Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • October 28, 2009 10:11 AM

The evolutionary argument I liked was why women can communicate better than men ;)

It goes something like this,

Men as hunters did not need to communicate via anything other than simple signs and vocal communications would alert prey to the danger.

Women being gatheres over large distances would need to be able more complex information about the location of resources to other women so that they could spread out efficiently to gather resources. But importantly they did not have a need for being quite...

The reason I like it is it is so simple it sounds like it must be true... But of course nothing in human evolution is simple ;)

The other argument about women and communication is the need for secrecy and decit,

In larger outposts of civalisation sharing becomes less advantageous to a person who gathers, simply because nature tends to spread the ripening of fruit seeds and nuts etc over a period of time.

There for if you know of a good location for nuts it is in your immediatly family interst not to let other families know but gather as much as you can without revealing the location to them.

Clive Robinson • October 28, 2009 11:52 AM

@ anonanona,

"Interesting. I suppose you mean clan or tribe rather than family."

Hmm it depends on your meaning of the words.

What I was getting at where close genetic relations -v- distant or non genetic relations in an area where people live.

A family is usually comprised of those at most three genetic steps away.

A tribe upto four or five genetic steps.

And a clan can be many genetic steps but with common acestry.

However a village or town can be comprised of geneticaly non related but co-operating people. The degree of co-operation depends on many things but the size of the setlment and the individuals interaction/standing within the community.

At some point co-operation turns into trade and thus into a market and market control.

Thus if you have a secret store of nuts the mear fact that is unknown to others increases their trade value.

Thus protecting the location of the source by secrecy becomes a guenuine advantage.

Clive Robinson • October 28, 2009 12:05 PM

One thing that is noticable is the lack of papers about left-v-right brain behavioural types.

It is very noticable that engineers have a significant contigent of left handed people and tends to atract people with high functioning autisum. One charecteristic of which is their ability to live inside their own heads and strangely be better able to see risk in any given senario.

Whilst senior execs in large organisations and politicos tend to be strongly right handed, having a need to live in the heads of others (networking) and distinct psycopathic traits.

Invariably they are poor at recognising risk and develop stratagies to off load or off set it onto others.

The rest of the human race tends to fall between the two.

What is noticable is that many many (virtualy all) studies of the brain tend to exclude left handed people.

I once asked an aquaintance who worked in the field why this was at a social event. The response was,

"The trouble with you lefties is your brains are not wired up right".

Clive Robinson • October 28, 2009 2:15 PM

@ Bryan Feir,

"I find it interesting that your comment is different from the 'conventional wisdom' I'd heard, which was that left-handed/right-brained people tended to be artists and creative types, and right-handed/left-brained people tended to be logical thinkers."

The first bit is bourn out in practice in that engineers and architects and others who design have a very high degree of left-handedness in their number in some places the inverse of that found in the general population.

However the argument about right-handedness and logical thought is not bourn out in practice, engineers and such are usually better at non verbal logic and reasoning than most others.

Which brings us onto,

"As I understand it, this is primarily due to the language facilities being on the left side of the brain, especially if you follow Dr. Michael Persinger's theory of consciousness being formed by the serialization of the brain's parallel operations through the language center."

Which is correct but you may be drawing the wrong conclusion from it.

Right handed people tend to think in words, which can make them "apear logical" in verbal or written argument based on the use of language.

However this does not make them logical in other senses of the word.

Think about how many "castle in the air" arguments the legal proffesion and politicians come up with that have no substance outside of the own brand of reasoning.

That is, their argument is about chasing the verbal squirles around in your head untill you accept their view point. In most cases the argument is highly selective and without real or suportable substance. As George Orwell made comment, it is aimed to have the same effect as spinning you around hence "spin".

Thus my comment about them living inside of other peoples heads.

You will see a number of politicaly orientated execs eapecialy in bueracratic organisations that spend most of their time running around "networking" what the are actually doing is re-enforcing the perception they wish to create in other peoples heads.

Invariably the actually achieve little and move on before any choices they have had to make actually achive anything good or bad.

They will then claim it as their good ground work if it succeds and blaim their successors if it fails.

And I'm sure most readers could come up with a list of people that they have had the misfortune to come into contact with that fit the above outline.

Clive Robinson • October 28, 2009 3:01 PM

@ Shane,

"I'm curious to know what gives you such amazing insight into the reasoning and methodologies of prehistoric humans?"

I could say economics being retrospectivly applied.

However it was pointed out to me in the late 80s by somebody in that field of research along with the fact that in reality humans have not realy evolved in certain respects for milenia and that similar traits where found in tribal communities that had had little or no contact with modern man.

