I know it's awkward to digress into theology, but I find this very interesting in terms of how we think about the first relationships between humans and God as talked about in Genesis.
One way of looking at those stories is that our ancestors at some point achieved a deeper relationship with each other through language in a way that made it possible for them (us) to have a deeper (and articulable) relationship with the divine. (Of course there are lots of totally different ways people reconcile Genesis with evolution, or don't, or say it's a waste of time, but I'm quite interested in that way.)
It is sort of startling then if the key to developing language is organised violence - which I had seen suggested, in terms of "well chimpanzees fight wars, our ancestors found they fought better wars if they communicated better".
What this account suggests is sort of the opposite: language arises in the vulnerable animals that know they are vulnerable and know they need others. That is an idea peculiarly resonant with Christian claims about what humans are - that the invitation to relationship with God is not because we are the most skilled of all the animals but that we are the animal that knows how weak it is.
As a side issue: there's a very interesting discussion in Charles Foster's Being a Beast about how carnivores seem to mourn their dead more than herbivores do.
Communication in general is necessary for group coordination surely, be it ants and pheromones or bees and their dances, or dogs with their several voices (bark, growl, yelp, howl, that humming-like thing when they want something, and my favourite: giving tongue, which sounds illegal but is actually a difficult to describe noise when they are on the trail of their prey). I reckon Homo Erectus couldn’t talk, but made elaborate noises, and used gestures, facial expressions and mime to communicate. He was pretty basic really with his tech after all.
"One reason for this relative docility is that our brains have evolved a strong sense of empathy towards other humans, and with it a revulsion to taking innocent life."
In Walter Scheidel's "The Great Leveler", he notes that the evolution of larger brains also made humans more egalitarian than neighbouring primates . Whereas chimps, gorillas, and bonobos tend to be much more hierarchical creatures where alpha males would dominate a group (although it is certainly not unknown for the others to occasionally kill him), humans' larger brains allowed for the ability to create spears which flattened the hierarchy of strength and the ability to gossip, hence to form coalitions that checked the excesses of would-be alphas.
A refreshing article. I’ve always found our supposed kinship with chimps hard to credit - chimps have snouts, huge fangs, bandy little legs and enormous arms, and they struggle to walk on their hind legs, preferring to scoot along using their arms to generate speed. We don’t use them for anything except experiments, whereas dogs guard us, keep us company, sniff out explosives, guide the blind, catch fleeing crooks and more besides!
Yep. That “smile” chimps do is actually a fear/submission face. And the ones on telly are usually youngsters cos they are small and as cute as a thing with a chimp’s head can ever be, unlike the adults which are scary IMO. You might remember some idiot in the States kept one as a pet. One day it saw her neighbour in the street, ran over to the neighbour and literally ripped her face off with its claws!
While we are on the subject of primates, I thought I would share this link I recently found on how the ancestors of monkeys, and hence apes and humans, first arrived in Africa. Primates appear to have lived in Eurasia and indeed North America before Africa!
"[T]he anterior cingulate gyrus, which affects our abilities to plan and learn from mistakes." I wonder if anyone has conducted studies on human brains and found that this grey matter is less developed in progressives . . .? Just asking!
Interesting to see so many of the shibboleths of the Left holed under the waterline: importance of monogamy; importance of paternal support and a father/father figure; importance of fidelity; long maturation; empathetic collaboration; and "a collectivity. . . in a common faith and devotion".
Never been a fan of chimps or bonobos: seeing the murderous rage and killing sprees of young male packs put me off. That, and their distended hind quarters!
One area in which humans have been influenced in a positive way by our hominid forebears is in the area of status seeking, which is thought to have evolved from the phenomenon of alpha male dominance, itself a highly evolved trait. Status seeking is clearly one of the driving forces in the economic development of capitalist societies: unusually talented and ambitious individuals like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk expend unbelievable amounts of time and energy in building their empires, which benefit society as a whole. Rather than being condemned for their fortunes, billionaires like them might better be seen as the workhorses of civilization.
Another positive product of alpha male dominance, at least according to UCLA evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm, is, ironically enough, our egalitarian ethos. His theory is that thanks to that long evolutionary history, we have a deeply inbred love of dominance and hatred of subservience (the two go together) which in hunter/gatherer societies led to something he called reverse dominance hierarchies. The basic idea was that in such societies were a would-be alpha male to rise up and attempt to overawe the group, all of the beta males around him would come together to beat him, kill him, or otherwise put him in his place.
