Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[A Poster He or I]

And evolution doesn't do anything proactively. It will wait until people start dying and then it will get to work. We, on the other hand, can do things proactively. Whether we will .....

Well, since I am a holist in most of my thinking, here might be the biggest difference of all in our respective positions. As I see it, humans are an expression of the natural order. Everything about the natural order is intimately interconnected and interdependent. The natural order has evolved to produce first sentience and finally self-awareness. We are the self-aware component of the biosphere. Personally I am all but convinced that it was the evolution of language that precipitated the degree of self-awareness we have; which in turn allows us to reflect upon our relation to the whole of the planet and to act proactively in defense of our survival. So, in short, Evolution is proactive now. It became proactive when humans became capable of proactive action due to their capacity to project from their accumulated knowledge.

How this will impact the course or the speed of evolution is anybody's guess. If we succeed in becoming the stewards of the planet, we will spread proactive evolution to other species by acting as their evolutionary proxy. If we start directly engineering our own genome at the molecular level, then I'd say we'll have sped up evolution quite a helluva lot. If we begin to carry our own artificial environments into space and disseminate our genome off-world, we will certainly be leapfrogging over what evolution without her human component could do. That may not change our human genome perceptibly at first, but bear in mind, that our space-faring descendants won't want to live in artificial biospheres forever. Someday, they will want to breathe the real air and run free on new worlds. And you can bet on evolution that the only way they will survive in an alien biosphere is to adapt to it at the level of the genome.

[Wilson]

Well, since I am a holist in most of my thinking, here might be the biggest difference of all in our respective positions. As I see it, humans are an expression of the natural order. Everything about the natural order is intimately interconnected and interdependent. The natural order has evolved to produce first sentience and finally self-awareness. We are the self-aware component of the biosphere. Personally I am all but convinced that it was the evolution of language that precipitated the degree of self-awareness we have; which in turn allows us to reflect upon our relation to the whole of the planet and to act proactively in defense of our survival. So, in short, Evolution is proactive now. It became proactive when humans became capable of proactive action due to their capacity to project from their accumulated knowledge.

How this will impact the course or the speed of evolution is anybody's guess. If we succeed in becoming the stewards of the planet, we will spread proactive evolution to other species by acting as their evolutionary proxy. If we start directly engineering our own genome at the molecular level, then I'd say we'll have sped up evolution quite a helluva lot. If we begin to carry our own artificial environments into space and disseminate our genome off-world, we will certainly be leapfrogging over what evolution without her human component could do. That may not change our human genome perceptibly at first, but bear in mind, that our space-faring descendants won't want to live in artificial biospheres forever. Someday, they will want to breathe the real air and run free on new worlds. And you can bet on evolution that the only way they will survive in an alien biosphere is to adapt to it at the level of the genome.

Poster, some of that's a little too new age mysticism for me, based not on logic as much as the feel good notion that the natural order is looking out for us. I do agree that it's not out of the question that laboratory manipulation of our genome could be possible someday - although that would no longer be natural selection.

I also agree that language was the capability that allowed a quantum jump in our intellectual capabilities. Hard to imagine doing any complex reasoning without the ability to have those deep internal conversations with ourselves. Hard to imagine developing much of our technology without the ability to send the details of our discoveries forward to others and to the succeeding generations.

[A Poster He or I]

Not really the natural order looking out for us. Rather, the natural order learning to more proactively look after herself, rather than the passive means used before. She may not get it right the first time, but evolution has all the time in the world.

[Obvious Leo]

"homo hominis lupus est"..... Plautus. Man is the wolf of man.

This is a subject I have written on extensively in a host of experimental essays.

