The Global Ape: Between Extinction and Transcendence E-Book

Dan Corjescu

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 392

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

What is Man? What is his nature? Where is he going? These are but some of the questions this book is trying to find answers to. They are questions that will take us on a fascinating intellectual journey encompassing politics, history, sociology, philosophy, religion, and science. Along the way you will encounter many great thinkers such as Aristotle and Nietzsche (to name but two) as well as be confronted by some of humanity’s most sublime achievements and horrific failures. After reading this book, you will have a better understanding of humankind’s potential for good and evil and our chances for survival and transcendence in the not too distant future.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Global Ape Between Extinction and Transcendence

Chapter One: The Fiery People

1. War-Nests

2. Great Chefs

3. Highly Emotional People

4. Mind Readers

5. Socialites

6. Cuddly Punishers

7. The Cultural Animal

8. Masters of Complexity

Chapter Two: Human Behavior, War, and The State

Chapter Three: Global Elements of Genocide: The Scholars Speak

Chapter Four: Enlightenment, Modernity, and Genocide Reconsidered

Chapter Five: War's Dialectic?

Chapter Six: All of Caesar's Men

Chapter Seven: The Evolution of Leadership and Social Dominance

Chapter Eight: The Babbling Ape

Chapter Nine: The Religious Ape: Homo Religiosus

Chapter Ten: The Shifting Sands of Science and Technology

Chapter Eleven: Moral and Unfree or On the Moral Graciousness of Fatalism

Chapter Twelve: The Global Ape: Between Transcendence and Extinction

Bibliography

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

To All Those Who Want Something Better

 

Introduction: The Global Ape Between Extinction and Transcendence

Human beings were global long before they were even fully human.

Our direct ancestor, Homo Erectus, was not only the longest surviving hominin group ever recorded, existing for over 1.5 million years, they were also the most geographically distributed starting out from Africa and then spreading into many parts of Asia.

What was Homo Erectus like? Well, firstly, he was in many ways very much like you and me. He possessed human like body proportions with shorter arms and longer legs relative to his torso. Behaviorally, he may well have been the first hominin to tame fire and to begin to use it for cooking. The consequences of these two particular technological breakthroughs and cultural practices were to prove enormous.

The taming and use of fire allowed us to live a life on the ground, protected from wild animals by day and by night. It probably led to, among other things, the gradual shedding of our hair, modern day sleep patterns, a growing sense of social community focused on the campfire, pair-bonding, and the ability to not only release more energy from food (meat) but to do it more easily gradually shrinking our entire digestive system which contributed to a significant increase in brain size as well as allowing for more time on our hands to do other things, like tool making and socializing.

I will be arguing in this book that Homo Erectus was the hominin who combined a complex suite of behavioral and cultural traits that eventually led to the human conquest of earth. The development of technologies such as stone implements and fire use; an ever broadening palette of personal and prosocial emotions such as empathy; the ability to read other conspecifics' minds; the growing social need to associate, learn from, and to be helped by others; the gradual process of self-domestication through social selection, and the increasing accumulation and use of material and symbolic culture; all this led to a complex emergent behavioral system that jump started human evolution and continues to this very day. Separately, each of these processes greatly contributed to the course of human evolution; taken together, however, they produced the “slow big bang” of the human revolution in individual cognition, social organization, and power over the environment. It is the story of the “human algorithm”.

Thus, human evolution can be seen as a complex system of different behavioral parts that when intertwined produced several kinds of social-cultural-biological feed-back loops which complexly fed into each other leading to something more than its separate behavioral strands: the emergence of the Global Ape.

Yet, this story is not just a powerfully inspiring one, it is also powerfully ambivalent. Why?

The development of the “human algorithm” eventually allowed for spectacular cultural feats such as Shakespeare's plays, the scientific method, the UN, and the Moon Landings but it also helped to enable countless millennia of warfare, slavery, and genocide. The “human algorithm” bestowed upon us unprecedented power, but by itself, it does not tell us how to best make use of it. For this, we need to rely on our inventive powers allowing us to create “ethics” or “values” which constitutes one of the more unique cognitive revolutions of the Global Ape: the revolution of imagination based, in part, on the prior revolution of the human bio-cultural algorithm. If there ever was a sort of “human magic” to transform the world it lies here in our moral imagination.