This is the same basic instinct that James Madison appealed to in his famous Federalist Paper number Ten in defense of the new US Constitution, only in this case applied to whole political factions rather than to individual beta males. Madison argued that were any one faction attempt to dominate the new American government, other factions would come together to resist such a takeover.
Nice idea…in theory. I prefer Elite Theory, where a group always has a leadership cadre. That seems to be how things go in practice, and fits with the distribution of talent, which is quite a rare thing in any area of endeavour. More in line with your first paragraph 🙂
Your last paragraphs about herds and goats got me thinking that we’re in an era where the outsiders are truly the exceptional winners.
Archetypal autistic Elon Musk types are able to solve incredible engineering problems, Gordon Gecko type psychopaths are able to CEO themselves to the top.
The herdiest types are derided when they obsess about masking and cause petrol shortages based on hearsay
"Reading this book, I couldn’t help but be reminded that the two most docile and civilised nations on earth, the Germans and Japanese, were responsible for the most appalling cruelty during the last century. And that’s not a coincidence."
I have often been both amazed and profoundly disturbed that the Nazis who saw many nearby ethnic groups as Untermenschen "unworthy of life" were pioneers in animal rights legislation!!!
Bit unfair on all Germans 1) About a third of Germans were actively opposed to the Right in the 1930s 2) The Prussian aristocracy were the main drivers of militarism 3) The Holocaust was not driven by the German people, the German Armed Forces or even the SS as a whole, but by a part of the SS (albeit a pretty big part).
They are less clever than their wolf ancestors but also friendlier and more sociable.
Many believe that this is a similar reason for why Homo Sapiens beat the Neanderthals. It wasn't because the latter were oafish cavemen as often portrayed and perceived. In fact, Neanderthals are actually believed to be cleverer than modern humans with larger brains. Neanderthals were apparently less sociable than modern humans forming smaller groups as well as being frankly less sexy than the newcomers.
Bold claim that Neanderthals were cleverer than modern humans. A big bonce does not a genius make. They had fire, weapons, clothes of a sort. But did they have TikTok?!? Aha!
David Berlinisky has been speaking to this point, almost alone, for many years. His book ‘The Devils Delusion’ is very amusing in the subject of Man’s dissimilarity to the Great Apes.
Marilynne Robinson’s essay, Absence Of Mind is also very worth reading on the subject, if only to remind one's self of the astounding uniqueness of the human mind.
Yes, but no primates (unless you include humans) are native to Europe, Australia, the United States, and there are reptiles native to far northern regions like the Cascade mountains in Canada. Generally speaking, primates aren't adapted to regions outside the sub-tropics. There are a few exceptions, of course (e.g. Japanese snow monkeys, Chinese Golden snub-nosed monkeys.) But, as a rule, they are evolved to live in trees in warm climates.
This is a point that many people miss: by definition, primates have prehensile feet. The other requirement is flat nails. In any event, were we to be consistent, we would say that it's actually an error to classify any species of homo as a primate. The field of primatology has gone to great lengths to miss this point. However, they did remove tree shrews from the primate order as tree shrews don't have flat nails. They're now classified as Scandentia. But humans remain in the primate order.
It's intriguing how so many creatures evolved greater sociability despite being from distinctly different branches of the mammal family: humans, dogs, rats, dolphins, etc.
It brings to mind this fascinating scenario where one ancient therapsid in the Permian evolved intelligence beyond that of its neighbours and created a highly, advanced civilization hundreds of millions of years ago that ultimately destroyed itself.
I know it's awkward to digress into theology, but I find this very interesting in terms of how we think about the first relationships between humans and God as talked about in Genesis.
One way of looking at those stories is that our ancestors at some point achieved a deeper relationship with each other through language in a way that made it possible for them (us) to have a deeper (and articulable) relationship with the divine. (Of course there are lots of totally different ways people reconcile Genesis with evolution, or don't, or say it's a waste of time, but I'm quite interested in that way.)
It is sort of startling then if the key to developing language is organised violence - which I had seen suggested, in terms of "well chimpanzees fight wars, our ancestors found they fought better wars if they communicated better".
What this account suggests is sort of the opposite: language arises in the vulnerable animals that know they are vulnerable and know they need others. That is an idea peculiarly resonant with Christian claims about what humans are - that the invitation to relationship with God is not because we are the most skilled of all the animals but that we are the animal that knows how weak it is.
