölldobler argue that it’s still about individual selection and kin selection. But the group gradually became more important because of ecological pressure, in the form of patchy resources and fierce competition from rival colonies. And the tug-of-war for individual advantage within the group gave way to cooperative behaviors as the tug-of-war for advantage against rival groups became more pressing.

So let’s say this is true of people, too. The disturbing implication of the “nested tug-of-war” idea is that altruism is a byproduct of enmity: It’s easier to give up what we want, to sacrifice for a sister or a cousin, if we feel threatened by some outside group. And a long evolutionary history of living with that sort of threat is also why we still slip so easily into rivalries against other high schools, or political parties, or ethnic groups.

Knowing this “doesn’t justify anything,” says Hölldobler. “But if children understand that there is this trait, and it was adaptive in the past, but it’s not very adaptive now,” they can work around the impulse to engage in pointless group rivalries and cultivate altruism in less antagonistic contexts. On the other hand, he admits, we might not enjoy football games as much.

Or political campaigns. In the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, according to Kristin Gore in The Times Magazine interview, Republicans bussed in protesters to stand outside the vice presidential mansion and scream, “Get out of Cheney’s house.” The Gore family apparently managed to refrain from “turning up the stereo to drown out the chants,” Noriega-fashion. But being under siege by the rival group no doubt re-kindled the family’s sense of unity and muted any hint of a tug-of-war within.

Call me a romantic, but I like to imagine the three sisters getting up together and going to the windows to brandish their delicate wrists, causing the horrified barbarians outside to flee in howling panic back under the rocks from which they had apparently crawled.

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Basic Instincts: Life on Two, Four, Six and Eight Legs

Bending the Knee

By Richard Conniff

June 25, 2007, 6:19 pm

Sometime this week, a jury in Chicago will begin to deliberate on charges that the domineering and flamboyant Canadian businessman Conrad Black looted $60 million from shareholders of Hollinger International, the newspaper company he once led.

Mr. Black’s lawyers wisely kept him off the stand. But his longtime partner F. David Radler testified as a prosecution witness and, for me, the high point of the trial came when he tried to parse the delicate question of whether he’d been Mr. Black’s right-hand man or . . . “I don’t think I’m anyone’s flunky,” Mr. Radler declared, “but that doesn’t mean that someone wouldn’t call me that.” Spectators in the courtroom laughed.

So were they laughing at him, or with him?

We generally don’t like to admit to our lackey past, especially not when our former gods lie in disgrace. But the truth about working life is that most of us, at one time or another, have skirted along the ignoble edges of flunkydom. In a previous column, I suggested that we don’t like to talk about hierarchy. But we really, really don’t like to talk about what it means to be a lieutenant, a consigliere, or even just a plain, dutiful subordinate.

And yet it’s a role we need to understand better, if only to avoid the sort of mess Mr. Radler and Mr. Black now face. The challenge is how to serve power without being servile. Henry Kissinger (who was a director at Hollinger) once called power the great aphrodisiac. The British newspaper columnist Barbara Amiel (also a former director at Hollinger, and sometimes known as Mrs. Black) put it with considerably more gusto: “Power is sexy, not simply in its own right, but because it inspires self-confidence in its owner and a shiver of subservience on the part of those who approach it.”

Ah, the shiver of subservience. It’s what you see, for instance, when an obsequious chimpanzee pays homage to his alpha by pant-grunting, a sort of rapid, Kissingeresque, oh-oh-oh murmur of obeisance, while at the same time repeatedly bowing and scraping. “The dominant chimpanzee reacts to this ‘greeting’ by stretching himself up to a greater height and making his hair stand on end,” the primatologist Frans de Waal writes. “The one almost grovels in the dust, the other regally receives the ‘greeting.’”

You might expect humans to be above that sort of thing. But we’re just subtler about our displays of obeisance. People entering the presence of a powerful individual often stoop slightly and lower their heads. They may not bob, but they find frequent opportunity to nod. They smile more, to indicate cooperation and agreement. And if they feel anger, they often literally bite their lips to avoid displaying it. They are quick, on the other hand, to show embarrassment or shame. (And I think that just about covers how the board of directors at Hollinger handled their oversight duties, with the possible exception of that bit about shame.)

