The Mediterranean octopus, my great-grandmother, and 20th century growth

Octopus Vulgaris

Octopuses are very smart. This is one of my recent favourite octopus documentaries. They have more dexterity with their tentacles than we do with our hands, they can solve quite complex puzzles, they have inter-octopus communication through skin colours, and they can learn very detailed things from mimicking and copying each other. They are curious, deliberate, spatially aware, and super fast learners. The docco follows a Spanish research group dedicated to the evaluation of the intelligence of the common octopus (octopus vulgaris), and the results presented are quite impressive. The documentary proposes that despite the phenomenal cosmic learning capacity and long life expectancy of the (male) octopus, they haven't made a species leap for one simple reason. They can't systematically pass knowledge to the next generation, because after protecting her first clutch of eggs, the mother always dies. So for all their mad skillz, the Mediterranean octopus must learn all about the world for himself, in each generation, by trial and error and imitation of other octopuses. There is no direct help from other octopuses because a male octopus - even a directly related one -  doesn't appear to have the capacity for empathy, ie a spontaneous negative neurochemical sensation when another feels pain, and a positive one when another feels pleasure. They also don't bond, they are drifting individuals who are skilled at mimicry. Their brains simply don't seem to get to the point of "I see you are frustrated trying to open that jar. Let me teach you how."
And female octopuses are expendable. Even human experimenters don't bother teaching female octopuses anything. They always die just before the hatching of the first clutch of eggs. If they live long enough to have a clutch, they have been biologically successful.

Here's an octopus opening a jar.

And a curious and dexterous wild octopus stealing a camera, and maybe trying to work it. See, they're smart. You wouldn't see a goat or a tiger or a cockroach doing this. A monkey, maybe. But not half as classily.

A fabulous book called Braintrust (R, you would really like this book), proposes a link between neurological structure, and community, morality and cooperation.
Patricia Churchland neatly argues that our ability to adapt to, and live in, a magnificent variety of societies adapted to the local geography and technology, is built upon the neurochemical pathways for:

1. Caring - for self, and for kin/mate/community as for yourself
2. Recognition of others' psychological states, and predicting how they will act. (Particularly handy for wolves hunting in packs, for example.  
3. Problem-solving in a social context, ie dynamic optimisation within constraints
4. Learning social practices, through explicit and implict teaching, plus imitation.

She then goes through the neurochemical pathways of each of these, from an evolutionary perspective, with reference to multiple other primate species, prairie voles, reptiles, and game theory. I am halfway through, and enthralled.
(I am also stoked to see some good quality tangible work along the lines that Sam Harris proposed in The Moral Landscape. Ie, that science ought to stick her nose into the moral space in order to explain and evaluate different moral structures in terms of individual/community wellbeing, measured by neurological function, social cohesion and aggregate welfare of the people in that structure, and thus evaluate different moral positions on some kind of yet-to-be-developed measurable axes. This would let us happily develop past an external singular morality (Holy Commandments) just like we have for law and order, models of illness and health, food and nutrition, and animal farming. He proposes that we need to accept that there are many different 'peaks' and 'valleys' in the moral landscape, and seek to map them.)

Anyway, with my human tendency to anthropomorphism, I was appalled at the sad fate of all those female octopuses.

And being a 21st century Western woman, I am acutely aware of all those generations of women before me (and all around me in the world today) whose lives resemble (relative to mine) female Octopus Vulgaris.

My great-grandmother and me

One of my great-grandmothers, Magdalena, was born to a reasonably well off landowning Polish family in 1881, and this section is about her. Okay, World Wars 1 and 2 messed up her world quite a lot, but her life story and selected medical history can tell you what she expected for herself in terms of reproductive health, general health, endurance of pain, and general and female-specific potential causes of death.