It is precisely our power to imagine different ways of “being” and “doing” and assign relative values to them that hold out the promise for better ways of living both among ourselves, other species, and our environment. This revolutionary mental faculty allows for the creation of greater levels of social complexity by imagining such things as money, states, and religions to name but a few socio-cultural constructs. Our moral imagination is quite literally our magical doorway to other universes. Culturally based universes of synergetically shared values and practices. Whether we ultimately choose more democracy over more dictatorship, more cooperation over more conflict, and, even, more love over more hate is in large part up to our ability to imagine heaven or hell here on earth. Thus, we are ever the Global Ape suspended between the possibility of either self-extinction or self-transcendence. The choice between infinitely possible worlds is apparently still ours to make.

Chapter One: The Fiery People

How selfish soever man may be supposed,

there are evidently some principles in his nature,

which interest him in the fortune of others,

and render their happiness necessary to him,

though he derives nothing from it,

except the pleasure of seeing it.—Adam Smith

Yes! I know now whence I came!Unsatiated like a flamemy glowing ember squanders me.Light to all on which I seize,ashen everything I leave:Flame am I most certainly!—Friedrich Nietzsche

I see it feelingly.—Gloucester to LearSHAKESPEARE, King Lear, act 4, scene 6

People just ain't no goodI think that's well understoodYou can see it everywhere you lookPeople just ain't no good—Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.—E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson

In part, this is a story about fire. The fire of the camp-light and of the human heart and mind.

On the ancient open African Savannah, the kinds of social organization that ancestral hominin groups were able to create and sustain were crucial. Social ties had to be strengthened if these groups were to continue to survive. Cooperation within these ancient groups had to be developed. If not, they could never have successfully surmounted the various threats from their novel environment. Wild predators such as big cats, natural disasters such as floods and droughts, and, not least, long term climate extremes exerted significant evolutionary pressure on them. As we shall see, these volatile conditions helped to contribute to the evolution of human emotions which was destined to play a crucial role in creating ever more complex forms of cooperation allowing for better survival strategies. From these ancient precarious beginnings, man was to emerge not only the most intelligent animal, not only the most emotional animal, but the most cooperative as well.

Philosophical discussions about the exact nature of the relationships between the emotions, reason/intelligence, and cooperation go back to at least antiquity and probably much earlier. It was Plato who famously divided the human soul into three parts: the appetites, reason, and self-regard (Thymos). The first two concepts present us with no particular interpretive problems for our purposes while the last one “Thymos” requires some further explanation.

Thymos is what we would call today “self-regard” or “self-esteem”. It is the psychological manner in which we regard ourselves and expect others to value us. When we do something against our own feelings of self-regard, we feel shame. When others challenge, despise, or negatively contradict our inner notions of self-esteem, we generally feel anger and, as often as not, seek some form of redress from the offender, whether person, institution, or even entire polity or society. Indeed, when we insert “Thymos” into modern discussions of the nature and origins of cooperation, altruism, and identity politics, as Francis Fukuyama has recently done, we quickly begin to see just how perspicacious Plato was. (Fukuyama 2018)

While our appetites are of a more bodily nature (if susceptible to cultural and historical modification) and reason a servant of practical instrumentality, Thymos presents itself as a very social feeling.

Our Thymotic self cries out for the regard of the other. We must feel valued, honored, and, even, treasured by those around us. We crave other people’s approbation as we fear their contempt. We demand to be recognized by others as we recognize ourselves. Our particular place in our social universe, regardless how small it might be in objective terms, means much to us. In fact, even in the not too distant past, avoiding the status of a social cipher was often a question of life and death.

Plato's gifted pupil, Aristotle, also divided up the human soul, but this time into only two parts: the appetites and reason. He famously equated the nature of being human with that of sociality: Man as a social being, ζῷον πολιτικόν. As it turned out, this way of interpreting human nature was to be more in tune with modern evolutionary narratives of human origins than even the later theories of the social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. To be sure, Man arose within social groups probably not unlike those of present-day Chimpanzees and Gorillas but not at all like today's solitary Orangutans. As far as we know today, man was never the shy, solitary, environmentally exemplary noble savage as famously depicted by Rousseau.

