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Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interact

by hyperion2010 8y ago

Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past. Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as I did a number of years ago, and you will start to see that humans behave in almost the exact same way, our brains lie to us about our motivations so we are obivious to the fact that we are acting from ancient primate social instincts, and worse you get stuff like this piece which pulls on the old great chain of being. Chips may not have governments, as the author says, but I suggest that he go back an take an introductory course in political science, because our entire understanding of modern political structures is founded on the idea that in some sense all politics are family politics (in group behavior). Macaques, chimps, baboons, and many more have extremely well studied and understood family group politics. One of the steps on the road to enlightenment is the realization that the monkey on your back is you.

joe_the_user 8y ago
Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past. I thought the difference is that by dint of our language use and our ability to modify our environment, we have the potential reproduce all the different social behaviors that the various primate species have - as well as social behaviors from even non-primate species. Sure, it's wrong to image one is entirely outside of a social species, that things like dominance and submission don't play any part. But it seems just as wrong to make a single analogy to a single species and be done. We can be like wolves (predictors), sheep (prey), chimps (violently competitive), Bonabos (nonviolently cooperative), and so-forth but it's the complex structures of human society that are going to determine which of these sorts of animal we wind-up with. It's important not to let the shock of realization "wow, human are just animals" stand in the way of thinking, "but we can still collectively shape which animals we will resemble".
- musage 8y ago
  > I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do. -- Henry David Thoreau
aalleavitch 8y ago
You’re right and wrong here. Humans are cultural creatures to the point where humans not exposed to some sort of cultural milieu simply don’t develop correctly. Walking erect didn’t free us from our vicious primate past: but culture absolutely can. You’re right in that many of our more basic instincts and psychology are a direct continuation of those evident in our evolutionary relatives, and even many of our cultural structures echo that. But we are no more bound by our instincts to be violent and selfish than we are bound by our physiology to be incapable of flight. Of course, exactly like chimpanzees, we could never fly by flapping our arms, but unlike chimpanzees we can figure out how to build and operate an airplane. Likewise, no matter how saddled we may be with primate psychology, we are capable of structuring our society to overcome that.
- anticensor 8y ago
  It's not walking, it's the realization of why we reproduce and why we die that makes us humans. Most animals are unaware of their own death and will just hunt more for more food in the short term, not knowing they may be killed as they are too tired to return.
  - mnem 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure most animals are aware of death in others, so it would seem likely that they may be aware of self mortality. Our general understanding of other animal behaviours is still quite primitive - generally things considered unique to the human animal are discovered in others after someone bothers to look. As for reproduction - do humans really know why they reproduce?
    - anticensor 8y ago
      Birth control would not emerge if we were unaware of why we reproduce.
k__ 8y ago
I once read our main skills is a superior immune system, incredible endurance and the skill to throw everything at a deadly speed.
wahern 8y ago
> Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates Humans are the only species to show pervasive, non-kin reciprocal altruism. Baboon troops are matrilineal and stable troops have a high-degree of kinship through the females. Males are more likely to move between groups but males will also kill newborns when taking over a troop. In other words, Baboon society is still completely comprehensible by traditional genetic evolutionary theory. More importantly, Baboon society is quite clearly _circumscribed_ by well-understood genetic theory. No species comes close to the degree of altruism humans exhibit. I can drop into the middle of nowhere and be greeted with warm relations, free food, and free shelter even when everybody knows I'll never return and thus would never be capable of reciprocating. There are anecdotes of this happening in other species, and even between species, but they're just that--anecdotes. Whenever it seems pervasive, upon investigation it quickly becomes apparent that it's mediated by an underlying intra-kin process.[1] There's a tremendous gulf between humans and every other species, including Baboons, in this regard. So not only do Baboons fail to reflect human behavior in small groups, it's preposterous to equivocate their behavior with human political behavior at scale. From the vantage point of aliens looking down on earth, large groups of humans, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of millions, behave much like ants or bees. But ants, bees, and all similarly behaving species are siblings! The lone, fascinating exception is humans. While there are genetic limitations to human altruism, somehow we managed to flip the equation. Individuals are generally altruistic by default unless and until that altruism begins to impose a non-trivial burden, and even then the drop-off is gradual and haphazard. Even the meanest among us exhibit and experience more altruism throughout the day than a Baboon. No existing evolutionary model has clearly shown how humans made this leap. Group selection has never been proven to exist, period. That a behavior improves the survival and reproductive success of a _group_ doesn't explain how it can arise and become prevalent genetically. Group selection, like similar theories, are post hoc rationalizations that fail to explain the full genetic evolutionary process. Likewise, theories about the benefits of tool making, intelligence, language, etc all fail to explain the genetic leap. It's difficult to exaggerate how significant and profound this difference is. Theories and rationalizations that don't account for this difference are fundamentally crippled. Indeed, theories that fail to fill this gap in our understanding have limited usefulness in terms of either their explanatory or predictive power. [1] Because animals cannot reliably or consistently know degree of kinship, all cooperative behaviors will naturally rely upon proxy indicators. Thus, if the strategy for cooperation is being nice to people in your troop because statistically you're strongly genetically related to others in your troop, then cooperating with a completely genetically unrelated troop member still conforms to the basic mechanics of selfish gene reproduction. You can see how extraordinary it is that humans regularly cooperate with, let lone behave altruistically toward, random humans. Again, we can rationalize how this behavior persists now that our species has found a new equilibrium, but nobody can explain the leap forward. And finding an answer will be difficult to understand because we're the only ones who have made it. The anthropic principle might partially explain this, but figuring out exactly how it happened would be profoundly useful in terms of understanding our own innate capacities and limitations, as well as in building complex systems.
Ologn 8y ago
> Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as I did a number of years ago, and you will start to see that humans behave in almost the exact same way, our brains lie to us about our motivations so we are obivious to the fact that we are acting from ancient primate social instincts, and worse you get stuff like this piece which pulls on the old great chain of being. My friend was in the jungles studying primates during his college years. One day we went to a restaurant/bar to eat. A girl was sitting on a bar stool and her boyfriend stood next to her and was rubbing her shoulders. My friend looked at them for a few moments and then said "He's grooming her".

