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Which begs the question, since humans have been able to dominate their ecology and competitors to such a massive degree, why didn't our evolution stagnate a lon

• nikanj 9y ago
  This is attributing emotion to things that have none, but regardless: Species don’t compete, genes do. My genes want to beat your genes, were you another human (in-species), a bonobo (in same-ish morphological niche) or a rat (another modern urban dweller).
  • bartread 9y ago
    > This is attributing emotion to things that have none Ummm, fair enough. But then you say... > My genes want to beat your genes Your genes don't want anything. They have no desires. No emotions. They're just molecules. Long, complex polymers, granted, but just molecules, nonetheless.
    • autokad 9y ago
      they are instructions. those instructions say compete in what ever round about way they decide on doing it. the ones that don't say compete die out.
• eesmith 9y ago
  Evolution doesn't "stagnate". Ever. Humans are still evolving. Probably faster than ever. See http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long . What does "a long long time ago" mean to you? It's only 65M years since mammals underwent the massive adaptive radiation after the K–T extinction. It's only 50,000 years since the human population started to greatly increase. (See previous reference.) You need to be very careful in looking for references which support your thesis. You'll not find good counterarguments that way. Be very cautious about any reference which emphasizes "dominance hierarchy" in humans, especially when based looking towards chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) as a model for understanding how early humans interacted. Only more recently have we been looking at bonobos (Pan paniscus), which are evolutionarily equally distant from us. The thing is, bonobos have rather different behaviors than chimpanzees, including in how they deal with dominance. Unfortunately, a lot of wide-spread cultural beliefs on this topic are wrong, or at least much more controversial than can be used as the basis for any good understanding. See for example "alpha male" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Controversy and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ti86veZBjU . I would advise you to look for books by people who work in, or very closely to, anthropology, archeology, and genetics. And stay away from evolutionary psychologists, most of whom in my experience have a flawed understanding of evolution. As an example of a warning flag, your last link, a book from 1990 is pre-genome, and talks much more about chimps than bonobos. You might be interested in "Why are there so many explanations for primate brain evolution?" at http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1727/20160244 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/372/1727/2016... . They argue that the Social Brain Hypothesis (SBH) has the strongest support: > SBH is an explicitly two-step process: an ecological problem is solved socially (i.e. as a cooperative process) and a big brain is needed to allow the requisite level of sociality to do this. The group created by big brains is not an end in itself (a mistake made by many attempts to compare between alternative hypotheses: e.g. [18,103]), but rather the means to an ecological end. It is important not to mistake this view for group selection: it does not involve the differential survival or extinction of groups. Rather, it is a group-level or group-augmentation explanation (sensu [104]), such that individuals living in larger social units have higher fitness than those living in smaller ones. The only mention of "dominance" in that publication is in the title of a citation to a paper from 1980.