Turning our attention now to the direct inheritors of Grecian civilization and culture, we find the powerful voice of the Roman writer Lucretius and his superb poem On The Nature of Things which was destined to have a great influence on Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers and far beyond. (Lucretius 2001)

Lucretius, being a disciple of the ancient Greek Atomist, Democritus, viewed the origins of mankind in a naturalistic light and, with much insight, recounted the rise of humanity through, first, the taming and then increasing social use of fire (particularly cooking) during which early time he says “neighbors in their eagerness neither to harm nor be harmed, began to form mutual pacts of friendship” as well as claiming “protection for their children and womenfolk, indicating by means of inarticulate cries and gestures that everyone ought to have compassion on the weak.” And perhaps most extraordinary of all, Lucretius quickly came to the very logical conclusion that “although it was not possible for concord to be achieved universally, the great majority kept their compacts loyally. Otherwise, the human race would have been entirely extinguished at that early stage and could not have propagated and preserved itself to the present day.” These remarkable insights were not only to be preserved in time, but were to be fully resurrected in the scientific garb of today's scholarly literature on human origins and development.

Fast forward nearly two thousand years and we now come to arguably the greatest philosophical poem ever written in the English language, a work that was to have a profound influence on Enlightenment thought generally and on Immanuel Kant specifically: An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope. (Pope 1994)

Suggestively, Pope writes that “to copy instinct was Reason's part”. By this he might have meant that instincts preceded reason and that it followed the social paths that instinct had lain down before it. Further and towards the very end of the poem, Pope concludes that “true SELF-LOVE and SOCIAL are the same” and that “VIRTUE only makes our bliss below”. These are striking thoughts which seem to suggest that our individual well-being is best served when we cooperate with others and that this kind of behavior will eventually ensure a state of affairs that will not only nurture ourselves but society in general. We realize ourselves best through helping others. This is not just a pious Christian thought but, as we shall see, the transformative social-cultural-evolutionary vehicle through which Mankind eventually conquered the whole of earth.

Almost at the same time as Pope, the eminent Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume also had a few things to say about the relationship between reason and what he termed the “passions”. For him “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” For Hume, what we would today call the emotions determine the ultimate goals of our lives, what we value and how we conduct ourselves and with whom. Reason merely gets us there. It is a practical tool for the satisfying of anciently rooted affective desires. (Hume 1984)

Man's emotional development made him more social than all the other apes and, in time, better able to cooperate. The evolution of the metaphorical heart of man preceded the evolution of his mind.

According to the enfant terrible of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the lived feeling of what he termed pity was the aspect of the human heart which organized and governed human existence prior to civilization. As he put it in his famous Discourse on the Origin of Inequality “it is pity in which the state of nature takes the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the added advantage that no one there is tempted to disobey its gentle voice.” Thus, according to Rousseau, early man lived by a code of compassion for his fellow man intending him no direct harm. It is the classical benign vision of both our early beginnings and the basics of our human nature. And it was to have a significant impact on thinkers, scholars, and revolutionaries of all kinds, regardless of whether it was ultimately faithful to what actually took place within the distant mists of our human origins. (Rousseau 1984)

Another philosopher of note, this time from nineteenth century Germany, also compellingly challenges us to contemplate various aspects of human cooperation. Arthur Schopenhauer in his delightful work entitled On the Basis of Morality firsts offers us a succinct moral prescription that rivals The Golden Rule: Harm no one; rather help all people as much as you can, Neminem laede; imo omnes, quantum potes, juva. This is a remarkable moral injunction that serves both to lessen the inevitable social friction between people and to proactively build ties of amity, cohesion, and cooperation contributing to the flourishing of society as a whole (Schopenhauer 2014)

The reverse of this moral formula is the very essence of malign egoism: Help no one; rather harm everyone that you can when it is to your advantage, Neminem juva, imo omnes, si forte conducit, laede. Such a moral maxim immediately conjures up images of some of the evilest villains of Shakespeare and some of the darker passages in Machiavelli. It is a recipe for social disaster and the dissolution of all positive group activity. It is the death of trust upon which all human societies are built. If adopted by a majority and then taken to its extreme, it would guarantee the extinction of the human race.

But Schopenhauer's meditations on egoism and cooperation do not end here. He goes on to talk about what he considers the great mystery of ethics, das große Mysterium der Ethik, which for him is compassion, das Mitleid, what we would today call empathy. As Schopenhauer framed the conundrum, it is the question of how “the Not-I to a certain extent becomes the I”: das Nicht-Ich gewissermaßen zum Ich geworden. It continues to be an ongoing scientific puzzle to this very day. In its modern form, it is known to some as the Riddle of Altruism, which the great Sociobiologist E. O. Wilson would come to call “the central unresolved issue in evolutionary theory”.

