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To push back a bit against our being naturally social, ancestral primates were solitary foragers with no natural tendency toward socializing. And even later whe
by shrimpx 4y ago
To push back a bit against our being naturally social, ancestral primates were solitary foragers with no natural tendency toward socializing. And even later when we became social hunter gatherers, I venture to imagine it was common to lose your group and become alone, due to the small number of people and dangers abound. Insisting that we’re naturally social is probably more far fetched than admitting it’s fairly normal to become alone.
- slothtrop 4y agoNotwithstanding I'm skeptical of your claim, being "naturally social" is the entire reason language has evolved. A (very) distant ancestor's nature has no claim on your nature.
- crthpl 4y agoOr perhaps the other way around: we are social because we have language.
- slothtrop 4y agoYou think language would spontaneously evolve without a disposition to socialize a-priori? That doesn't make any sense.
- shrimpx 4y agoPresumably we needed to “notice” an orange in a tree before we could point to it. Before you could communicate with signs, you could probably realize something equivalent to “that’s food”, despite not having language yet.
- shrimpx 4y agoI agree we’re social, I just don’t entirely agree it’s unnatural to be solitary. That ancestor probably has some tiny amount of bearing, though possibly negligible. Language doesn’t prove the absence of natural solitude. It just shows we’ve been “pretty social” for a while.
- slothtrop 4y agoTalking about absolute states. Our being social beings doesn't preclude also experiencing solitude or having more or less tendency towards introversion. A solitary nature in this case has a meaning that we also ascribe to certain animals wholesale, because it describes a biologically driven behavior that can't be said of humans.
- oblio 4y ago> Language doesn’t prove the absence of natural solitude. It just shows we’ve been “pretty social” for a while. For modern humans it does. You can't dedicate a huge percentage of your brain to speech and communication in general, and allocate a sizeable percentage of your total energy usage (!) to them, and still be meant to be a solitary species.