Failing that, you could *cough* pay for a journal subscription or actually enroll in an institute of higher learning. The latter is probably a good idea because it gives you a better chance at actually comprehending what’s going on in a journal article. But hey, sometimes it’s more fun to annoy the hell out of trained scientists by reading the conclusion to every study you can feast your eyeballs on and make stuff up about your wariness of the methodology of everyone whose opinion you don’t agree with. You know, just squint and say… “I don’t know, that seems rather methodologically unsound and the sample size is too small to draw any real conclusions.” If you fancy yourself as more of a DIY scientist than an officially sanctioned liberal elite, here are three pointers for scoring free papers without schmoozing friends and acquaintances and flirting with the cute and surly girls with Lisa Loeb glasses…

1. Google Scholar

PubMed, SchmubMed. Sure, PubMed is officially curated by Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, and Monsanto® and is thus the search engine of choice for all officially sanctioned science. Unfortunately, 9 out of 9 searches on PubMed lead you to nothing but “Abstracts” and screens asking for your credit card. Get to know and love Google Scholar. Unlike the easy to remember URL for PubMed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed, duh!), Google Scholar is located at http://scholar.google.com.

Oh, another cool thing about Scholar vs. PubMed is that you actually get search results without having to know how to construct a “query” with symbols. Type in an author’s name or title or keyword or whatever and you’ll get some stuff. Also, there’s a great “Advanced Scholar Search” option. I like that it’s phrased in such a way that I can interpret it as “Advanced Scholar” who happens to be doing a search. I mean… if Google says so?

It isn’t that complicated. It’s like Google Search but filters out spam results and only spits out stuff for nerds. Another cool bonus is that it indexes Google Books too, which is nice if you’re looking for authors who would be in both categories. There are a couple tricks…

The most important bit is the “All ____ versions” link. For example, if you’d clicked on the “Mate choice turns cognitive” result, it leads you to a paywall. However, clicking the “All 16 versions” link leads you to a page including links to 5 PDF sources. And… PDF is the currency of the academic paper. The one below it that’s listed as “[DOC] from unm.edu” is probably a draft copy on the author’s site. Since we know Geoffrey F. Miller also happens to be a professor at UNM, it’s almost certain. And here again, clicking the “All 4 version” leads to a PDF copy as well.

The other “trick” is the “Cited by _____” link. This is a good indicator of how many other studies reference this particular study. Think of it as a Facebook ‘like’ but you like it so much you spent ten years studying something and wrote 50 pages about it. If that number is 1, it’s probably not very authoritative. The obvious exception is that if it’s a new-ish paper. Another cool thing is that you can instantly get to all the papers in the database that link to the study by clicking through. This is awesome for finding more recent studies or for finding criticisms that came out after it was published.

2. Google (Plebian Edition)

Most of the papers indexed on Google Scholar are hosted on servers at colleges or other semi-reputable sites. However, it’s often the case that you won’t find a PDF version of the exact study you’re looking for via Scholar. In that happens, head on over to regular ol’ Google. There, the magic word is “filetype:pdf”. Here’s an example search for one of the same papers above…

That result happens to be available through Scholar also, but the results will often be different. Also — and this is key — often results will have a weird title in the search result, but still be the correct paper when you click through. Google sometimes indexes the actual filename or a few words from the PDF if it’s not tagged properly.

3. Self-Aggrandizing Scientists

I kid Geoffrey Miller by the title of this subheading. He made a crack about navel-gazing bloggers in his book Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. He’ll be fine.

The important thing here is that authors sometimes have rights to host personal copies on their websites. Geoffrey Miller’s page has links to 20+ PDFs of various papers. Academics who are proud of their work aren’t shy about showing it off when they can, and that’s awesome. I’ve time and again found papers not available anywhere else right there on the author’s page. So… just go back to the vanilla version of Google and find their home page (usually a .edu).

*Quintuple your chances of success. Many studies are written by 2-10 authors. That’s right, any of their sites may have a copy.

This method also sometimes turns up entire chapters from books. Many scholarly books are compiled by editors who solicit work from various scientists to each write a chapter of the volume. If you search for the chapter author, you might find they have their contribution on their personal site as well.