Schopenhauer, like many philosophers before him, was certain that egoism was the leitmotif of human behavior. Yet he was keenly aware of empirical evidence which strongly seemed to suggest the contrary. Pure selfless acts were not fictions of the philosophical or religious imagination. They were real and Schopenhauer puzzled over them. In the Twentieth century, many thinkers sought to solve the dilemma by “uncovering” the suspected underlying selfish motives behind apparent altruistic acts through what would be called Kin Selection theory and Evolutionary Game theory. Others, particularly those who like E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson (no relation) were staunch believers in what they called Group-Selection or Multi-level Selection theory believed that the selfless acts exhibited by humans were not only selfless in action but pure in motive, having been shaped by millions of years of inter-group conflict modified by natural selection. But here we are getting slightly ahead of our story.

For his part, Schopenhauer attempted to solve the riddle of egoistic man displaying selfless acts by saying that it was through our imagination, die Phantasie, that our inner state of compassion comes to be. We imagine the pain of the other person and make it our own. In a sense, we live the pain of the other as we imagine it to be, or as it would be for us. The happier we are in fact the more we feel the misfortune of the suffering other. For what it's worth, this is a good first proximate explanation. What it lacks, though, is an ultimate explanation. The why something should be so. Why is it that we have this power of imagination to place ourselves in the proverbial shoes of someone else? Today we would call this ability: A Theory of Mind (ToM).

Simply put ToM is the ability of people to intuit what other people are feeling, needing, wanting, intending, or believing. Without this ability human society would be impossible. Indeed, without ToM we would not be human. This ability “to read minds” seems to be, if not uniquely human, at least significantly more developed within humans when compared to all other animals. It would not be a stretch to say that it is a psychological characteristic which helps define what being human is. It is universal, necessary, and, yes, somewhat mysterious.

The strength and importance of compassion, empathy, Mitleid, in the lives of human beings did not escape Schopenhauer. He was convinced that it was an integral part of human nature transcending as he said all “dogmas, beliefs, myths, concepts, education, religion, and moral systems” and to be found in “all lands and times”. We have it, because we are born with it. For Schopenhauer we are born Janus faced: as egoists and as altruists. For him, our compassionate psychological states and altruistic acts cannot be reduced to a more basic fundamental egoism such as is expressed in the common German saying “that the cleverest egoists are altruists”. On this issue he was not a philosophical monist but rather a convinced dualist as regards human nature. For him it was an indisputable fact that we certainly think of ourselves and act according to our interests but that we also think of others too, not seldomly sacrificing our lives for them, even, at times, for complete strangers.

Following in Schopenhauer's footsteps more than a century later we encounter the American philosopher, Richard Taylor. (Taylor 1984) According to Taylor, man is a creature of passion, of will. He is not the rational animal of Aristotle. He is the passionate beast able to rationalize and achieve his will. As Taylor says:

What is significant about man is that he wills certain ends. From one sunrise to the next, this is what gives his life meaning; indeed, it is the very expression of life itself. Human reason is employed almost exclusively in discerning the means whereby those ends, which are the product of the will, can be achieved. (Taylor 1984)

Taylor elaborating upon his voluntaristic philosophical project concerning good and evil logically states that “were it not for the need of men to get along together safely, no man would respect any principles of justice”. This echoes Spinoza's earlier thought that “nothing is more of help to people than other people”: Homini nihil utilius homine. The big question however is not only what natural and cultural forces of selection made this so, but what exactly kept it that way for so long?

In order to begin to answer these questions and others we must turn our attention now to the topics of Evolutionary Theory, Great Transitions in Evolution, Group Selection Theory, Science as a social and moral system, and the past misuses of Darwin's greatest idea.

Evolution as a theory was a revolutionary idea that had a venerable pedigree stretching all the way back to the ancient Greeks. However, in its Darwinian form, it offered itself up as a comprehensive theory of life's origins at a particular time in European historical and cultural development. It arrived at a time of aggressively competing nation-states, during the rapid development of the national-industrial economy, and amidst widespread popular ideologies of race, class, and gender.