Of course Plautus was a playwright and not an evolutionary biologist so he probably imagined he was composing a metaphor when he coined this pithy aphorism. However when we examine Poster's analysis of the mechanisms for human evolution we can see that this observation by Plautus could just as easily be taken literally, which would make man his own genetic engineer. Homo sapiens was the last in a long line of plains-dwelling hominids who were driven out of the trees by climate change about 5 million years ago. They quickly adapted to the new niches on offer in the advancing tropical savannah and as higher order primates they were already social animals. However the real arms race which was the evolution of self-aware sentience did not really begin in earnest until the emergence of homo erectus, the tool maker. Dozens of hominid species had come and gone before the arrival of this comparative genius and we may well ask what the hell happened to them? They were smart, they walked upright, they ate meat, and they lived in co-operative social enclaves with few natural predators to be overly concerned about. Nevertheless they came and went very quickly, a puzzling outcome for the enormously successful primates, which had been spreading out across the globe since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The answer to this riddle lies in the fact that all of these pre-homo species co-existed with other hominids at various times and were therefore in competition for essentially the same resources. The only serious threat that your plains-dwelling hominid faced was another plains-dwelling hominid with a taste for murder, an engaging behavioural quirk which they inherited from their common tree-dwelling ancestors. The other off-shoot lineage from this common ancestor, the chimpanzee, also exhibits an occasional predilection for this unusual behavioural strategy. Thus it was the behaviour of the pre-homo hominids which gradually became the primary selection factor in their own reproductive success and thus it was their behaviour which was driving their physical phenotypic and genotypic changes. Whether we call this the evolution of behaviour or the evolution of society or the evolution of culture it is clear that it would favour the emergence of ever smarter and smarted hominids. The smart ones ate the stupid ones and therefore intelligence was selecting for itself according to the self-reinforcing loop mechanism which I referred to earlier.

By the time homo erectus came along we were well on the way to becoming the uber-predator of the savannah. Over the ensuing 1.5 million years a number of homo sub-species came and went but we didn't manage to wipe out the last of the competition, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, until comparatively recently in our evolutionary history, about 40,000 years ago. It is widely assumed, as Poster has pointed out, that it was the evolution of complex language which finally tipped the balance in favour of the sapiens sub-branch and thus we vanquished the last of our rivals.

This is only a brief potted summary of a long and complicated story but our taste for slaughtering each other did not end there. We've managed to continue this self-selection process almost right up to the present day and merely streamlined our methods for doing so. We have engineered ourselves to be the species that we are because of the murderous behaviours that we have chosen to adopt to ensure our own survival. By doing so we have effectively reconstructed the Darwinian paradigm to suit our own requirements, which begs a very interesting question and one which I've always been astonished is rarely asked.

We can argue as much as we like about where we evolved FROM but the truly interesting question is this one: What the hell are we evolving INTO. Clearly this is something we're going to have to decide for ourselves.

Regards Leo

[Wilson]

Well, we're not doing much evolving at this point. That was the thrust of this thread.

The murderous behavior you mentioned isn't inevitable. Have you, Leo or Poster, had any murderous tendencies this week? I haven't. The reason we developed our warlike capabilities was, I believe, because of the threat of competing groups of humans or animal predators, and the necessity to bogard one's own resources. So we developed this wonderful empathy and sympathy and cooperation for members of "us" - our group or tribe - and a depressing natural animosity toward "them" - everyone outside our group. Share your food with a starving competitor and you've decreased your chances at survival. Fight to protect them and you and your group may be killed or injured. On the other hand, kill their men and steal their women, and your genes will march on. Of course there's also the natural individual desires like wanting to dominate others, accumulate more than others, compete with them, so that's part of it, too, but the unfortunate tendency we have for trying to wipe out whole other populations came to us through evolution.

What has happened, in the developed world especially, is that we see other cultures on television, and we find out that those funny looking, funny acting people aren't really much different. So we tend to bring them under the umbrella of "us", and no longer want to kill them. But fundamental Muslims see us in the West as "them" and many of them still want to wage jihad.

So warfare isn't inevitable way in the future, if we ever get to the point of feeling that everybody out there is like "us".

[Obvious Leo]

The murderous behavior you mentioned isn't inevitable.

I agree. Nowadays we sublimate such instincts into less harmful outlets such as sports. In any event complex behaviours are not hard-wired into our DNA like opposable thumbs, so it makes more sense to think of this tendency as a software problem rather than a hardware one. There's also little doubt that we appear to be growing out of it, probably because the tool-maker has got a bit too smart for his own good.

"The survival value of human intelligence has never been satisfactorily demonstrated".... Michael Crichton. A quote often referred to by those who insist that any civilisation which develops the capacity to destroy itself will inevitably do so. It's hard not to be persuaded by this gloomy world-view, on the evidence from a sample size of one, because great civilisations have come and gone throughout history and as George Santayana famously said: if we fail to learn from history we are condemned to repeat it.

So we developed this wonderful empathy and sympathy and cooperation for members of "us" - our group or tribe - and a depressing natural animosity toward "them" - everyone outside our group. Share your food with a starving competitor and you've decreased your chances at survival. Fight to protect them and you and your group may be killed or injured. On the other hand, kill their men and steal their women, and your genes will march on.