• She survived several bouts of childhood illness for which I am vaccinated. Other children in the town died.
• She always expected to spend her adult life mostly pregnant or nursing infants, and reasonably isolated from her husband's daytime activities.
• She had a private tutor because they were quite rich and her father was considered indulgent educating her. A tutor was quite rare for young women. 
• She spoke six languages fluently but never learned to read any of them. (Her brothers had scholarly tutors too and they all were taught to read as children - she wasn't expected to need to.)
• She expected to have peasant maids for her whole life. They were to clean, fetch and carry, wash clothes, and care for her children in various capacities. Her task was expected to be to manage the household.
• She (and her contemporaries) understood that there was a real possibility of dying in pregnancy or childbirth, although she had a good live-in midwife and thought the likelihood was lower than for the peasant classes.
• She had about 13 pregnancies - we think - between 1903 and 1916, and did not expect them all to go to term. She also had an unknown number of miscarriages. There was one preterm stillbirth. She had one set of twins.
• She did not expect all her 12 live babies to survive childhood. She considered it extraordinary luck and good management that none died as infants during WW1, where their property was sporadically on the Eastern Front. Only one died in childhood, a girl, during WW2.
• By about 1960, she had a prolapsed uterus that would FALL OUT of her body and she would ask her daughter to PUT IT BACK IN PLEASE. It was so bad the Australian surgeons wouldn't operate.
• Forced labour in in Siberia had also left her with varicose veins like tree roots on both legs which she never had treated either.
• She had never took painkilling medication until the refugee hospital in Turkey in 1946. Not because of unavailability (except during the Wars), but because she would fill the prescription and save it for her family and household.
• She had tropical ulcers and parasites from 1948 onwards, which were never fully cured.
• She had learned hygiene and food preparation habits, and herbal medicine, from her own mother. She advised and treated herself, her family, the local peasants, other refugees, and others who knew to ask, with honey soaked bandages and nettle tea and chicken soup and a hundred other remedies.
• She died of pneumonia at age 95, half a world away in Australia.

My birthday was one hundred years and twelve days after Magdalena's.

• I was literate by the age of four. 
• I have had formal schooling, university education, and when I get organised I expect to do postgraduate study too. 
• I don't have a household servant. I pay a fortnightly cleaner, some fabulous childcare workers, and sometimes the local takeaway shops, to cover much of what a servant would have done. Electronic appliances do the rest. I do get caught out with three feral kids at 6PM and no help. Magda would have had help.
• I expect to spend most of my adult life working in what was until very recently clearly a man's job, with income and position based on my reputation and achievements and independent of my gender. 
• I am planning to have a long and illustrious career once my kids don't need so much from me.
• I expect to end up in charge of a number of men, and hopefully some women too. I will expect them to do what I instruct, regardless of me being female.
• I accept that pregnancy and infant nursing is a glitch in my career. I only resent this a little.
• I do not expect to have untreated gynecological issues. I expect mainstream medicine to be on top of female physiology by now.
• I have had 3 full term pregnancies. I expected to survive all of them. I required medical intervention after one of the births. It worked - I survived.
• I now expect to not have any more pregnancies. I have medical tools to control this.
• I expected all 3 children to survive birth. Now that they have, I expect all 3 to live to adulthood.
• I expect to put the same resources into educating our daughter and launching her into the world as for our sons.
• I expect painkiller, anaesthetic, antibiotics anytime I need them. I expect medical consultation and surgical treatment where it is warranted. 
• I do not expect to have to learn my own herbal medicine in order to treat myself or women and children around me because of some social priority structure or because medicine didn't know about female physiology.
• I can't speak of war, forced labour or refugee hospitals, but I would be more than indignant under such circumstances if resources are gender-prioritised, especially if it's away from me or women and children around me. That's my child-bonded brain flooded with oxytocin talking. (To be fair, Magda did mention that in DP and refugee camps after Siberia, women and children were medically and nutritionally well cared-for. In this point I suppose am contrasting with modern places like Somalia or Bangladesh.)
• I expect to drive cars and boats and operate machinery as I am licensed to. I do not expect to be confronted or questioned on a gender basis about this anymore. I expect to be able to obtain such licenses, tickets, certifications and access cards as I need for my job or my interests on the basis of being able to pass the criteria, not on the basis of gender.