The rise of nationalism combined with the intellectual misuse of Darwinian thought led to extreme interpretations of national origins, identity, and international competition which inevitably were to exert a material influence on world historical events most tragically in the form of the First World War. Similarly, the rise of free-trade doctrines and ideas of economic individualism were further radicalized when merged with Darwinian theory often arguing against the interests of the poor and the active amelioration of their economic and social conditions. As far as gender was concerned, Darwinism served to harden older more traditional forms of belief about the roles of women and men at home, in the workplace, in public life, and on the battlefield. As for race, the continuing misuse of Darwinian theory helped to exacerbate, often to a murderous degree, the various cultural, historical, and ethnic antagonisms between majority and minority groups within nations as well as encouraging the elimination of those persons deemed physically or mentally deviant. Indeed, when popular interpretations of Darwinism became united with then prevalent cultural ideologies of Honor and Blood, whether national, sub-national, or individual; the twin threats of social injustice and international violence were to thereby fatefully increase their pernicious influence.

Thus, historically, Darwinian theory has been used negatively to support socially destructive viewpoints and practices. Social Darwinism, an ideological and methodological perversion of Darwinian theory, with its stark emphasis on the idea of the “survival of the fittest” was a naturalistic-sociological view of the proper aims of societal development that was successfully espoused for a time by Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham Sumner in the United States. It viewed society as a struggle for survival between the “less fit” (usually meaning the poor) and the “more fit” (usually meaning the elites), an idea which was used to argue against social support systems for the less fortunate. Additionally, other kinds of social eugenics (attempts to “improve” the human race through artificial selection) whether as governmental policy and/or serious intellectual pursuit were widespread and deemed respectable throughout the Western world prior to the Second World War. This often included authoritarian practices such as government mandated sterilization of the mentally challenged or otherwise physically sick. However, after the medical horrors perpetrated by the Nazis were revealed to the world, social eugenics quickly fell into general disrepute. It should be noted however that the causal relationship between Darwinian science and Hitler's worldview has been recently contested by scholars such as Robert Richards. (Richards 2013)

Despite this deplorable misuse of evolutionary theory to create execrable values and distinct dysgenic social policies by inflicting pain and suffering on the innocent, we should not confound the political, social, and cultural uses of a scientific theory with its ultimate explanatory value.

The great Scottish philosopher David Hume taught us long ago that you cannot logically jump from a statement of what “is” to a statement of what “ought” to be. This is his famous is/ought distinction. It was an idea that was latter elaborated by G.E. Moore as the “naturalistic fallacy”. Here, Moore argues that the concept “Good” is not reducible to any “natural” quality such as “pleasantness” for instance. (Moore 2017)

Science can helpfully describe what “is” in fact but it cannot tell us what we “ought” to do with this knowledge. For example, if it were found out that a certain population of humans, call them “group A”, carried a deadly gene that if left to freely spread would eventually lead to the extinction of the human race, science could not tell us what would be the appropriate social policies to adopt in such a harrowing case. Such task would necessarily be left to the politicians, ethicists, moralists, and philosophers to agonize over in, hopefully, wide open public debate.

Science is not in the business of morals creation except perhaps in one distinctive and important sense. The very practice, development, and maintenance of science as a social endeavor presupposes a strong belief in a particular value system. If we practice and support science it means that we believe in the value of the scientific method and the processes of rational thought associated with it. It is in this sense that all science is ultimately bathed in the values that were promulgated in the Enlightenment. Without these prior values serving as a moral support, science as a socially successful project could not even get started let alone develop. A society must believe in science in order for it to be successful. Thus, to repeat, science itself cannot give us values to live by even if, arguably, science itself is a value laden activity which directs and influences our modern technical society more than anything else. Initially, science needs to be believed in but once it gets started it cannot tell us what to do with its potentially world changing results.

Science is a specific kind of “fact producing machine” while man is the quintessential value creator and world interpreter among the animals. This is a theme which preoccupied philosophers and historians as diverse as Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Dilthey, Wittgenstein, and Gadamer. However, it could be cogently argued that an accumulation of new facts on a particular subject will certainly produce pressure on the mental processes leading to the effective application of a moral evaluation once taken. For instance, if science continues to produce substantial evidence that our economic activity on this planet is causing increasingly irreparable harm then people, being factually/evolutionary interested in their survival, will be necessarily constrained to take positive action rather than morally abstaining. In this way, it can be seen that even though science cannot create values it certainly can have a decisive and cumulative influence on which values and courses of action will ultimately be adopted by, in this case, our increasingly global society.

Encouragingly, during an age when many reveled in pseudo-Darwinian doctrines of nature “red in tooth and claw” there were some who even then well understood the distinction between the ethical world of value creation and the scientific world of the discovery of facts.