Speaking of off the wall ideas anyone remember the "Naked Ape" and it's author the zoologist "Desmond J. Morris". I went to one of his lectures and he made an interesting point for people to think about.

"Meat eating is social" "vegitation eating is asocial"

He said that if you looked at people walking down the street you would much more frequently see groups of people eating "burgers, kebabs" and other meat based foods. However you rarely see groups of people walking around eating fruit.

He indicated that this may be due to the hunter group and kill feast becoming a social norm, where as eating whilst gathering was essentialy an individual activity not a social activity.

It makes for interesting thinking but I would advise against taking it to the point of saying "vegitarians are anti social" as there is as he pointed out no evidence for this with cooked fruit and vegtables.

Clive Robinson • October 28, 2009 3:26 PM

@ Shane,

"In short, the left-brain-right-brain discussion amounts to mainly bullshit. Perhaps some 'interesting' statistical distributions, but its ability to describe humanity or categorize us has no more relevance than the color of their eyes might."

We actualy don't know if it is "bullshit" or not.

What we do know is that when carrying out experiments on human brain function left handed people are in the main quite deliberatly avoided or specificaly excluded.

Hence the comment,

"The trouble with you lefties is your brains are not wired up right"

When I asked somebody I know quite well who is involved with this sort of research why left handed people are excluded from such research. The truth behind the pun is that the few experiments under FMRI etc has shown major differences in brain activity between left and right handed people.

So yes there is a lot of "'interesting' statistical distributions" but no research as to why.

So we do not know if your "bullshit" viewpoint is valid or not from any meaningfull perspective.

With regards education and forcing right handedness on children. This was done to my father who was strongly left handed. The chosen method was to hit him across the knuckles of his left hand with a "yard rule" every time he used his left hand. The result was that the injuries left him with lasting physical trauma that gave rise to early onset arthritus in his left hand.

And the reason for this, well left handed people are considered "sinister", "gauch" and "cack handed" and even evil.

Both sinister and gauch mean left, and your "cack hand" that you cleaned your bottom with was the left hand as the majority of people had less use of it and thus did not use it for eating.

Clive Robinson • October 29, 2009 4:52 AM

@ Moderator,

My apologies for being the root cause of the diversion, it was not intended to be away from the subject but to more underlying issues.

My original intent was to highlight that the need for security is inherant in human beings, due to a need for secrecy to gain competative advantage, whilst still still being co-operative within a habitation beyond a close genetic size.

Further that the history of the arguments that have sofar been offered (in those areas of science that have offered them,) although simplisticaly appealing are either not proven or not correct.

As has been noted in the past the exceptions to rules (hypothoses) generaly moves human understanding forward.

Two such exceptions I have been told about are the Kalhari Bushmen and the Australian Aborigines. For differing reasons they did not have a need for secrecy in the way we do in our western society.

What is becoming clear that as much as mankind attempts to shape nature, nature also shapes mankind.

There are distinct differences in such things as eye sight, ability to control body temprature, tolerance to alcohol, shape of bones and many other examples that show that different human cultures are evolving seperatly in response to their environment.

It would be unreasonable to expect that where there is evidence of physical evolution to the environment in less than 10,000 years, that there has not been consiquent changes in the structure of the brain in response to the environment.

In fact there is a growing body of evidence that sugests that even the language spoken has evolutionary effects on humans (for instance pitch perfect ratios with language).

Therefore it might be that other factors in society are likewise causing definate evolution in humans. For instance ratios of alcohol tolerance in the population, and more importantly the birth rate changes as a geo-political area moves from agrarian to industrial.

Not just in that the birth rate usually drops, but also the age at which women chose to give birth goes up. This would be expected to change a population by natural selection, favouring those women capable of giving birth to health children over the age of 35, over those who cannot.

Therefore it might be the case that the "fear of terror" if it persists over as little as two or three generations might have a lasting evolutionary effect on a population.

On another note we are already seeing some employers specificaly looking for certain personality traits/types. More recently we have seen companies activly seeking those in the Autistic Spectrum Disorder (asperbergers/dislexia/ADHD).

Why because they have certain desirable traits with regards amongst other things "savant" abilities.

It is known that in engineering and some sciences people with ASD do better than others but often fail hopelessly when they move into managment. Further that the children of engineers are more likely (by about 1/8) to have ASD than children of those in other proffesions.

As Bruce has noted being able to tell "hinky" is a definate advantage in security. Will our current changes in society cause us to evolve where detecting "hinky" becomes less rare?