With a difficult boss, deference can be a form of survival behavior. In one intriguing experiment in the early 1980s, researchers from the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine isolated dominant male vervet monkeys so they could see their subordinates through a one-way mirror and make their customary threats and other displays.

But the subordinates couldn’t see back and thus were unable to respond with the obligatory signs of deference. This presumably infuriated the alphas, and over the 16 days of the experiment, their serotonin levels dropped by 40 percent. And this sort of thing evidently matters: Keeping up the serotonin levels of dominant individuals helps boost their confidence and discourage destructive aggression.

So kowtowing is a way of keeping the peace.

The trouble with this dynamic is that human subordinates don’t just boost the boss’s confidence. They also need to steer it and modulate it. Powerful bosses often disregard contradictory evidence; they tend to set goals and run roughshod over anything or anyone that gets in the way. So subordinates, who usually see the dangers more clearly, sometimes have the delicate task of restraining the boss from acting too rashly.

Smart bosses recognize this and cultivate people who will be frank with them. Or if nobody has the nerve, they make the downside an explicit part of any conversation: “O.K., let’s talk about what could go wrong here.” Thus a David Radler might have his moment to say, “Gee, Conrad, the money sounds good to me, too. But what if a prosecutor got this crazy idea that we were stealing from our shareholders?”

Unfortunately, a lot of bosses aren’t that smart. When they run companies, they stuff their boards with pals and patsies who will let them have their way. They bully critics into submission. (”Mr. Black begins many conversations by threatening everybody,” an adversary once remarked.) They arm themselves with all the intimidating ornaments of rank and power. At the trial, his lawyers spoke of “Conrad,” as if he were just a country boy who never renounced his Canadian citizenship to become the nouveau aristocrat, Baron Black of Crossharbour. But you have to wonder: Was Mr. Radler obliged to address his old partner as “My Lord”?

Other bosses also routinely rely on the aura of power to induce the shiver of subservience. In the 2004 election, President George W. Bush boasted happily that critics liked to rehearse their grievances outside his door, but once inside the Oval Office, “they are so overwhelmed they can say only, ‘You’re looking good, Mr. President.’” Hence Mr. Bush has ended up with subordinates who say things like “slam dunk” when they really mean “not a shred of evidence.”

There are plenty of ways to institutionalize open, honest discussion. But in the end, it always seems to come down the willingness of a subordinate to shake off the illusory attractions of power and speak plainly.

Not long ago, an executive assistant went to work for the C.E.O. at a California company. A few weeks into the job, the C.E.O. burst out of his office and started to scream at her. After a stunned moment, she followed him back into his office and closed the door. Then, sweetly and with a note of disappointment, she said, ‘You must never, never, never talk to me like that again, because it’s just not possible for us to work together like that.’”

The C.E.O. was shocked because no one had dared to confront him before. But he has not talked to her that way since.

Not many subordinates can muster that blend of deference and backbone. They worry too much being cut loose from a good job or a glamorous boss. But to David Radler, whose plea bargain will soon have him practicing his displays of submission in prison, that might not seem like such a terrible thing.

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Basic Instincts: Behavior on Two, Four, Six, and Eight Legs

June 18, 2007, 6:16 pm

Egalitarian Tall Tales

By Richard Conniff

A few weeks back a puff piece in a New Zealand newspaper extolled a trucking company that “has fostered an egalitarian culture … and does not believe in hierarchy, bureaucracy or superiority.” The same article also noted that company headquarters features this saying in bold text on a lobby wall: “The man on top of the mountain didn’t fall there.”

Are you sensing a mixed message here about the egalitarian ideal? (But, wait, maybe you’d better check with the boss before you get back to me on that.)

Modern companies often claim to embrace the egalitarian and disdain hierarchy. They like to boast that they have no reserved parking spaces, no executive dining rooms, everyone working together on a first-name basis and modest cubicles for all employees — even C.E.O.s like Meg at eBay, and John at Cisco. No hierarchies here, thanks, not us.