Two Victorian gentlemen come to mind here. The first was the Russian prince and notable anarchist Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin who wrote the optimistic work Mutual Aid. (Kropotkin 2006) The other was the English Biologist and Anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley popularly known as “Darwin's Bulldog” for his strong public advocacy of the then new theory. Huxley delivered a famous speech at the Sheldonian Theater in London on May 18th, 1893 entitled Evolution and Ethics. (Huxley 2009)

Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid forcefully argued that Darwinian theory teaches us cooperation and not conflict and competition; that it is not a struggle between life forms for existence and, ultimately, propagation. For him, the “fittest' were those who helped each other out. As he put it:

we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society.

It was this belief that led him to the idea that “sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.” And much of the rest of the book is devoted to exhibiting historical and naturalistic examples of this, his fundamental thesis.

Kropotkin, following in the footsteps of Rousseau and others, was to have many imitators and followers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, much of the present book will prove to be an intellectual exploration as to how right or wrong he ultimately might have been.

Huxley, too, in his speech Evolution and Ethics provides an uplifting vision. He strongly denies the conclusion, then prevalent, that evolution means the adopting of a “gladiatorial theory of existence”. He contends that the ultimate direction of human society is guided by ethical choices based on careful, rational deliberation. He extols the force of human culture over human nature.

Indeed, he exhorts us to actively, consciously work against the “struggle for survival”. In as much as we are able to do this, he argues, we will socially and morally progress. For him, then, the “struggle for survival” is not destiny, but an earlier natural fate that can and must be overcome through a successful combination of human decision making and moral evaluation.

As he stirringly put it all those years ago:

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which exist, but of those who are ethically the best.

Here, then, is a vision worthy of the world's quintessential cultural animal. The realization that we are able to superimpose another evolutionary layer on the natural world that of the ethical. It is our powers of moral evaluation and culture making that can, if we but will it, lead us towards new paths of social evolution independent of prior natural laws of selection and survival. Human culture can write another new chapter in the annals of evolution:

The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it. It may seem an audacious proposal thus to pit the microcosm against the macrocosm and to set man to subdue nature to his higher ends; but, I venture to think that the great intellectual difference between the ancient times with which we have been occupied and our day, lies in the solid foundation we have acquired for the hope that such an enterprise may meet with a certain measure of success …The history of civilization details the steps by which men have succeeded in building up an artificial world within the cosmos. Fragile reed, as he may be, man, as Pascal says, is a thinking reed: there lies within him a fund of energy, operating intelligently and so far akin to that which pervades the universe, that it is competent to influence and modify the cosmic process. In virtue of his intelligence, the dwarf bends the Titan to his will.

The “Titan” to which Huxley refers is, of course, the great discovery of Darwin, for some, perhaps the greatest discovery ever made by Man: the theory of natural selection. As the philosopher Daniel Dennett has put it:

Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea. (Dennett 1996)

The “dangerous” idea itself was straightforward. Here, the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson gives us a succinct summary:

The theory is amazingly simple: 1) Individuals vary; 2) Their differences often have consequences for survival and reproduction; 3) Offspring resemble their parents. Given these three conditions, populations will change over time. Traits that contribute to survival and reproduction will become more common. Individuals will become well adapted to their environments. (Wilson 2019)

Daniel Dennett has interpreted the theory as an example of a mindless “algorithmic process”. Individual organisms within a species vary. They compete for resources and mates. They are differentially successful at a) survival and b) the production of offspring. Those who are successful in reproduction pass on their genetic traits to the next generation which repeats the process. Over time, different traits will come to dominate depending, in part, on an ever-changing environment. As the environmental circumstances change, so too will the species. However, if environmental pressures are too abrupt in time or otherwise overwhelming the species may become extinct and the algorithm completely stops for that lineage. Indeed, it is a sobering thought that of almost all of the species that have ever lived on this planet the vast majority are no more. On this planet, the algorithm, itself, survives while the players are constantly changing.

This idea is both a biological philosophy of change and an elegant explanation for it. Although simple, it does not lack in aesthetic power. Darwin himself saw that:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Darwin 2009)

Yet, if the theory is simple, elegant, aesthetically pleasing, and, above all, true why is it then “dangerous”? Again Dennett:

Darwin’s idea bear(s) an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

Darwin’s idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers — welcome or not — to questions in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn’t that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own “real” minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin’s idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding.

Much of the controversy and anxiety that has enveloped Darwin’s idea ever since can be understood as a series of failed campaigns in the struggle to contain Darwin’s idea within some acceptably “safe” and merely partial revolution. Cede some or all of modern biology to Darwin, perhaps, but hold the line there! Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion! (Dennett 1996)

As just mentioned by Dennett, among one of the most fascinating ways in which evolutionary theory has “crossed the line” is in its application to culture.