As a side issue: there's a very interesting discussion in Charles Foster's Being a Beast about how carnivores seem to mourn their dead more than herbivores do.
that is interesting
There's no evidence that any other animals except people, are aware of if the divine or have the tiniest interest in it.
Communication in general is necessary for group coordination surely, be it ants and pheromones or bees and their dances, or dogs with their several voices (bark, growl, yelp, howl, that humming-like thing when they want something, and my favourite: giving tongue, which sounds illegal but is actually a difficult to describe noise when they are on the trail of their prey). I reckon Homo Erectus couldn’t talk, but made elaborate noises, and used gestures, facial expressions and mime to communicate. He was pretty basic really with his tech after all.
"One reason for this relative docility is that our brains have evolved a strong sense of empathy towards other humans, and with it a revulsion to taking innocent life."
In Walter Scheidel's "The Great Leveler", he notes that the evolution of larger brains also made humans more egalitarian than neighbouring primates . Whereas chimps, gorillas, and bonobos tend to be much more hierarchical creatures where alpha males would dominate a group (although it is certainly not unknown for the others to occasionally kill him), humans' larger brains allowed for the ability to create spears which flattened the hierarchy of strength and the ability to gossip, hence to form coalitions that checked the excesses of would-be alphas.
"the ability to create spears which flattened the hierarchy of strength"
"Be not afraid of any man, no matter what your size.
When danger threatens, call on me, and I will Equalize."
A refreshing article. I’ve always found our supposed kinship with chimps hard to credit - chimps have snouts, huge fangs, bandy little legs and enormous arms, and they struggle to walk on their hind legs, preferring to scoot along using their arms to generate speed. We don’t use them for anything except experiments, whereas dogs guard us, keep us company, sniff out explosives, guide the blind, catch fleeing crooks and more besides!
Dogs also make better cartoon characters, as they're on our wavelength.
Whereas the PG Tips chimps weren't.
Yep. That “smile” chimps do is actually a fear/submission face. And the ones on telly are usually youngsters cos they are small and as cute as a thing with a chimp’s head can ever be, unlike the adults which are scary IMO. You might remember some idiot in the States kept one as a pet. One day it saw her neighbour in the street, ran over to the neighbour and literally ripped her face off with its claws!
That was interesting and different.
While we are on the subject of primates, I thought I would share this link I recently found on how the ancestors of monkeys, and hence apes and humans, first arrived in Africa. Primates appear to have lived in Eurasia and indeed North America before Africa!
https://theconversation.com/one-incredible-ocean-crossing-may-have-made-human-evolution-possible-157479
"[T]he anterior cingulate gyrus, which affects our abilities to plan and learn from mistakes." I wonder if anyone has conducted studies on human brains and found that this grey matter is less developed in progressives . . .? Just asking!
Interesting to see so many of the shibboleths of the Left holed under the waterline: importance of monogamy; importance of paternal support and a father/father figure; importance of fidelity; long maturation; empathetic collaboration; and "a collectivity. . . in a common faith and devotion".
Never been a fan of chimps or bonobos: seeing the murderous rage and killing sprees of young male packs put me off. That, and their distended hind quarters!
One area in which humans have been influenced in a positive way by our hominid forebears is in the area of status seeking, which is thought to have evolved from the phenomenon of alpha male dominance, itself a highly evolved trait. Status seeking is clearly one of the driving forces in the economic development of capitalist societies: unusually talented and ambitious individuals like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk expend unbelievable amounts of time and energy in building their empires, which benefit society as a whole. Rather than being condemned for their fortunes, billionaires like them might better be seen as the workhorses of civilization.
Another positive product of alpha male dominance, at least according to UCLA evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm, is, ironically enough, our egalitarian ethos. His theory is that thanks to that long evolutionary history, we have a deeply inbred love of dominance and hatred of subservience (the two go together) which in hunter/gatherer societies led to something he called reverse dominance hierarchies. The basic idea was that in such societies were a would-be alpha male to rise up and attempt to overawe the group, all of the beta males around him would come together to beat him, kill him, or otherwise put him in his place.
This is the same basic instinct that James Madison appealed to in his famous Federalist Paper number Ten in defense of the new US Constitution, only in this case applied to whole political factions rather than to individual beta males. Madison argued that were any one faction attempt to dominate the new American government, other factions would come together to resist such a takeover.