joe_the_user 8y ago

Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates, the only difference is that we have the gall to think that walking erect seems to have freed us from our vicious primate past. I thought the difference is that by dint of our language use and our ability to modify our environment, we have the potential reproduce all the different social behaviors that the various primate species have - as well as social behaviors from even non-primate species. Sure, it's wrong to image one is entirely outside of a social species, that things like dominance and submission don't play any part. But it seems just as wrong to make a single analogy to a single species and be done. We can be like wolves (predictors), sheep (prey), chimps (violently competitive), Bonabos (nonviolently cooperative), and so-forth but it's the complex structures of human society that are going to determine which of these sorts of animal we wind-up with. It's important not to let the shock of realization "wow, human are just animals" stand in the way of thinking, "but we can still collectively shape which animals we will resemble".

musage 8y ago
> I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do. -- Henry David Thoreau

aalleavitch 8y ago

You’re right and wrong here. Humans are cultural creatures to the point where humans not exposed to some sort of cultural milieu simply don’t develop correctly. Walking erect didn’t free us from our vicious primate past: but culture absolutely can. You’re right in that many of our more basic instincts and psychology are a direct continuation of those evident in our evolutionary relatives, and even many of our cultural structures echo that. But we are no more bound by our instincts to be violent and selfish than we are bound by our physiology to be incapable of flight. Of course, exactly like chimpanzees, we could never fly by flapping our arms, but unlike chimpanzees we can figure out how to build and operate an airplane. Likewise, no matter how saddled we may be with primate psychology, we are capable of structuring our society to overcome that.