Expecting a particular life drives social change

The general expectation of a woman consistently surviving childbirth, and having medical resources and attention when you need, changes individual and community expectations of life length, power and influence during her life, and the type of life she can lead. Because my community expects me to survive and contribute, it is worth educating me, paying me money for my exertions, fixing me up when I am sick, and indeed researching how womens' health actually works (because the Western medical 'typical' patient is male) in order to treat me effectively. So I feel entitled in a way my grandmother couldn't. She was further away on the octopus continuum. 

The 20th century was marked by periods of exponential economic growth (measured in GDP) in a great many countries. The following dotpoints are standard economic explanations.

• A proportion of this was technological: mechanisation, economies of (massive) scale, new industries like communications and aviation and 
• A proportion of this was medical: for example Malaria reduces a country's GDP by up to 5%. Put in clean fresh water and watch the community's GDP go up.
• A proportion is infrastructure-based, where trade (and GDP) grows following good roads and ships and telephone linkes.
• A proportion of this was the increase in size and complexity of service/support industries to production such as marketing, management consulting, finance and investment, litigation, insurance etc. These industries move around a comparatively very large amount of money for their tiny contribution to the flow of tangible goods. (cycling bidons and stress balls notwithstanding).
• A proportion of this is due to the new vast energy availability and consumption, in our use of power systems, transport, home and work electronics, and the digital revolution.
• A proportion of this is due to the increasing payment - and thus measurement - of previously unpaid womens' household or volunteer work, including childcare, nursing, social work, food processing, hospitality etc.
• A proportion of this is due to women starting to engage, and consume, in previously predominantly male activities, such as higher education, adventure sports, medical and dental treatment, travel, and all kinds of entertainment.

The elephant in the room has a long memory

Evolution is not fast. Women and men think and operate differently*. Gender equality and equivalency in antropology is a rich complex thing that I am not going to go into - except that typically men and women aren't equal or equivalent in a society. There is enormous diversity in humanity, but quite often men and women run in different, parallel 'working' worlds. Our species has had substantial and persisting evolutionary advantages from our gender-different brain wiring*. This simply does not change in a hundred years*. Epigenetics can change certain traits in 1 or 2 generations, but sex hormones as neurochemicals is part of the big structural stuff, because it is extremely similar across the globe and apparently selected over 40,000 + years.
Mounting evidence is indicating that mens' and womens' brains are very very different
(two extremely readable books btw, with lots of evidence and quite vicious feminist critiques.)
and this is how.

* BUT keep in mind that:

1. Temperament, culture and environment have a vastly larger effect on the brain and behaviour than anyone ever expected, we load our neural "firmware" in infancy and childhood and nobody quite knows how that works except that it causes magnificent variation in and between populations, and may be a factor in susceptibility/resilience to some mental illness.
2. There is an awful lot going on in your brain that is not gender-specific. Sex hormones are neural activity mediators rather than drivers, helping us with habits and reflexes and tendencies, not ruling our thoughts and actions (although parents of adolescents may wonder a bit).
3. Structural, neurochemical and hormonal variation is enormous between individual brains of each gender, and just about all neurochemical or behavioural gender-based normal curves have a large and poorly measured overlapping mid-region.
4. Neurochemical gender differences are age dependent. Differences are greatest at ages birth-3, 15-20, and when male and female brains both change for bearing and rearing of young. The difference effects decrease as you get older. Old men and old women are hormonally very similar.
5. **Anything here is a massive oversimplification.** It's an extremely complex area with a lot of conclusions drawn from fragments of data. For a slightly more detailed picture, go read the books above, plus some Google Scholar. For a very detailed picture, go do a PhD in gender and neuroscience.

Adolescent male primate brains are flooded with testosterone*, in humans it's from age 13 to 25. Teenage boys are* naturally confrontational and adversarial, they get hooked on the dopamine rush of doing exciting/fast/illegal/truly dumb things, they are suddenly hierarchy-focused and can develop a status-addiction, they have sex thoughts going in the background "like a TV in a sports bar", and they struggle to empathise, meaningfully communicate, or practically cooperate with any demographic except their age and status peers.