Nice idea…in theory. I prefer Elite Theory, where a group always has a leadership cadre. That seems to be how things go in practice, and fits with the distribution of talent, which is quite a rare thing in any area of endeavour. More in line with your first paragraph 🙂
Thoroughly enjoyable read.
Your last paragraphs about herds and goats got me thinking that we’re in an era where the outsiders are truly the exceptional winners.
Archetypal autistic Elon Musk types are able to solve incredible engineering problems, Gordon Gecko type psychopaths are able to CEO themselves to the top.
The herdiest types are derided when they obsess about masking and cause petrol shortages based on hearsay
Any thesis that leaves Dawkins and Singer with egg on their faces, has much to recommend it.
"Reading this book, I couldn’t help but be reminded that the two most docile and civilised nations on earth, the Germans and Japanese, were responsible for the most appalling cruelty during the last century. And that’s not a coincidence."
I have often been both amazed and profoundly disturbed that the Nazis who saw many nearby ethnic groups as Untermenschen "unworthy of life" were pioneers in animal rights legislation!!!
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/04/feeling-their-pain-animal-rights-and-the-nazis/
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19960201/2311809/why-german-nazis-were-big-fans-of-animal-rights
Many animal lovers are misanthropes.
That is especially true if they're also environmentalists, as were the Nazis.
Bit unfair on all Germans 1) About a third of Germans were actively opposed to the Right in the 1930s 2) The Prussian aristocracy were the main drivers of militarism 3) The Holocaust was not driven by the German people, the German Armed Forces or even the SS as a whole, but by a part of the SS (albeit a pretty big part).
Razib Khan wrote an article back in 2020 about dog evolution and human domestication.
https://quillette.com/2020/10/29/the-evolutionary-history-of-mans-best-friend-revealed/
They are less clever than their wolf ancestors but also friendlier and more sociable.
Many believe that this is a similar reason for why Homo Sapiens beat the Neanderthals. It wasn't because the latter were oafish cavemen as often portrayed and perceived. In fact, Neanderthals are actually believed to be cleverer than modern humans with larger brains. Neanderthals were apparently less sociable than modern humans forming smaller groups as well as being frankly less sexy than the newcomers.
https://theconversation.com/why-did-modern-humans-replace-the-neanderthals-the-key-might-lie-in-our-social-structures-195056
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2022/october/neanderthal-extinction-maybe-caused-sex-not-fighting.html
Bold claim that Neanderthals were cleverer than modern humans. A big bonce does not a genius make. They had fire, weapons, clothes of a sort. But did they have TikTok?!? Aha!
Strongly agreed. I used Khan as a source in my book. Very smart guy. Thanks to Mr. West, to you and to him.
David Berlinisky has been speaking to this point, almost alone, for many years. His book ‘The Devils Delusion’ is very amusing in the subject of Man’s dissimilarity to the Great Apes.
Marilynne Robinson’s essay, Absence Of Mind is also very worth reading on the subject, if only to remind one's self of the astounding uniqueness of the human mind.
Yes, but no primates (unless you include humans) are native to Europe, Australia, the United States, and there are reptiles native to far northern regions like the Cascade mountains in Canada. Generally speaking, primates aren't adapted to regions outside the sub-tropics. There are a few exceptions, of course (e.g. Japanese snow monkeys, Chinese Golden snub-nosed monkeys.) But, as a rule, they are evolved to live in trees in warm climates.
Neanderthals? Only found in Europe, and a few in the Near East. Modern Europeans, with the pale skin to get the maximum vitamin D?
This is a point that many people miss: by definition, primates have prehensile feet. The other requirement is flat nails. In any event, were we to be consistent, we would say that it's actually an error to classify any species of homo as a primate. The field of primatology has gone to great lengths to miss this point. However, they did remove tree shrews from the primate order as tree shrews don't have flat nails. They're now classified as Scandentia. But humans remain in the primate order.
Oh, I get you now. Very interesting point.
It's intriguing how so many creatures evolved greater sociability despite being from distinctly different branches of the mammal family: humans, dogs, rats, dolphins, etc.
It brings to mind this fascinating scenario where one ancient therapsid in the Permian evolved intelligence beyond that of its neighbours and created a highly, advanced civilization hundreds of millions of years ago that ultimately destroyed itself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/comments/15j2h5p/the_planet_of_the_first_makers_what_if_the_great/
Very interesting, Ed. One of the few essays of yours where I haven’t thought somewhere around half way through that you would learn to précis.