And I think they are fibbing.

In every human organization to which I have ever belonged, I’ve always known precisely where I stood in the hierarchy. And I bet the folks who work for Ms. Whitman and Mr. Chambers do, too. I’ve come to believe that our instinct for hierarchy isn’t merely an inevitable human condition. If we could just stop pretending that hierarchies don’t exist, we might even see that they can actually be beneficial.

A long line of academic thinking says the opposite: that hierarchy is a modern imposition on free-spirited, brother- and sisterly human nature. The traditional tribes to which we belonged through almost all of human history were fiercely egalitarian, according to anthropologists.
But the academics go wrong, I think, on several counts.

They mistakenly treat egalitarian gestures, like sharing food, as the mark of egalitarian societies. But these gestures often tend in the opposite direction; they are the means by which shrewd leaders consolidate power. I suspect that anthropologists also often fail to recognize hierarchies because hierarchies tend to be invisible. The etiquette is so subtle that even insiders conform to it without being fully conscious of it.

For instance, when primatologist Terry Maple got his first teaching job at a Georgia university, he thought tenured faculty would be free from tiresome hierarchical behaviors. (Go figure.) Then he arrived early for his first department meeting and found a seat in the third row. Another faculty member soon came in and stood impatiently at the end of the aisle.

“Well, what’s going on, Tom?” said Maple.

And Tom said, “You’re sitting in my seat.”

Maple got up and moved one seat over, and Tom said, “Now you’re sitting in Professor Smith’s seat.”

Having been trained to study behavior, Maple took notes in subsequent meetings and documented a rigid seating order, with proximity to the chairman reflecting relative power, even when the meetings moved to a new room. It was an invisible hierarchy.

We seem to have evolved to deny the existence of such hierarchies even as we subscribe to them with all our hearts. At one California company, for instance, subordinates — sorry, associates — stand outside the CE.O..s office and air-knock to get his attention, rather than brazenly rapping on the glass door. They think they’re just being polite. But it’s what any animal-watcher would call submissive approach behavior.

So how could this sort of thing possibly be beneficial? Aren’t the perquisites of hierarchy, like a bigger office or a better title, the cause of endless workplace bickering and politics?

On the contrary, a relatively settled hierarchy actually means less bickering, not more. Fighting is five times more likely to occur in chimp groups, for instance, when rank is uncertain. Roughly the same thing happens in corporations after a merger. But once a hierarchy gets established, ambitious subordinates (of either the simian or human variety) seldom mount an overt challenge, because it’s just too risky.

Having a strong leader who’s willing to act decisively can also make a group more effective at coordinating action toward some clearly stated goal. We may not like to be reminded of the hierarchy too openly. But we also find comfort, safety, and purpose within its boundaries.

Acknowledging this makes a lot more sense than the make-believe strategy of pretending hierarchy doesn’t exist. It becomes possible to talk about when the hierarchy isn’t working — when it’s slowing things down too much, or when the style of leadership is just too nice, or too brutal, for the task at hand.

Reminding yourself to pay attention to small acts of hierarchy can also help you understand how and why decisions get made: Who speaks first after the boss and does he sound a bit like an echo? Who plays hockey with the C.E.O. on Saturday mornings? Where does a subordinate glance in search of support when mounting a challenge? These subtle signals matter more than anybody likes to admit. At one company in Connecticut, where management likes to boast about its deeply egalitarian culture, all employees have email addresses on the lines of JaneDoe@widget.com.

But the founder’s email is IAMME@widget.com.

So here’s the tricky question: What do you do when a boss like that starts to boast that his company has no hierarchy?

Well, you could start up a good conversation by saying, “I don’t know, sometimes hierarchy isn’t such a bad thing.”

But if you’re like most of us, the odds are you’ll just smile deferentially and say, “No hierarchy? Oh, that’s so wonderful. Was that your idea?”

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Basic Instincts: Behavior on Two, Four, Six and Eight Legs

By Richard Conniff

June 13, 2007, 5:38 pm

Don’t Buy Local!