That's how "homo hominis lupus est" works as an evolutionary paradigm for homo sapiens and also explains his remarkable intelligence, which lends itself to no other explanation. As Crichton points out, we have far too many smarts to satisfy the simple imperative of the survival of the fittest, so I suggest that our own evolutionary strategy morphed into one of the survival of the smartest. It's likely we're going to have to use all these smarts and more in order to survive the next couple of centuries, because the way I read it we've now reached an evolutionary watershed where our entire evolutionary future rests in our own hands. However on the plus side, fewer humans die at the hands of other humans than ever before in human history, so we have reason to be optimistic about the information age we're entering into. I reckon the sudden rise in religious fundamentalism in recent decades is simply a backlash representing the last gasp of a dying ideology which will not outlive our grandchildren. Flowering plants do the same thing. When a plant in your garden flowers more profusely than it ever did before, then the odds are it'll be dead next year. This makes perfect evolutionary sense for a plant but it's likely to have the opposite effect in the case of human behaviour. The rise in human secularism seems to be closely accompanying the inexorable advance of the information age, as common sense would require. Religious belief and ignorance go hand in glove so global education will spell the doom of all our ancient superstitions, probably to be replaced by less harmful ones.

Have you, Leo or Poster, had any murderous tendencies this week?

I've never had a murderous impulse in my life but I don't doubt that I'm capable of it, and I reckon the same could be said for most people, especially women with young children. If anybody messed with my children or grandchildren I'm sure I could kill them with my bare hands and never lose a wink of sleep. I'm only an upright ape after all and genes are only genes.

Regards Leo

[Wilson]

I agree with what you just wrote, Leo, and feel the same way as you indicated in the last paragraph.

One small issue: You said that our evolutionary strategy morphed into survival of the smartest. That's sort of true but it doesn't quite hold for individual natural selection. If it did, women would probably be attracted to nerds rather than football heroes. Since they aren't (women are so shallow, unlike us guys who go for quality), we need to look for an explanation. I believe that in hunter-gatherer times brute strength and athleticism were more important than brains for the survival of an individual man's woman, as compared to the survival of a weak man's woman, so women evolved to prefer the brute to the brain. But the survival of the group as a whole depended on both the fierceness of its warriors and on the problem solving ability of the group. One smart guy could make a huge survival difference for the entire group, by devising better hunting and food gathering techniques, better fighting techniques, better protection against predators, better planning for water and other necessities, etc. Since everyone in the group benefited from his brilliance, he didn't automatically become a sex symbol, because within the group girls hooked up to the warriors may have been more likely to survive. Girls didn't flock to listen to the brainiac's philosophical ramblings. But he did okay, he was respected, some girls liked the smart ones, and his genes went forward, and since he probably shared genes with others in the group, including the tougher guys, his genes did get selected for, but it wasn't quite as clean a selection or his genetic mutations as it could have been. That's all speculative, of course, but it's the best explanation I've come up with.

[Obvious Leo]

I made the exact same point in an earlier post which you must have missed. No doubt the geeks have always been at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to sharing the delights of the nubile tribal maidens but in this scenario we need to focus more on the survival of the group rather than the reproductive success of the individual. As you correctly point out the geek will be sharing many of his genes with his football hero cousin who will be doing most of his fighting for him and enjoying the sexual spoils of victory. However I very much doubt that our cannibal ancestors would have been too squeamish about rape so I'm sure that even the geek would have got his turn at any captured females that said cousin managed to drag home from work by the hair. These were tough times and not for the faint-hearted.

Regards Leo

-- Updated June 13th, 2014, 12:03 am to add the following --

For anybody interested in the behavioural, cultural and societal implications of primate evolution I would highly recommend the work of Robin Dunbar, from Oxford university. He's a bit of a jack of all trades in the primatology business but he specialises in evolutionary anthropology and also in evolutionary psychology. These are the cutting edge disciplines in modern evolutionary study and he's generally regarded as one of the world leaders in both these fields.

Regards Leo

[Wilson]

Leo, I did miss your earlier post and would enjoy reading it, if you can direct me there. I wasn't aware that anyone else had reached the same conclusion. Did Robin Dunbar also express that opinion?

Hard to know exactly how coupling was parceled out in those times. As you said, captured women would have certainly been shared. And I wonder how monogamous those early humans were even within their groups.

[Obvious Leo]

Leo, I did miss your earlier post and would enjoy reading it, if you can direct me there. I wasn't aware that anyone else had reached the same conclusion. Did Robin Dunbar also express that opinion?

Hard to know exactly how coupling was parceled out in those times. As you said, captured women would have certainly been shared. And I wonder how monogamous those early humans were even within their groups.