Primate females have more oxytocin receptors in key brain parts than the males* (it's a bit species dependent, human females have relatively many times more receptors*). Ovulating female humans have* apparently very complex, cyclical brains, but oxytocin is a dominant gender-different neurotransmitter. For most of a woman's life, blood oxytocin is more or less the same as a male's, but those receptors make the effect much more intense. Also, when a pregnancy occurs, oxytocin levels skyrocket. Oxytocin is a simple molecule used all over the brain - but in the female's corpus collosum it is super important in pair/family bonding, having empathy and reading others' emotional states, differentiating the in-group and out-group, and protecting and providing for the in-group with the same neurochemical reward as protecting and providing for oneself. It may also help the individual conceptualise social norms and expectations, and oxytocin levels rise when a monkey in a group is part of punishing an in-group offenders (eg ostracising a food thief). Doses of oxytocin can also make people of both genders more trusting, more communication-attuned, and more prone to spending spare time in social bonding activities like grooming, chatting, and non-goal-oriented cooperation (shopping and going to the toilet together).

Testosterone partially explains rugby union, and oxytocin afternoon chit-chats with the mums group where their hair is all nicely done.

But how is it that in the 20th century, women of all classes and backgrounds suddenly, abruptly, feel entitled to healthcare, paid employment, status in our own right? Our brain hardware doesn't carry this easily. Neither does my male colleagues' brain hardware cope well with a dominant low-testosterone woman in charge.

I propose that it is simple life expectancy and entitlement.

In the late 19th century, women started expecting to survive childbirth. They felt entitled to have plans and ideas for life after childbirth. And then from the 60's, to stop and start having children by choice. It seems reasonable to thus be entitled to have resources invested in girls: equal priority nutrition, education, public recognition etc.
20th century wars provided Western women with an opportunity to work in all kinds of paid (mens' world) employment.
Increased white collar work and certain new female-dominant professions helped in the overall raising of life expectancy, especially for working classes (eg. nursing, community health, unions, worksite safety enforcement etc)
By the mid 20th century, most of the developed world expected not to die from blood infection, measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, polio, tetanus, cholera, smallpox, plague, malnutrition etc. Even cancer and traffic collisions are getting less deadly year by year. With each sudden death risk eliminated, our sense of entitlement rises.
This century, we have invented "childhood", "adolescence" - both social constructs which didn't exist in the Industrial Revolution and still don't in sub-Saharan Africa.
We have also stretched out childhood like never before, and educating boys and girls equivalently also conveniently and safely occupies them at school until their brains start to come down from the hormone highs.
We have stretched out working life like never before. People who in past centuries would have been wizened and crippled from physical work by 40 can typically now work to 60 or 70 - often out of choice, and with much better health!

By starting from better healthcare for women we are living much longer, we feel entitled to more, and we are less socially, politically and militarily disrupted by testosterone-fuelled young punks, because they're safely encased in school or university.

I propose that the early-20th-century injection of oxytocin- rather than testosterone-driven workers and thinkers has been a big factor in the large number of revolutionary paradigm-shifts in just about every arena: technological, social, political, literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophical.

What if the 20th century marks a change in our own species - as big as if a significant proportion of female octopuses could survive their first clutch of eggs, and thus take the first evolutionary steps to changing their brain chemistry and structure for empathy, and developing social structures to pass on their knowledge to the next generation? Wouldn't the octopus vulgaris species just take off like a rocket? They are so very clever and adaptable, all they would need to do is get their intergenerational act sorted out - and watch out, ocean floor!

Wouldn't it take off like - well - all the exponential curves used to describe 20th and early 21st century development?

I would be so proud of humanity if this were a preliminary to a species-wide structural shift. 

I wonder where it will lead.

I hope I live to be 95 like Magdalena. I might get to find out.