Other

Once you’ve amassed a gazillion PDF files you’ll probably go crazy trying to keep them all sorted. For that, I use a cool (free) new-ish service called Mendeley. It allows you to organize, tag, and share PDFs via web or a downloadable interface. I’ve been using it for something like 9 months and I love it. To sign up and for links to “my” Paleolithic Diet Research group and others, you can click over to my profile there.

So there you have it… You’re three steps closer to becoming a liberal elite. And… you didn’t even have to buy a Volvo.

Aside from Richard Dawkins interviewing Stephen Pinker, there’s not a lot of evolutionary psychology related video content online. So I was pretty excited to find this recent talk from Wonderfest. An added bonus is that it’s not by evolutionary psychologists, but a pair of paleoanthropologists. Since critiques of evolutionary psychology are often levied by non-anthropologists by dismissing EvPsych for making too many assumptions about life in the paleolithic, this has a different flavor of credibility.

One point that I appreciated was Dr. Gilbert’s view on the “job” of scientists. Some scientists (and its critics) are fond of implying that us laymen should just sit around and wait for scraps of knowledge to be tossed our way. Here’s a more enlightened view:

“[As scientists], our business is not to speculate stories that you can then think about. Our business is to give you empirical evidence that you can go home and have all that fun of speculation yourself.”  – Henry Gilbert, PhD.

Protagonists

David DeGusta is a Research Paleontologist at the Paleoanthropology Institute.

Henry Gilbert is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at California State University, East Bay.

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Topics

• Studying the Evolution of Human Traits
• The Science of Human Origins
• Examining How Evolution Has Shaped Behavior
• Landmarks in Human Evolution
• The History of Evolutionary Psychology
• The Rise of Behaviorism
• Cognitive Psychology and the Refinement of Adaptationism
• Nature vs. Nurture and Modern Evolutionary Psychology
• The Dangers of Discussing Hardwired Behavior
• Studying the Evolutionary Origins of Language
• Studying Language Through the Fossil Record
• Studying Language Through the Genetic Record
• Studying Language Through the Archaeological Record
• Discussion on the Evolution of Language
• Studying the Evolution of Culture
• Possible Causes for the Development of Culture
• Discussion on the Evolution of Culture
• The Evolutionary Origins of Art
• Signs of Neanderthal Culture and Language
• Animals and the Neurological Basis of Lan

Tools. [The End]

The folks whose eating habits are informed by evolutionary biology have all but subsumed the meaning of “paleo” in pop-culture. Since our minds begin to make associations at the mention of a word, this shift in meaning directly impacts how we think. Thus, for many people, the paleolithic era is mentally associated with hunters, gatherers, and grain hating. As one of them, that’s not a judgment, just an assumption that influences the rest of this piece.

For those steeped in the nuances of Pleistocene and Paleolithic research, please excuse me for a moment so we might indoctrinate any newbies: Pleistocene is a geological term which refers to the the planet and its physical properties across a particular period of time.  Paleolithic is an archaeological term that refers to humans (hominin, to be more accurate) across a particular period of time. Pleistocene and Paleolithic refer to roughly the same period of time, but they look at different things. Basically, the former looks at the world, the latter looks at the humans in it. That’s why Paleolithic is the term humans are most fond of. And… why we’ll drop Pleistocene for the rest of today. Paleolithic derives from the Greek: palaios, “old”; and lithos, “stone”. Thus, its etymological translation amounts to  “old age of the stone” or “Old Stone Age.” The reason stone is in there is because the material used to make the most advanced tools of the time was stone.

If the Paleolithic Era is archaeologically defined by hominid development of stone tools, how can we jettison the stone part and claim all tools are paleo? I prefer a different, but I think equally (if not more) accurate perspective. The psychologically important development in the Paleolithic wasn’t stone, but the tools. Surprise! …stone existed before the Paleolithic, but hominids didn’t make tools out of it, or anything else, really (and don’t try to derail the discussion by saying gravity was a tool, thank you very much). Stone didn’t change, our brains evolved to use it. That reveals the crux of my argument: the concept of tools is paleo. Now, that could rightly be passed off as linguistic trickery if we restricted “Paleolithic” to its archaeological roots. But as I mentioned above, we’ve expanded its use to encompass a period of human evolutionary biology and thus, by default, evolutionary psychology. It’s in the overlap of archaeology, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology that the concept of tools gets significant in a major way.