A lot of people have begun to lose their appetite lately at the thought that their food travels, on average, 1,500 miles from farmer to dinner plate. Buying, instead, from local farmers looks increasingly appealing: We get fresher produce (and benediction from Alice Waters), while also preserving open space and protecting local jobs.

But what’s really lifted the “buy local” movement out of the foodie realm and into general public awareness is fear of climate change: It suddenly seems dangerously profligate that we spend 36 calories of fossil fuel energy transporting one calorie of California lettuce to a consumer in New York. Likewise that apples in a New England supermarket come from New Zealand, or potatoes in Ireland from Cyprus, or flowers in the Netherlands from Kenya. Carrying carbon to Newcastle seems to be among the chief functions of modern international trade.

So my first reaction was to think that buying local makes a lot of sense. And if it’s true for food, what about the pots we cook that food in, or the furniture we sit on, or the cars we drive to the supermarket? When does “Buy American” morph from jingoism to progressivism?

And yet buying local may not be the simple answer we’re looking for. For starters, it’s more likely to hurt American farmers than help them. Agriculture is one area where the United States still enjoys a trade surplus, amounting to $5.66 billion last year. But the “buy local” movement is strongest in Europe, where it got its start, and American agricultural products feature prominently among the targets.

The “local” label also says little or nothing about a product’s actual environmental friendliness. A resident of Sacramento, for instance, can take comfort in buying “local” rice, but it’s still likely to be rice grown in a heavily irrigated desert, at huge environmental cost. In the overall carbon footprint of a product, the cost of transport often turns out to be relatively trivial. For instance, a New Zealand study recently made the case that better conditions make lamb grown there and shipped to Europe four times more energy-efficient than home-grown European lamb.

The opposite is true for products that must be air-freighted, like flowers and certain fresh seafood; good sushi probably comes with a huge carbon footprint. But sea freight can be surprisingly efficient, even for heavy manufactured goods. I asked an environmental group, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, to calculate the cost of getting an average car from Tokyo to San Diego, and we were all surprised that it came to between 1,000 and 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. That’s close to what the same car will typically produce every month for the rest of its driving life.

But how do you factor a product’s total carbon footprint into the debate over international trade? For instance, would it make sense to impose a carbon tax at our borders, so countries that fail to control their global warming emissions, like China and India, don’t get an unfair competitive advantage over countries that take global warming seriously? Great idea. Kyoto-signatory nations in Europe are already talking about taking that kind of stand–against the United States.

Or maybe we could piggyback on cap-and-trade systems like the one already functioning in Europe. These systems impose mandatory overall limits on global warming emissions within a nation or region, but allow businesses that do better at meeting targets to sell carbon credits to businesses that do worse. To enter a market with a cap-and-trade system, an importer would have to compensate for a product with a big carbon footprint by adding the cost of carbon credits into the price. Such a system would catch countries or individual manufacturers that refuse to act on global warming (again possibly including the United States).

But either the carbon tax or the credit system is likely to lead to years of litigation through the World Trade Organization, according to Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. That’s because the subtext in both approaches is confrontational and protectionist. Avoiding the us-and-them mindset and seeking collaborative solutions makes far more sense when scientists increasingly suggest that all of us together could soon be up to our knees in the rising consequences of global warming.

So where does all this leave the individual shopper trying to make good choices? Tesco, Britain’s largest retailer, is now working to put a “carbon label” on every product it sells. Instead of the comfortable illusion of environmentalism provided by the “buy local” idea, this label will detail the actual global warming cost of a product. And that will probably show that it makes sense to buy that compact fluorescent lightbulb, even if it was made in China. And, yes, the climate will probably be better off if you buy a Prius manufactured in Japan, not a Cadillac Escalade made in the United States.

Beneath the surface, the urge to buy local is often just a disguised version of the urge to punish someone foreign. But as a way to fix global warming, fretting about where your salad was grown is like thinking you can win a war by calling your sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.”

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BASIC INSTINCTS: behavior on two, four, six and eight legs

By Richard Conniff

June 5, 2007, 5:23 pm

More Useless Knowledge

When army ants are sweeping across the forest on one of their massive predatory raids, potholes tend to slow them down. And just the other day, British researchers revealed how these hard-charging creatures deal with the impediment: Individual ants fling themselves down and bridge the potholes with their bodies. In fact, the volunteers seem to size-match themselves to the holes they choose to plug. And when the army has tramped across their backs, they get up, dust themselves off, and head home to join the communal feast.