anticensor 8y ago
It's not walking, it's the realization of why we reproduce and why we die that makes us humans. Most animals are unaware of their own death and will just hunt more for more food in the short term, not knowing they may be killed as they are too tired to return.
- mnem 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure most animals are aware of death in others, so it would seem likely that they may be aware of self mortality. Our general understanding of other animal behaviours is still quite primitive - generally things considered unique to the human animal are discovered in others after someone bothers to look. As for reproduction - do humans really know why they reproduce?
  - anticensor 8y ago
    Birth control would not emerge if we were unaware of why we reproduce.

k__ 8y ago

I once read our main skills is a superior immune system, incredible endurance and the skill to throw everything at a deadly speed.

wahern 8y ago

> Well if Chimps can't then Baboons sure as hell can. Have a read of A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky. The vast majority of human social and politic interactions are stereotypical of almost all primates Humans are the only species to show pervasive, non-kin reciprocal altruism. Baboon troops are matrilineal and stable troops have a high-degree of kinship through the females. Males are more likely to move between groups but males will also kill newborns when taking over a troop. In other words, Baboon society is still completely comprehensible by traditional genetic evolutionary theory. More importantly, Baboon society is quite clearly _circumscribed_ by well-understood genetic theory. No species comes close to the degree of altruism humans exhibit. I can drop into the middle of nowhere and be greeted with warm relations, free food, and free shelter even when everybody knows I'll never return and thus would never be capable of reciprocating. There are anecdotes of this happening in other species, and even between species, but they're just that--anecdotes. Whenever it seems pervasive, upon investigation it quickly becomes apparent that it's mediated by an underlying intra-kin process.[1] There's a tremendous gulf between humans and every other species, including Baboons, in this regard. So not only do Baboons fail to reflect human behavior in small groups, it's preposterous to equivocate their behavior with human political behavior at scale. From the vantage point of aliens looking down on earth, large groups of humans, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of millions, behave much like ants or bees. But ants, bees, and all similarly behaving species are siblings! The lone, fascinating exception is humans. While there are genetic limitations to human altruism, somehow we managed to flip the equation. Individuals are generally altruistic by default unless and until that altruism begins to impose a non-trivial burden, and even then the drop-off is gradual and haphazard. Even the meanest among us exhibit and experience more altruism throughout the day than a Baboon. No existing evolutionary model has clearly shown how humans made this leap. Group selection has never been proven to exist, period. That a behavior improves the survival and reproductive success of a _group_ doesn't explain how it can arise and become prevalent genetically. Group selection, like similar theories, are post hoc rationalizations that fail to explain the full genetic evolutionary process. Likewise, theories about the benefits of tool making, intelligence, language, etc all fail to explain the genetic leap. It's difficult to exaggerate how significant and profound this difference is. Theories and rationalizations that don't account for this difference are fundamentally crippled. Indeed, theories that fail to fill this gap in our understanding have limited usefulness in terms of either their explanatory or predictive power. [1] Because animals cannot reliably or consistently know degree of kinship, all cooperative behaviors will naturally rely upon proxy indicators. Thus, if the strategy for cooperation is being nice to people in your troop because statistically you're strongly genetically related to others in your troop, then cooperating with a completely genetically unrelated troop member still conforms to the basic mechanics of selfish gene reproduction. You can see how extraordinary it is that humans regularly cooperate with, let lone behave altruistically toward, random humans. Again, we can rationalize how this behavior persists now that our species has found a new equilibrium, but nobody can explain the leap forward. And finding an answer will be difficult to understand because we're the only ones who have made it. The anthropic principle might partially explain this, but figuring out exactly how it happened would be profoundly useful in terms of understanding our own innate capacities and limitations, as well as in building complex systems.

Ologn 8y ago

> Spend some time watching a group of primates or work with a group of them over time as I did a number of years ago, and you will start to see that humans behave in almost the exact same way, our brains lie to us about our motivations so we are obivious to the fact that we are acting from ancient primate social instincts, and worse you get stuff like this piece which pulls on the old great chain of being. My friend was in the jungles studying primates during his college years. One day we went to a restaurant/bar to eat. A girl was sitting on a bar stool and her boyfriend stood next to her and was rubbing her shoulders. My friend looked at them for a few moments and then said "He's grooming her".