I have been thinking about John Walker who was captured with the Taliban. He was not the only one. There were a few other westerners who had converted to Islam and then to the extreme version of the Taliban. My thinking on such subjects is heavily colored by the study I have done in the past few years on evolutionary psychology. Generally, when you see humans or other animals doing something that looks really stupid in terms of survival and reproduction you are seeing some kind of psychological mechanism at work that tended to improve reproductive success in the environment of our ancestors. It may be totally inappropriate in the current environment, or just totally inappropriate such as the Heaven's Gate members who were into whacking off their balls. Nutty as they are, these activities can still be understood in that related activities in the past more often then not improved reproductive success. For example capture-bonding (known by other names such as Stockholm Syndrome) is what happened to Patty Hearst. Capture-bonding is thought to be an evolved psychological mechanism to socially reorient in a situation where a tribe had captured one of our ancestors. In our tribal past it was an essential survival trait. Walker was not (as far as I know) subjected to capture-bonding except in the fairly mild form armies use to bond new recruits in basic training. So why did he go off and get in a situation where he could get his ass shot off? I can account for some of it by the attention reward mechanism I have discussed in other articles. But why did a middle class California boy get into Islam in the first place? This is rank speculation, but I think the evolutionary psychology researchers would support it (or an improved version). In times gone by the females preferred to be a second or third wife to a high-ranking tribe member rather than pair bond to a low ranking member of the tribe. Thus the lowest status male members of a tribe had little chance to pass on their genes. (Unlike chimpanzee bands where even the lowest ranking male has *some* chance of passing on his genes or bonobo bands where social rank has little effect on male reproductive success.) In such circumstances a young human male with dismal prospects for a wife might try his luck in another tribe. Though it has always been a high risk to leave your tribe and try to enter another, it can be done. An entering male may obtain a higher social rank than he had in his original tribe. In any case, social status is not the sole factor in determining male attractiveness. There is enough advantage in out breeding to have made strangers attractive as mates. Mitochondria studies indicate that women's genes became wide spread by moving from the tribe in which they were born to the next tribe. Y chromosome studies indicate that in the past men (though rarely) moved thousands of miles in one jump. Very few humans live in tribes today. If this "very low rank, switch tribes" strategy is an evolved response to low rank, it rarely results in the extreme form seen in John Walker's case--even less common than Patty Hearst type capture-bonding. I suspect that when it occurs it is the result of excessive sensitivity to feelings of low rank rather than to a reality of no reproductive prospects. Keith Henson