Post No 27 in this thread which really just covers the same ground we've both now explored. I've been rather consumed by physics in recent years so it's been quite a long time since I did much work on human evolution, although it was human evolution which initially drew me into a deeper study of physics via informational complexity theory and process philosophy. It's probably fair to say that Dunbar and I managed to arrive at many similar conclusions independently because I only found out about him comparatively recently through Dunbar's number and optimum social group dynamics. However once I discovered him I took to his writings with enthusiasm because it's always gratifying to find someone who thinks much the same way as you do but knows a hell of a lot more about it. He also writes occasional opinion pieces for New Scientist and he's got one of those agile minds which I always find stimulating, even if I don't always agree.

I very much doubt that monogamy would have featured much in hunter-gatherer societies because it's never really caught on very successfully since. However it would be foolish to embark on any sweeping generalisations because the cultural diversity across such widely scattered tribal groups would be quite impossible for us to imagine in our relatively homogeneous modern world. My own best guess is that monogamy as a social fiat was probably a rare phenomenon before the evolution of agriculture and permanent human settlements. That's basically when all the trouble started for poor old homo sapiens because Dunbar's number is one that is not to be denied. Instead of the "us" and "them" dichotomy operating only between societies it then started to also operate within them. This led to the evolution of economics, government and law and later to the evolution of religion as a form of social control. Some might say it was the beginning of the end but in many ways it was also the beginning of the beginning.

Regards Leo

[Alan Jones]

I thank y'all for the interesting discussion on a topic I like to study. I recently found a very nice summary of several parts of the investigation, including a discussion of "relaxed natural selection and microevolution of human morphology" at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/115in. Any thoughts about epigenetic changes in styles of thinking within cultures (see Ian McGilchrist)?

[Madera]

The answer depends on our reactions to the environment. No negative reactions is the solution. we pass on to the next genertion what has been instilled in us by parents and those who corrupt the soul of a child. that child grows up and passes it to the next generstion. simple solution is self awareness.

[enegue]

Why do the races - European, African, Asian - look so different? Small numbers, reproductively isolated in Europe and Asia from Africa. What they call the founder effect - the small number of individuals who reached Asia and Europe would have had, by chance, different physical, facial, intellectual, and emotional characteristics from the average back home in Africa. Those in Asia would have had, by chance, different characteristic than those in Europe. And of course life was very dangerous for the pioneers, so any characteristics that offered survival advantages would be snapped up by evolution.

According to National Geographic's "Genographic Project", ALL modern humans had their origin in Africa, and around 70,000 years ago began a migration "Out of Africa". Looking at estimates of population numbers, there were only around 150,000 of them (or even as little as 10,000), so the variation we see in human DNA today is at best, only what it was then. It is far more likely, however, to be less varied and more corrupted due to drift and mutation.

Cheers,
enegue

[Dysorganism]

My guess is that human evolution is faster now than ever before. As many have pointed out evolutionary success is to have the maximum number of fertile offspring. Palaeolithic humans were well adapted to their environment. There were probably few new genes that gave a strong selective advantage. The reproductive strategy was to have few children, invest heavily in raising each child and to have low child mortality compared to most other species.

Now in the modern world the few child strategy is completely wrong. Modern humans can afford to invest in giving birth too many children and still have almost all children reach maturity. Humans are poorly adapted to maximising their number of offspring in the current situation. It's not hard to think of biological changes that would make humans able to have more offspring. I expect there to be a strong evolutionary pressure to change.

You could argue that humans decide how many children to have not because of biological limitations but because of social and psychological reasons. The thing is sometimes biological limitations do play a role. Like how the span of reproductive age is sometimes limiting. Psychological traits are to a large extent decided by genetics. Twin births have a hereditary component. There are probably many genetic variants that on the whole will increase the number of children.

Evolution is described as an accumulation over time of many genes each giving a relatively small advantage. Ten thousand years is a very short time to see an evolutionary change. Genes don’t have to give a huge advantage to be evolutionary favoured and a fast evolutionary change is probably still too slow for us to see.

[enegue]

My guess is that human evolution is faster now than ever before. As many have pointed out evolutionary success is to have the maximum number of fertile offspring. Palaeolithic humans were well adapted to their environment. There were probably few new genes that gave a strong selective advantage. The reproductive strategy was to have few children, invest heavily in raising each child and to have low child mortality compared to most other species.

You don't think that hunger, violence and disease might have played the significant role in the keeping population numbers depressed?

Cheers,
enegue