Culture-gene co-evolution otherwise known as dual inheritance theory attempts to explain how genes and culture interact through time.

What genetic and cultural evolution have in common is that both genes and cultures have variable traits that change their frequencies over time. The main difference is: what is transmitted. Genes “encode chemical messages to build proteins that ultimately enable form and function.”. (Mukherjee 2016) Culture transmits learned behaviors and ideas. Another major difference between the two is the speed of transmission. Normally, genetic change is slow, or at least much slower than cultural change can be. Even if significant genetic change, under the right circumstances, could theoretically occur over the span of a few generations, significant cultural change can happen within the course of a single lifespan. One of the reasons for this is that cultural change can move “horizontally” through space from person to person, while genetic change is spatially and temporally sequential.

An oft used example illustrating the difference between the two methods of transmission is a hundred-year-old woman born in 1900 in East Berlin. She would have lived through a Wilhemine, Weimar, Nazi, Socialist, and a reunified Democratic Germany, all of which were culturally very different. Yet she, for the most part, would not have changed genetically.

Another interesting aspect of the theory is how culture and genes interact.

Perhaps the most significant illustrations available for this are the invention of cooking and the beginning of dairying.

Since we will talk in depth about the first one shortly, I will limit myself to talking about the second one for now.

Around 8K years ago, some human populations began raising cattle for milk. As a result, within these populations genetic traits for lactose digestion began to be strongly selected for. It was beneficial (in terms of enhanced survival and reproduction) for people to be able to drink milk into adulthood in these populations. This is a good example of how culture can influence genes.

In their controversial book The 10,000 Year Explosion Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending explain how:

human evolution has accelerated in the past 10,000 years, rather than slowing or stopping, and is now happening about 100 times faster than its long-term average over the 6 million years of our existence. The pace has been so rapid that humans have changed significantly in body and mind over recorded history. Sargon and Imhotepl were different from you genetically as well as culturally. (Cochran and Hapending 2010)

Ultimately, what is causing so much historically recent change are the selection pressures generated by Human Civilization itself. Human created culture and not the natural environment has become the main driver of genetic change in humans. This is an epochal change. A major transition in the history of evolution and life itself.

Interestingly, a common theme in the “major transitions of evolution” such as

“the origin of life, of the genetic code, of cells, of sex, of multicellular organisms, of societies, and of language” is that they all share a common feature: “entities that were capable of independent replication before the transition can replicate as part of a larger whole after it”. “As a result, “the constituent entities making up the higher-level units come to share a common fate, with selection pressures working on the higher rather than the lower level units.” (Smith and Szathmáry 1998)

This is a characteristic example of a highly disputed idea within evolutionary theory known alternatively as “Group Selection Theory” or “Multi-Level Selection Theory”. Some of the more notable proponents of this theory are E. O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson and Elliot Sober among others. It is an influential minority view among evolutionary biologists, particularly as regards explanations for human biological and cultural evolution.

Darwin was the first to describe an early form of Multi-level Selection Theory in his book The Descent of Man:

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase. (Darwin 2011)

More recently this same idea has been re-expressed by E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson as: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

Indeed,

a number of writers have pointed out that multi-level selection may be of considerably greater importance among humans than among other animals given the advanced level of human cognitive and linguistic capabilities and consequent capacity to maintain group boundaries and to formulate general rules of behavior for large groups, and the resulting substantial influence of cultural inheritance on human behavior (Bowles and Gintis 2013)

And finally,

Group selection is an important force in human evolution partly because cultural processes can create variation between groups, even when they are composed of large numbers of unrelated individuals. A new cultural “mutation” can quickly spread within a group, causing it to be very different from other groups and providing a decisive edge in direct or indirect between-group competition. (Wilson and Wilson 2007)

The most recent, dramatic example of group-selection at work is undoubtedly the “Columbian Exchange”.

The Columbian Exchange refers to the exchange of culture and populations between the Old World and New. As is well known, it is a story of the displacement/eradication of one population by another. The Europeans supplanted the native populations of the New World through a mixture of premeditated violence and, for the most part, the unpremeditated spread of disease. They were able to do so because of their superior technology, internal organization, and ideology; all essential parts of culture. The end effect was, as Darwin wrote, the supplanting of one “tribe” by another.

