No

by Robert Valko

Created on: August 02, 2010   Last Updated: August 03, 2010

The house and senate recently approved a bill that would ban the wearing of baseball hats in public. Men found hiding under their favorite teams' bonnets will be Tasered and hauled off to the clink. This law will be enforced especially at baseball games, where the hats have been linked to the highly offensive acts of peanut-shelling and cheese-slice wearing.

The hats have also been implicated in other aggressive acts. Indeed, cheese-heads who also wear oversized "foam fingers" have been found poking popcorn and peanut vendors with the fingers, demanding that they "get out of the way or sit down," or, just join 'em for a beer.

"The poking must stop now," said a 21 year-old ballpark vending supervisor at Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies. As he walked and talked during a rare interview, his four-pound French bulldog snapped at fans' ankles, apparently under the impression that their lower legs were fellow bulldogs that posed a threat to its lunch.

The supervisor spoke candidly: "We see the poking as an offense to our sensibilities. It upsets us to think that people could pick on us popcorn peddlers. Bat Boys don't have to put up that kind of abuse."

He then commented on how men who wear the hats have been known to go two, even three days without showering. "They use their little beanies as refugee tents, riding out their bad-hair days under them, avoiding their mousse-ing responsibilities for as long as they can."

Bulldogs and bad hair aside, legislation is working its way through the Belgium government that really would make the wearing of certain pieces of clothing a crime. They are trying to band burqas and niqabs, face veils worn by Muslim women. The ban would be for women who work in public schools and in government jobs. The largely male government is pushing the legislation through the system.

I'm not going to address some of the obvious issues related to this subject, for example, the fact that, deep down, all men are terrified of women, burqas or not. Nor am I going to address some of the other concerns: racism, in-group/out-group bias, anxiety, and xenophobia, just to name a few. But, I would like to get to the evolutionary roots of how burqas could be banned.

For starters, most Muslim women have probably never been to a Rockies game; they've never had the pleasure of wearing a slice of cheese or poking people with three-foot fingers. If they had, they might occasionally trade their headdress in for a slice of cheddar.

As far as the evolutionary reasons go, well, maybe 7 million years of countless raids, ambushes, invasions, attacks, battles, and 15,000 wars over the last 10,000 years has something to do with it.

Indeed, group to group tension and competition has been an unfortunate by-product of human evolution. Because we humans have such a poor track record with aggression, our brains have evolved to be hypersensitive to the presence of outsiders.

There is a mechanism in the mind that author Rush Dozier calls the "binary instinct." Natural selection coughed up it up to help us assess, in a fraction of a second, whether an outsider is friend or foe. The instinct arose to protect us against the countless acts of aggression our species is prone to.

When people look different, whether due to skin color, clothing, or because a male teen is wearing a flat rimmed baseball hat tilted to the side, we get nervous.

It's likely that the binary instinct is the starting point of racism and the cause of the banning of burqas and niqabs. If each of us maintains an acute awareness of our binary propensities, we will move one step closer to overriding racism. Personally, I get nervous around French bulldogs.

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