TheMillerCircle.org

We are making great progress. Progress that is, in understanding the peculiar nature of the Republican brain. In general, humans, both Democrats and Republicans have very large brains and a very long period of adolescence to engage in prolonged learning tasks before the reproductive years come into play. If you try to calculate our brain size, by predicting what it should be, based on mammalians of similar size, you conclude that the human brain is about seven times larger than that of a similar-sized non-human. Other primates have large brains as well. If you look further into the parcellation of our brain, you realize that one of the largest areas of growth over our other mammalian representatives has been dedicated to the growth of the cerebral cortex, but more specifically to the frontal lobes of the brain, where everyone agrees, some of our most complex processes take place, such as long-term planning and analytical strategy.

There are many theories about the evolution of us and our brains, but one theory, that of social evolution is gaining some momentum from studies using fMRI as a method for further defining the roles that different brain regions play in our complex social and biological interactions. A study of great interest in this regard appeared in the New York Times Science section on the social behavior of hyenas. At first, it seems like this may be an irrelevant source of information on this topic, something of a joke. But, one theory of the evolution of our brain comes out of sociobiology. Adapting that point of view to brain evolution suggests that a large frontal lobe evolved and was relegated to the evolution of our complex social interactions, those that feed into our ability to live in a culture and adapt favorably to the survival of a clan, not just an individual.

The hyenas come into this story as a result of extensive studies of their social behavior, based on decades of work, following clans through generations. And, now hyena brain compartmentation has been invoked to account for hyena social behavior. There are four species of hyenas and they differ from one another based their physical differences, but also on the size of the clan to which they belong and the complex or simple social interactions of each species. Spotted hyenas have the largest clans and the most complex social interactions. A single spotted hyena clan may be as large as 60 to 80 members and each member of the clan recognizes the others as individuals. All social hyena species form a matriarchal structure, with a single “alpha female” as the head. Going down in clan size from the spotted hyenas, you have the brown hyenas with a clan of about 14, striped hyenas have a clan of only 3 and, at the bottom of this social scale you have the aardwolf, who have become primarily insect eaters, with a single pair forming the extent of the clan, living near a termite nest and defending their territory as a small family cluster.

Studies with fMRI have demonstrated interesting phenomena related to brain mechanisms of human social interactions. When studies were carried out to look for brain regions activated by questions about social interactions, the frontal lobe is an apparent source of activity. So the question asked by the hyena researchers was whether the social scale of hyena behavior had a correlate in brain structure. As it turns out, the brains of hyenas are quite large, though still dwarfed by our own. This study was complicated by the fact that hyena brains are hard to come by, but the skulls of different hyena species have been collected and there are well known image reconstruction methods that provide an approximation of different brain regions based on the skull formations and indentations related to the different brain compartments. So, based on this kind of reconstruction data, it appears that the frontal lobes of these four species of hyenas can be scaled in the same order as their social behavior, with the spotted hyenas at the top and the aardwolf at the bottom.

It seems at last, we are beginning to understand the brain structure of Republicans. For the low social brain structure of the Republicans, the type of person to whom Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman would have appeal, we find a brain devoid of major frontal lobe development, something akin to the aardwolf. To compensate for this deficiency, the Republican brain has hypertrophied the amygdala, which is the emotional center that generates strong fear responses in retaliation to threats or unexpected events. Thus the Republican brain responds to threats with emotionalism and seems incapable of engaging in any long-term strategy. The Democrat brain on the other hand has the highest level of frontal lobe development, as these Homo sapien subtypes rely on a successful clan structure and believe in it as the solution to an ever larger clan community. Concomitantly, the amygdala of the Democrat brain is not hypertrophied, as fear is not the first response of that type of brain. This is because the large frontol lobes allow the Democrat to ponder the threat or the event and make a strategy that is good for the whole clan, not just the aardwolves among us. As clarity on this issue will undoubtedly grow in the coming months and years, it is worth pondering where George W. Bush’s brain will fit on the frontal lobe scale of humanity?

Another triumph of American eclectic university life is reflected in the fact that the academics who have studied hyenas for decades are all members of Michigan State University. Now if that isn’t an elegant example of frontal lobe strategies reaching across the spectrum of biological diversity to find additional clues to George Bush’s behavior, I challenge all of you to come up with a better example. Over and out!