Many scholars in line with Darwin believe that this was but the newest chapter in a long story of human groups supplanting/exterminating other human groups. And this grim story most likely extends to non-human groups such as the Neanderthals, although this is a topic that is hotly contested. Some believe that the Neanderthals died of “natural causes” due from either “extreme climate change”, “low birth rates”, “incest”, or most recently “changes in the earth's magnetic field”. (Davis 2021) While this point of view let's our ancestors off the hook, other scholars firmly believe that Homo Sapiens out-competed Neanderthals through either superior cognitive abilities, better technology, targeted warfare and overall better cultural transmission or a combination of all four. Perhaps we will never know for sure.

However, it may equally be true that in order for group-selection to work it does not necessarily require inter-group conflict. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes: “Group selection does not require war or violence. In general, groupishness is focused on improving the welfare of the in-group, not on harming an out-group.” (Haidt 2013) While this might be an expression of Twenty-First Century wishful thinking on his part, we will explore his idea more fully once we get to the anthropological theories of Christopher Boehm.

Yet another factor potentially contributing to the plausibility of Group-Selection Theory is a controversial process known as the Baldwin Effect.

A subtle modification of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, first outlined almost exactly a century ago by the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin, “Baldwinian evolution”, suggested that learning and behavioral flexibility can play a role in amplifying and biasing natural selection because these abilities enable individuals to modify the context of natural selection that affects their future kin. Behavioral flexibility enables organisms to move into niches that differ from those their ancestors occupied, with the consequence that succeeding generations will face a new set of selection pressures. For example, an ability to utilize resources from colder environments may initially be facilitated by seasonal migratory patterns, but if adaptation to this new niche becomes increasingly important, it will favor the preservation of any traits in subsequent generations that increase tolerance to cold, such as the deposition of subcutaneous fat, the growth of insulating hair, or the ability to hibernate during part of the year. In summary, Baldwin’s theory explains how behaviors can affect evolution, but without the necessity of claiming that responses to environmental demands acquired during one's lifetime could be passed directly on to one's offspring (a discredited mechanism for evolutionary change proposed by the early nineteenth-century French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck). Baldwin proposed that by temporarily adjusting behaviors or physiological responses during its lifespan in response to novel conditions, an animal could produce irreversible changes in the adaptive context of future generations. Though no new genetic change is immediately produced in the process, the change in conditions will alter which among the existing or subsequently modified genetic predispositions will be favored in the future ... In general, behavioral adaptations tend to precede and condition the major biological changes evident in human evolution because they are far more facile and responsive than genetic and morphological changes. (Deacon 1997)

Put in other words, social learning, behavioral changes, and cultural novelty can, if maintained and repeated through the generations, change the course of evolution. This idea has immediate major implications for how we theorize about human evolution. First, if true, it means that the introduction for example of a new tool, social rule, or group behavior, could, over the span of a few generations, favor the selection of new genetic traits. Thus, social learning, material invention, and intra-group imitation, in the human case, could have, in some instances, led to significant change in the human genome eventually transforming both our minds and our bodies. We have already mentioned an historical example of this in the cultural practice of dairying and its eventual genetic consequences. As Dennett has written: “A practice that is both learnable (with effort) and highly advantageous once learned can become more and more easily learned, can move gradually into the status of not needing to be learned at all.” (Depew and Weber 2007)

How many other human traits that are now genetically encoded might have first begun with the learning of new ways of doing things? Even more provocatively, do species with ample behavioral plasticity “tend to evolve faster than those without it.”? (Dennett 1992) And finally and perhaps most importantly, the Baldwin Effect allows us to believe that “organisms do not passively succumb to the severity of environmental judgment. Instead, they perceive, interpret, and act in the environment in ways that creatively and unpredictably change the whole setting for selection and evolution.” (Hoffmeyer and Kull in Depew and Weber 2007)

Keeping our previous discussions of the theory of natural selection and the Baldwin effect in mind, we can now begin to piece together the mystery of human evolution by first introducing eight theories that, separately, have helped to explain it. I have nicknamed the eight theories as follows:

1) War-Nests

2) Great Chefs

3) Highly Emotional People

4) Mind Readers

5) Socialites

6) Cuddly Punishers

7) The Cultural Animal and, finally,

8) Masters of Complexity.

1. War-Nests

Our first theory comes to us from the work of E.O. Wilson and the theoretical biologist Samuel Bowles. (Wilson 2013)