A study by a team of archaeologists and anthropologists pinned down human brain size as a key factor that kept the hominid line in the stone tool making mindset for millions of years (Faisal 2010). That makes sense, and we know that brain size expanded significantly between the beginning of the paleolithic to its end. However, archaeology says nothing about the adaptive pressures required for evolutionary selection to effect such a change. To explain why our brains got bigger, we need to think about it from a different perspective.

From the standpoint of evolution, the development most important to humans in the Paleolithic was not the stone tools themselves, but the concept of tools. Across this period, humans developed what Marshal McLuhan would later refer to as “extensions of man”. Humans’ manipulation of their surroundings became the dominant strategy upon which evolution exerted its adaptive pressure. Human brains grew as man’s external manipulation abilities proved more efficient than biological “weapons”. We didn’t need to grow bigger, stronger, and faster than surrounding predators once this evolutionary cascade kicked into high gear. Further, once tool use becomes a strategy, it precludes (to varying degrees) biological evolution. McLuhan’s extensions become de facto solutions for the majority of adaptive problems. Every time something is used as a tool it serves as a proxy for evolution. Think surgical solutions to appendicitis, chemical solutions to infertility and impotence, condoms, guns, microwaves, refrigeration, tractors, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.

Not only the tools themselves arise in the Paleolithic, but the psychological impulse to solve problems of survival and reproduction through the use of tools, arose during that time as well. Our brains were wired up for tools. So… what does this mean? If we look at this from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, our natural inclination to formulate tool strategies to solve problems is just as “paleo” as eating meats, fruits, and vegetables. This yields some paradoxical outcomes between the historicity of the paleo diet versus the pervasiveness of paleo psychology.

• Paleo diet enemy: Wheat (agriculture more generally) is, quite literally, a tool. The domestication of wheat was a human extension to solve problems of caloric inconsistency. Paradox!
• Industrial food processing is a tool.
• Chemical preservatives are tools.
• Corn-feeding animals is a tool.
• Alcohol is a tool! That’s right, people… Tools don’t have to serve an obviously adaptive purpose (though maybe we can pontificate on the reproductive “benefits” of alcohol related reproduction).

Not all tools are such anathemas to the health of humans. I make the illustration to open a space for questioning what is paleo in the historical sense versus what’s paleo in the sense of the shift of hominid conceptualization of tools. And obviously, some tools are amazingly beneficial.

• Is protein powder historically paleo? Not a chance. Is protein powder a tool that can be utilized for specific purposes?
• Is coconut oil historically paleo? Again, definitely not. And again… we use it as a tool.
• Are vitamin D supplements historically paleo? Until we find archaeological evidence of white lab coats in the paleolithic, it’s safe to say no. However, they serve a valid purpose as an absolutely beneficial tool for many modern humans.

So when we talk about paleo being a logical framework, and not a historical reenactment, these are the kind of questions we’re discussing. What historically “incorrect” or #notpaleo or #faileo tools that we have at our disposal should we be using? What are the costs and benefits associated with their use? In reference to paleolithic based diets, it makes sense to talk about the things we ingest, have injected into our veins, or absorb through our skin. That said, this logical framework can be extended to our physical activities, the way we design our lives, the spaces we choose to inhabit, how we interact with one another, and how we spend every moment. Since the question of the best way to optimize our lives is a ridiculously difficult undertaking spanning centuries of thought may be beyond the scope of this article, I’ll save it for the following three zillion posts [subscribe via RSS].

Our Paleolithic ancestors didn’t eat what they ate because they were nutrition experts. They didn’t do what they did because they possessed a superior level of philosophical knowledge or wisdom. [Perspective: speech as we know it didn’t exist for more than 2 million years (~85%) of the Paleolithic] Our ancestors simply did what they had to do with what they had available. They died when they did it wrong, and we are the benefactors of those who made the right decisions. We’re lying to ourselves if we think they wouldn’t have utilized many of the tools we have today… both nutritionally and otherwise. And that is a prime reason why romanticizing our Paleolithic progenitors and emulating a historical reenactment completely misses the important point of the Paleolithic. Look at everything that’s available and use the best tool at hand… That’s paleo logic in the modern world. And that’s still only half of the logic… next time…

References

Aldo Faisal, Dietrich Stout, Jan Apel, Bruce Bradley. The Manipulative Complexity of Lower Paleolithic Stone Toolmaking. PLoS ONE, 2010; 5 (11)