In other useless news, a researcher at the University of South Florida reports that the fastest tongue on Earth belongs to a giant palm salamander from Central America. The salamander fires its tongue like an arrow, using energy stored by stretching elastic fibers in its mouth. This is bad news for nearby insects.

But it’s wonderful news to me. Over the course of this month, I’m writing a series of columns about the quirky nature of behavior in both the human and animal worlds, and from time to time you will notice that the two worlds have a way of overlapping for me. The topics will range from my own hapless feelings of un-schadenfreude (see the first column in the series, which ran on Monday) to the idea of buying local as a remedy for global warming. The series is called “Basic Instincts” because I believe that what we think of as our highest human behaviors are often deeply rooted in animal biology.

I didn’t have any such idea in mind when I first started writing about behavior years ago. To be honest, I was just having fun. It seemed to me delightful to live in a world where, for instance, certain beetles have evolved to do handstands on the dunes of the Namib Desert, using their backs to catch and collect the precious mist drifting in off the Atlantic. (They actually have grooves on their backs to guide the water down to their mouths.)

The human beings who study such things often proved entertaining, too. I once spent time in the field with a brilliant researcher whose methods occasionally included humming to a spider (some spiders recognize their prey by sound). He also tended to pick up spiders with his fingers, commenting, for instance, that “when squeezed gently on the abdomen” one such spider “produced a strong, somewhat disagreeable odor reminiscent of … lampyrid beetles and canned string beans.”

I can’t quite place the smell. But I came to love the arcane details of animal behavior in part because they often seemed so splendidly useless. And useless knowledge is a precious thing. As a character in Tom Stoppard’s play “The Invention of Love” puts it, knowledge does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true.” The character (based on the poet A.E. Housman) concedes that useful knowledge is fine, too, “but it’s for the fainthearted.”

Well, O.K., I sometimes also feel fainthearted. So I should add that useless knowledge often has an insidious way of leading people in useful directions. Charles Darwin, for instance, wasn’t looking for anything in particular when he collected finches in the Galapagos; it was years before it dawned on him that they were the key to understanding evolution by natural selection. And in recent decades, it’s been hard to miss how useless knowledge about the behavior of animals has begun to provide surprisingly useful insights into the behavior of human beings.

Not so long ago, science treated the two worlds as largely separate. Anthropomorphism — attributing human thoughts and feelings to animals — was a cardinal sin. This taboo was “anthropodenial,” according to the primatologist Frans de Waal, a way of preserving the special status of Homo sapiens. Over the past few decades, though, scientists have haltingly come to acknowledge that animals often respond to the world much as we do, and that we behave in many ways much like animals. Our behaviors aren’t separate. They’re just different points along a continuum.

And that realization has helped encourage what I think of as zoomorphism, the practice of using animal behaviors to explain what makes humans tick. A few years ago, for instance, researchers discovered that macaque monkeys have special neurons in their brains enabling one individual to mirror the actions of other monkeys. Useless knowledge. But scientists soon found that humans have mirror neurons, too, and they appear to be a key to understanding behaviors like empathy, emotional contagion and autism.

It can seem unsettling at first when distinctly human behaviors turn out to have a common heritage with that of other animals. Maybe that’s because of the misguided impression that the lives of animals are exclusively nasty, brutish and short. But zoomorphism just as often leads in the opposite direction. For instance, Frans de Waal was once watching chimpanzees when he noticed two male combatants resolve their hostilities with an embrace. In the old days of anthropodenial, scientists would have dismissed that “a post-conflict interaction.” But de Waal said it was a reconciliation. It was the beginning of the recognition that the way humans speak and respond to a phrase like “I’m sorry” isn’t just a social nicety. It’s a part of our deep biological heritage.

When it comes to behavior, whether on two, four, six or eight legs, I still love useless knowledge. But I’m no longer sure any such thing exists.

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